Survival

Read the following excerpt from Joseph Conrad's story Typhoon.

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   Nobody -- not even Captain MacWhirr, who alone on deck had caught sight of a white line of foam 

coming on a t such a height that he couldn't believe his eyes--nobody was to know the steepness of that sea and the awful depth of the hollow the hurricane had scooped out behind the running wall of water.

   It raced to meet the ship, and, with a pause, as of girding the loins, the Nan-Shan lifted her bows and leaped. The flames in all the lamps sank, darkening the engine room. One went out. With a tearing crash and a swirling, raving tumult, tones of water fell upon the deck, as though the ship had darted under the foot of a cataract (a cataract is a large waterfall).

   Down there they looked at each other, stunned.

   "Swept from end to end by God!" bawled Jukes.

   She dipped into the hollow straight down, as if going over the edge of the world.  The engine-room toppled forward menacingly, like the inside of a tower nodding in an earthquake.  An awful racket, of iron things falling, came from the stoke hold.  She hung on this appalling slant long enough for Beale to drop on his hands and knees and begin to crawl as if he meant to fly on all fours out of the engine-room, and for Mr. Rout to turn his head slowly, rigid, cavernous, with the lower jaw dropping. Jukes had shut his eyes, and his face in a moment became hopelessly blank and gentle, like the face of a blind man. 

   At last she rose slowly, staggering, as if she had to lift a mountain with her bows.

   Mr. Rout shut his mouth; Jukes blinked; and little Beale stood up hastily. 

   "Another one like this, and that's the last of her," cried the chief.

   He and Jukes looked at each other, and the same thought came into their heads. The Captain! everything must have been swept away. 

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