And then human voices joined the chorus--voices which expressed every intonation of panic, of the horror which is built upon amazement, of the unleashed emotions of men awaking to meet blindly the common hazards of life and confronting chaos, illimitable ruin, a sudden unbarring of the gates of Hell. The struggle in the boat ceased. Wild curses became, on Luigi's lips, a string of piteous appeals to the very saints whose names he had used a moment before to point his blasphemies. Miller and Landon grasped the oars. But even the terrors of earthquake do not wreck the discipline of Italy's Carbineers. The sergeant's warning was repeated thunderously. Miller screamed an assent, a surrender. Landon answered with an oath. The one endeavored to propel the boat shorewards, the other towards the sea. It spun between their efforts; they yelled and gesticulated madly. And again the sergeant's voice was heard, with a hundred other voices, appealing to a God whose mercy was surely turned away. For a moaning sound _tingled_ along the strand, and then silently, but with the speed of a cataract, the sea sank back from the shore. It plucked half a hundred boats from their anchorages; it gripped them down into its trough. For full thirty seconds they fled upon this monstrous tide of a tideless sea, hull crashing against hull, mast beating against mast, a wrecked wilderness of spars and rigging, tangled, coiled, the froth, the scum, as it were, upon that mighty crest. And behind them went the _Santa Margarita's_ dingy, with bound and free in equal helplessness. Then, as if the sluice of some Cyclopean lock had been shut, the mighty mill-race halted and a mountain grew upon the face of the deep. Huge, black, awesome, it swung itself up, swelled higher and higher, hung through an æon-long moment of horror, and then rolled back whence it had come. And the menace of its coming left no tiniest coign of foothold for hope in its path. Irresistible and relentless it moved along to destroy every barrier of nature, every man-built obstacle with its might. Its foam-plumed crest roared over the quayside and the Marina five fathoms deep. Like a chip upon the surface of a torrent which suddenly hastens to the brink of the cascade, the boat and its burden of lives was snatched along. The three who stood and gripped its gunwale saw the broad expanse of the Marina before them, saw it seem to sink as they themselves rose upon the flood, saw how they raced across it twenty feet above the level of its flags. And they saw more--saw it with eyes which seemed to sear their brains with anticipation, with despair. This! A long, irregular, deep-fronted row of dwellings, square to the sea, square to the reeling ridge of ocean which was sweeping upon them as the gust sweeps down upon the far-flung autumn leaves. They called aloud in chorus; they challenged Fate with their despair. And Fate replied.