The suffering had to go on, and he began to wonder how human beings could endure such stress and yet live.
But Vandover himself suffered too keenly to take much thought for the sufferings of the others, while besides that anguish which he shared with the whole boat, the pain in his broken thumb gnawed incessantly like a rat.

From time to time he stared listlessly about him, looking at the dark sky, the tumbling ocean, and the crowded groups in the plunging, rolling lifeboat.
There was nothing picturesque about it all, nothing heroic.

It was unlike any pictures he had seen of lifeboat rescues, unlike anything he had ever imagined.

It was all sordid, miserable, and the sight of the half-clad women, dirty, sodden, unkempt, stirred him rather to disgust than to pity.
At last the dawn came and grew white over a world of tumbling green billows and scudding wrack.

Some three miles distant, seen only when the boat topped a higher wave, the same procession of bleached hills moved gradually to the south under the fog, their feet covered by the white line of the surf.