The ship he had left was now lost to him in each trough of the waves; he could hear the break of the rollers over the reef, and saw that the tide had already drifted him to windward of the wreck. The roar in front increased as he proceeded, and at last he could see, as he rose, the waves thirty yards beyond him suddenly flatten, flinging up a veil of spray into the air. For a moment he hung irresolute; there, if ever a man might see it, was death visible before him. Then, with a curious sense of obliteration, his mind cleared. It seemed empty of thought or fear as the open sky above him; not a shred even of anticipation floated anywhere within it. He trod water as he gathered a dozen loops of the lifeline in his hand, lest he should be hung up and dragged under by it when flung over the ledge. Then he went forward. A moment later, when the wave that had lifted him suddenly sank and smashed before him into a terrible welter of foam above the reef, his heart sank; but decision was past him. He knew that he was rising on the wave that followed, heard a strange crisp noise above him, and felt the crest dart forward like the head of a snake. The next instant he was rolled up in the foam and flung onward like a whirling wheel. He lost his senses for a second from sheer giddiness, and found himself fighting for breath and the surface in almost quiet water, with the black sides of the wreck not fifty yards ahead. The line was coiled about his body, but his limbs were free, and he seemed quite unhurt, and strangely unsurprised to be so, though but a moment back he had been prepared for destruction. He was soon on the lee side of the wreck, and after some little difficulty was hauled on board, being too weak to lift himself from the water. He fell when set down upon the deck, and only then discovered that two of the bones in his left foot were broken, and that blood was draining from a gash nine inches long in his thigh. He also became aware that, unlike the _Candia_, the wreck carried a mixed cargo of humanity, and was amused even in his unhappy plight to notice that its immense relief and gratitude quite overruled any considerations of sex. There was no surgeon on board, the saloons were awash; but the women tore up their petticoats to bind his wound, and, rolled in blankets from the deck-house, he was made fast to the driest part of the poop. There, drenched with spray and in a good deal of pain, he lay till evening, declining to use the means of safety he had provided till all but the captain and second mate had left the ship. The rigging up of a traveller had proved a difficult matter with the wreck heeling over as the tide left her, and the wind rising again after the ebb made all other means of communication impossible. The captain was only got on board the _Candia_ as darkness was falling, and Caragh had some salve for his hurts in the knowledge that the wreck slid off the reef and sank at high water before the next dawn.