But he was under a hamper of ropes that strung him down as if he were in a coop, and his dulled senses failed for a moment to tell what ailed him.

At last, after seconds that seemed like ages, it dawned on him; the masts had snapped like carrots, both were over the side, and the hulk was only a half-sunken plaything for the seas to hurl hither and thither.

Larmor?
Gone! How long?
These things chased each other through his dim mind; he slipped his arm out and crept clear; then a perception struck him with the force of a material thing; a return wave leaped up with a slow, spent lunge on the starboard side, and a black something--wreckage?
No.

A shudder of the torn nerves told the young man what it was.

He slid desperately over and made his clutch; the great backwash seemed as though it would tear his arm out of the socket, but he hung on, and presently a lucky lift enabled him to haul Larmor on board! All this passed in a few lying instants, but centuries--- aeons--could not count its length in the anguish-stricken human soul.
I once knew a sailor who was washed through a port in a Biscay gale; the return sea flung him on board again.