"Some sea, that," he said, slipping down his hood and throwing back the brine-dripping hair from his forehead. "It's happened before, but never like that. Lord only knows what it's done to her. S'pose we'll begin to hear of that in a minute." He pointed to a string of porcelain insulators dangling at the end of twisted bits of wire in front of one of the paneless windows. "That's the remains of our auxiliary radio," he said, grinning; "and look at the fo'c'sle. Swept clean, pretty near. Thank heaven, the gun's left. But, do you remember that heavy iron bar the muzzle rested on? Gone! It was probably that, with some of the shells in the rack, that made all that rat-a-tat. But what of it? Look how she rides 'em now that she's eased down a bit. Only trouble is, she's got to go it again. Look how we've dropped back." And he gave the engine-room, by voice-pipe, a new "standard" speed, and threw the telegraph over to "Full." The pulsing throb began anew, and under the urge of speeding propellers the _Zip_, steering in narrowed zig-zags quickly regained her station. All of the destroyers, and the _Lymptania_ as well, had eased down slightly, and the reduced speed meant also a reduction of the danger of another of those deep-sea dives, something no craft but a submarine is built to stand the strain of. But even as it was we were driving right up to the limit of endurance all the time, and the sea that did not come rolling up green right over the bows was the exception rather than the rule. From the forecastle right away aft there was never more than a few seconds at a time when the main deck was free of rollicking cascades of boiling brine, and there were moments when only the funnels and the after superstructure, rearing up like isolated rocks on a storm-beaten coast, were visible above the swirling flood. There were times when the men standing-by at the guns and torpedo-tubes seemed almost to be engulfed; yet none of them was swept away, and they even--from the way they kept joking each other in the lulls--appeared to be getting a good deal of sport out of the thing.