Smiling with a grim satisfaction at this last statement, Thurstane gave the man a five-dollar piece, muttered, "Call me if anything goes wrong," and slipped into his narrow dormitory. Without undressing, he lay down and tried to sleep; but, although it was past midnight, he stayed broad awake for an hour or more; he was too full of thoughts and emotions to find easy quiet in a pillow. Near him--yes, in the very next stateroom--lay the being who had made his life first a heaven and then a hell. The present and the past struggled in him, and tossed him with their tormenting contest. After a while, too, as the plunging of the brig increased, and he heard renewed sounds of disaster on deck, he began to fear for Clara's safety. It was a strange feeling, and yet a most natural one. He had not ceased to love; he seemed indeed to love her more than ever; to think of her struggling in the billows was horrible; he knew even then that he would willingly die to save her. But after a time the incessant motion affected him, and he dozed gradually into a sound slumber. Hours later the jerking and pitching became so furious that it awakened him, and when he rose on his elbow he was thrown out of his berth by a tremendous lurch. Sitting up with his feet braced, he listened for a little to the roar of the tempest, the trampling feet on deck, and the screaming orders. Evidently things were going hardly above; the storm was little less than a tornado. Seriously anxious at last for Clara--or, as he tried to call her to himself, Miss Van Diemen--he stole out of his room, clambered or fell up the companionway, opened the door after a struggle with a sea which had just come inboard, got on to the quarter-deck, and, holding by the shrouds, quailed before a spectacle as sublime and more terrible than the Great Cañon of the Colorado. It was daylight. The sun was just rising from behind a waste of waters; it revealed nothing but a waste of waters. All around the brig, as far as the eye could reach, the Pacific was one vast tumble of huge blue-gray, mottled masses, breaking incessantly in long, curling ridges, or lofty, tossing steeps of foam. Each wave was composed of scores of ordinary waves, just as the greater mountains are composed of ranges and peaks. They seemed moving volcanoes, changing form with every minute of their agony, and spouting lavas of froth. All over this immense riot of tormented deeps rolled beaten and terrified armies of clouds. The wind reigned supreme, driving with a relentless spite, a steady and obdurate pressure, as if it were a current of water. It pinned the sailors to the yards, and nearly blew Thurstane from the deck.