Then, as the ketch heaved and heaved again in the light of the flames that ran up the tarry rigging, at one stride the dawn was on us; with no flush of sunshine, but with a grey, steel-coloured ray that cut the darkness like a sword.  I had managed to hoist myself again to the bowsprit, and, straddling it, had time in one glance aft to take in the scene of ruin.  Yet in that glance I saw it—­the yawning hole, the upheaved jagged deck-planks, the dark bodies hurled to right and left into the scuppers—­by three separate lights:  by the yellow light of the flames in the rigging, by the steel-grey light of dawn, and by a sudden white-hot flush as the lightning ripped open the belly of heaven and let loose the rain.  While I blinked in the glare, the mizzen-mast crashed overside.  I cannot tell whether the lightning struck and split it, or whether, already blasted by the explosion, it had stood upright for those few seconds until a heave of the swell snapped the charred stays and released it.  Nay, even the dead beat of the rain may have helped.

In all my life I have never known such rain.  Its noise drowned the thunderclap.  It fell in no drops or threads of drops, but in one solid flood as from a burst bag.  It extinguished the blaze in the rigging as easily as you would blow out a candle.  It beat me down prone upon the bowsprit, and with such force that I felt my ribs giving upon the timber.  It stunned me as a bather is stunned who, swimming in a pool beneath a waterfall, ventures his head into the actual cascade.  It flooded the deck so that two minutes later, when I managed to lift my head, I saw the bodies of two Moors washed down the starboard scuppers and clean through a gap in the broken bulwarks, their brown legs lifting as they toppled and shot over the edge.

No wind had preceded the storm.  The lightning had leapt out of a still sky—­still, that is, until jarred and set vibrating by the explosion.  But now, as the downpour eased, the wind came on us with a howl, catching the ship so fierce a cuff, as she rolled with mainsail set and no way on her, that she careened until the sea ran in through her lee scuppers, and, for all the loss of her mizzen-mast, came close to being thrown on her beam ends.

While she righted herself—­which she began to do but slowly—­I leapt for the deck and ran aft, avoiding the jagged splinters, in time to catch sight of my father’s head and shoulders emerging through the burst hatchway.

“Hullo!” he sang out cheerfully, lifting his voice against the wind.  “God be praised, lad!  I was fearing we had lost you.”

“But what has happened?” I shouted.

Before he could answer a voice hailed us over stern, and we hurried aft to find Billy Priske dragging himself towards the ship by the raffle of mizzen-rigging.  We hoisted him in over the quarter, and he dropped upon deck in a sitting posture.

“Is my head on?” he asked, taking it in both hands.