The Secret in the Hill by Bernard Capes — Read

What a fantastic nightmare in my memory is that amazing voyage! Were souls as oddly consorted ever launched on an odder? Looking back at this date on all the circumstances, our isolation, our helplessness, our exhaustion of mind and body following on the strain -- and that, by long hours yet, not to be withdrawn -- it appears to me little less than miraculous that we ever won to harbour. Had it not been for the strange distraction of a certain recital which the occasion called forth, and which, occupying our thoughts both during and after its telling, rendered us partly oblivious to our condition, a very creeping paralysis of terror would, I believe, have ended by destroying us. To swing there unrelated to any visible hold on life but the sodden, weltering stick beneath us: lost atoms in a vast immensity of mist and water! My mind, save I gripped it frenziedly to its own consciousness, would have reeled and forsaken me, I think.

Sometimes for a moment, indeed, it would be almost gone, dropping through the seeming clouds on which we swam into immeasurable abysses of space; and it was only on these occasions by grappling aghast with the figures of reality before it, that it could recover and control itself. If only we could have seen the shore -- could have steadied nothing more than our vision on that ghost of moral support, it would have been something. But by now the haze had shut down, and we were derelicts utterly committed to the waste. It was a bad time -- a bad, forsaken time, and I do not much like to recall it, that is the truth.