The members of the ship’s company prepared themselves for the crisis of their fate in the manner which seemed best to them. The skipper descended to the cuddy, and occupied himself in gazing fondly upon a miniature painting of a young woman which he took from his sea-chest. The mate found some relief in turning up at hazard passages of Scripture in an old Bible, opening the page by inserting a pin at random in the closed leaves. The sailors discovered some rum in the hold, and my mind was busy with a hundred plans, rejected as soon as conceived, for buoying myself up until I could float into the smooth water on the landward side of the reef; for that the schooner would go to pieces and leave me like a bit of driftwood in the spray I had not the slightest doubt. As the wind slackened the sea rose. The hurricane no longer flattened its surface. We were thrown up to dizzy heights and slid down fearful green valleys with the sickening sense of a fall from a pinnacle in some horrid nightmare. While buried in these terrible ravines we saw nothing but the mountainous sides of imprisoning watery hills. As we shot to the summit of one of these ranges I looked out wearily into the world of throbbing ocean, and saw with a thrill which I can recall at this moment that we were within a few hundred yards of a white wrath—the broad belt of gleaming surge, the stupendous rampart of water, seething and boiling in a vast chaos of foam—which marked the break on the reef. In a moment we are thrown between two gigantic pillars in this leaping and thundering aqueous gallery. It is the narrow opening in the reef, where the flux and reflux of the sea form a miniature maelström of sufficient power to engulf the largest ship afloat. We are wrapped in mist and spray. We are being drawn into the boiling cauldron. The schooner has a gyratory motion for some seconds as she is sucked by the vortices, and it is doubtful which way she will be carried. Suddenly, with a roar and a bellow which made me shake in every limb, we are upborne on a mighty wave, which ascends like a waterspout, tapering to a pyramidal point. Clinging desperately to a belaying cleat, I was blinded and deafened by the drenching spray, and strangled by the wind. For a moment we are poised on the watery apex in mid air. At that instant I suffered a syncope of all my faculties. I did not lose consciousness, but was spell-bound with the fascination of the rabbit under the gaze of the rattlesnake. I even noticed without shuddering in that terrible sixtieth part of a minute, during which our vessel trembled at this dizzy height, that the sides of the column of malachite-green had a ghastly radiance caught from the sickly sun, that the interior rolled with the gleam of a sapphire, and that there were faint rainbow tints on the outermost edge of spray, while below the sea was churned into a thundering abyss in which it was impossible to distinguish the coral bank from deep water.