But again the rapid motion was suddenly checked, and the women, fancying they had struck on the Vrekin Rock, shrieked aloud.

The cry, and the terrified words which accompanied it, aroused Lady Mar.

She started from her trance, and, while the confusion redoubled, rushed toward the dreadful scene.
The mountainous waves and lowering clouds, borne forward by the blast, anticipated the dreariness of night.

The last rays of the setting sun had long passed away, and the deep shadows of the driving heavens cast the whole into a gloom, even more terrific than absolute darkness; while the high and beetling rocks, towering aloft in precipitous walls, mocked the hopes of the sea-beaten mariner, should he even buffet the waters to reach their base; and the jagged shingles, deeply shelving beneath the waves, or projecting their pointed summits upward, showed the crew where the rugged death would meet them.
A little onward, a thousand massy fragments, rent by former tempests from their parent cliffs, lay at the foundations of the immense acclivities which faced the cause of their present alarm--a whirlpool almost as terrific as that of Scarba.

The moment the powerful blast drove the vessel within the influence of the outward edge of the first circle of the vortex.