"The captain commanded the longboat, the second mate and Devereux had a whaleboat apiece. Devereux’s was the smallest; his crew consisted of six men besides himself. The boats drew together on the quiet water for a consultation. A deep stillness invested the place, the stillness of a lofty cavern, of an empty world; and somewhere off in the gloom that awful sucking sound went on, now loud, now dying out to a faint echo, like a demon chuckling over human disaster. "All night they played hide-and-seek with that demon in the darkness. The breeze fell off, and after a while it grew flat calm. At times the voice of the reef was hoarse and low and languid; at times it purred and bubbled energetically; at times it would be silent so long that they’d lean over the gunwale to listen, thinking they had lost it—when unexpectedly it would snarl out again, close at hand. In the middle of the night they did seem to be really losing the sound, and were afraid they’d drifted from the vicinity; they bent to the oars rather aimlessly, for no one could judge the exact direction, and before they knew it were almost running afoul of the hideous thing. Some of the men swore that the sound moved on the water; this seemed plausible, for it was to be supposed that the reef extended a considerable distance, yet the notion nevertheless gave rise to a vague superstitious fear. Either it moved, or they were surrounded by a nest of reefs—one was about as bad as the other. Devereux said it was a night to drive a nervous man crazy, a night that they began to think would never end. "When dawn came at last, they looked about them and saw nothing at all—nothing but an unbroken horizon, a boundless ocean, a few spars floating idly in the midst of a great calm, and a little dark dot like a pimple on the face of the waters, just in front of the rising sun. "They rowed toward this pimple on the surface. It opened and closed with the sucking motion of a loose mouth, and between the monstrous flickering lips of water a point of rock protruded, black and swollen like the tongue of a drowned man. It seemed impossible that this solitary rock had made all the commotion of the night, had invested them as if with an army of breakers; yet there was absolutely nothing else in sight—the rest had been imagination.