With the darkness the hurricane rose to a climax. The booming waves, gleaming with that pale phosphorescent light which seems to make the gloom of a tempestuous night only more hideous, broke over the vessel’s bow, heaving into her undecked hull a body of sparkling water that threatened every moment to swamp her. Still she rushed onward through the foaming ocean, leaping over the billows with a sort of convulsive energy that shook every timber in her frame, and opened her seams to the assailing element. The tiger roared, dashing from one side to the other of his cage, which he threatened every instant to shake in pieces. His howlings were continued with scarcely any intermission, and added another feature of terror to the storm. The Hindoo sailors were perfectly passive. The vast quantities of opium they had swallowed stupefied them so completely that they appeared utterly unconscious of the surrounding peril. The vessel was allowed to take her own course, and she was urged towards the shore. The rudder was torn from her stern, and she lay like a huge log upon the convulsed bosom of the ocean. Not a hope of escape remained. She was nearly filled and on her beam ends. She rocked and heaved under the lashings of the storm, like a creature in the throes of death. Her sails were rent, and fluttered in the gale in thin strips, clattering amid the roar of the tempest to the answering groans of the masts, that bent and quivered like the tall thin stalk of the young bamboo. Midnight passed, but the storm did not abate. The air was loaded with pitchy masses of rolling vapour, which hung so low that the vessel’s masts almost seemed to pierce them as she rose upon the circling crests of the billows; they spread like a pall over the Heavens. There was no light but what arose from the sea, and the intense darkness rendered the aspect of the tempest still more terrific. During the whole night it continued without intermission. The dawn revealed a wide expanse of waters agitated into frightful commotion; the wind howling through the air with a vehemence that seemed at once to shake the earth and convulse the sea; the Heavens overspread with an interminable tract of deep blue vapour which the eye could not penetrate. The vessel now began to reel and stagger under the weight of water which she had frequently shipped from the heavy seas that had dashed over her. She laboured with difficulty through the rolling surges.