“Aye, hold hard, lad,” cried Paul, springing to his side with a coil of rigging.  With a few rapid turns he knitted himself to his foe.  The wind now acting on the sails of the Serapis forced her, heel and point, her entire length, cheek by jowl, alongside the Richard.  The projecting cannon scraped; the yards interlocked; but the hulls did not touch.  A long lane of darkling water lay wedged between, like that narrow canal in Venice which dozes between two shadowy piles, and high in air is secretly crossed by the Bridge of Sighs.  But where the six yard-arms reciprocally arched overhead, three bridges of sighs were both seen and heard, as the moon and wind kept rising.

Into that Lethean canal—­pond-like in its smoothness as compared with the sea without—­fell many a poor soul that night; fell, forever forgotten.

As some heaving rent coinciding with a disputed frontier on a volcanic plain, that boundary abyss was the jaws of death to both sides.  So contracted was it, that in many cases the gun-rammers had to be thrust into the opposite ports, in order to enter to muzzles of their own cannon.  It seemed more an intestine feud, than a fight between strangers.  Or, rather, it was as if the Siamese Twins, oblivious of their fraternal bond, should rage in unnatural fight.

Ere long, a horrible explosion was heard, drowning for the instant the cannonade.  Two of the old eighteen-pounders—­before spoken of, as having been hurriedly set up below the main deck of the Richard—­burst all to pieces, killing the sailors who worked them, and shattering all that part of the hull, as if two exploded steam-boilers had shot out of its opposite sides.  The effect was like the fall of the walls of a house.  Little now upheld the great tower of Pisa but a few naked crow stanchions.  Thenceforth, not a few balls from the Serapis must have passed straight through the Richard without grazing her.  It was like firing buck-shot through the ribs of a skeleton.

But, further forward, so deadly was the broadside from the heavy batteries of the Serapis—­levelled point-blank, and right down the throat and bowels, as it were, of the Richard—­that it cleared everything before it.  The men on the Richard’s covered gun-deck ran above, like miners from the fire-damp.  Collecting on the forecastle, they continued to fight with grenades and muskets.  The soldiers also were in the lofty tops, whence they kept up incessant volleys, cascading their fire down as pouring lava from cliffs.

The position of the men in the two ships was now exactly reversed.  For while the Serapis was tearing the Richard all to pieces below deck, and had swept that covered part almost of the last man, the Richard’s crowd of musketry had complete control of the upper deck of the Serapis, where it was almost impossible for man to remain unless as a corpse.  Though in the beginning, the tops of the Serapis had not been unsupplied with marksmen, yet they had long since been cleared by the overmastering musketry of the Richard.  Several, with leg or arm broken by a ball, had been seen going dimly downward from their giddy perch, like falling pigeons shot on the wing.