obscurity of the water breaking all about its sides and streaming in cascades from the flat railed-in top. A hatchway opened, and two figures crawled out, clinging{76} to the rail of their swaying foothold while the full force of the wind clawed and battered at their forms. They maintained a terse conversation by dint of shouting in turn with their lips to each other’s ears, while the conning-tower of the submarine on which they stood moved forward in the teeth of the elements.
{76}
For half an hour they went plunging and{77} lurching onwards, clinging with numbed hands to the rail as a green sea swept about their legs, wiping the half-frozen spray from their eyes to search the darkness ahead with night-glasses. Then one pointed away on the bow.
{77}
“How’s that?” he bawled. A point on the bow something dark tumbled amid the waves and flying spindrift. The other stared a moment, shouted an order to the invisible helmsman through a voice-pipe, and the wind that had hitherto been in their streaming eyes smote and buffeted them on the left cheek. A scurry of sleet whirled momentarily about them, blotting out the half-glimpsed buoy; the taller of the two figures put out an arm and smote his companion on the back. They had made that buoy at dawn the previous day, and then, according to the custom of British submarines in enemy waters, submerged till nightfall. Now, despite the set of the tides and currents and the darkness, they had found it again, and with it their bearings for the desperate journey that lay ahead.
For two hours they groped their way onwards through what would have been unfathomable mysteries to a landsman. Compass, chart, and leadline played their part: but not even these, coupled with the{78} stoutest heart that ever beat, avail against unknown minefield and watchful patrols. Thrice the two alert, oilskin-clothed figures dived through the hatchway into the interior of the submarine, and the platform on which they had been standing vanished eerily beneath the surface as a string of long, dark shapes went by with a throb of unseen propellers. Once when thus submerged an unknown object grated past the thin shell with a harsh metallic jar, and passed astern in silence. Then it was that the captain of the submarine removed his cap, passing his sleeve quickly across his damp forehead, and the gesture was doubtless accepted where all prayers of gratitude find their way.
{78}
The first gleam of dawn, however,
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