Page:Weird Tales Volume 02 Number 2 (1937-02).djvu/78

 sluggishness. By sheer force of will he kept himself from succumbing to panic. His only hope lay in clear thinking. He knew his position was grave. Evidently the ship had struck a half-submerged rock or a coral reef somewhere in the South Seas, the most treacherous and at the same time the most beautiful waters of the world. Where the vessel was foundering the water might be three feet deep or a mile. If a mile he would go down with the ship, be virtually buried alive, assuming that the hatch would hold water-tight. He thought of all the fantastic tales he had read of premature burial. Now he was living a story as terrifying as any by Edgar Allan Poe. There was no hope for him; he faced a lingering, suffocating death with perhaps complete madness before the ghastly end.

He pictured himself lying dead, with the few ravenous rats that had failed to get away gnawing at his flesh. Cold perspiration stood out on his forehead. He rose to his feet. The floor sloped at such a perilous angle he could scarcely stand. He groped his way along the walls. There was not a crevice anywhere through which even the faintest draft of air could filter.

Then unexpectedly there came a grating sound. The hatch was drawn back and Jolly Cauldron's voice bellowed out harshly above the wailing of the storm, "Here's a ladder, dog. Get out! You've got a chance to live if you can swim."

Guy Sellers fumbled about in the darkness until his hand came in contact with the rope ladder. He whined like a frightened animal as he seized it and began to ascend. He was saved, not from death definitely but at least from the frightfulness of a rat-infested tomb.

In a few moments he was on deck. It was still as black as the hold. The night was so thick that water and sky and air all merged into one limitless opaque mass of blackness. The rain drove down like chips of steel. In that gale no lantern could have survived. He seized a rope to keep himself from being swept overboard by the monstrous seas which constantly planed the deck. He did not know what had happened to his companions. They might have been standing beside him unnoticed in that impenetrable blackness. It was uncanny, the piercing, deafening crescendos of the elements, and yet not a single human sound.

How long he stood motionless, he did not know. It might have been hours or it might have been only minutes. In great moments, moments of awe or terror, time becomes abnormal. It grows to monstrous size or shrinks into insignificance. Time at best is absurdly indefinite.

Guy gasped for breath as a great wave crashed over him. He lost his grip on the rope ladder and was swept along, struggling futilely. He clutched frantically at the rail, but his fingers closed only on air. He tried to regain his feet, but the deck was so wet and slippery he fell before he had even risen to his knees. He cursed in despair. At that moment there came a wave so huge that as it broke above the ship it must have towered higher than the masts. It curled over and broke with a terrific roar. As it fell it seized Guy bodily and cast him into the whirling sea. Mercifully as the full force of the wave struck him he was stunned, and again his senses slipped from him like a cloak.

When he opened his eyes, he was lying on a white coral beach. It was morning. The storm had passed. The weather had swung to the other extreme, as is its habit in the tropics. In the dazzling brilliance the waters shone as though they; had become a sea of liquid gold.