Explore "Long Odds" by Harold Bindloss on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a thick black night when Desmond brought the _Palestrina_ into the Bahia, steaming at half-speed with the big smooth swell heaving in vast undulations behind her. The blinding deluge which had delayed him for half an hour had just ceased, and at every roll boat and deckhouse shook off streams of lukewarm water. A dripping man stood strapped outside the bridge swinging the heavy lead, and his sing-song cry which rose at regular intervals broke through the throb of slowly turning engines. A yard or two away from him Desmond leaned upon the rails peering into the darkness athwart which there ran a dim black line of bluff. A filmy haze that glimmered faintly white leapt up between him and it, and the stagnant air was filled with a great, deep-toned rumbling. It rolled along the half-seen bluff like the muttering of distant thunder, for, though the Bahia was partly sheltered, the vast heave of the Southern Ocean was crumbling upon the hammered beach that night.
It does so now and then when there is not a breath of wind.