A hundred brave bow-men bold

a few more pawns sliding into the limbo. Not that it matteredthey had thousands more left to play with. For the first time Mallory thought of himself. Not with bitterness of self-pity or regret that it was all over. He thought of himself only as the leader of this party, his responsibility for the present situation. It's my fault, lie told himself over and over again, it's all my fault. I brought them here, I made them come. Even while one part of his mind was telling him that he'd had no option, that his hand had been forced, that if they had remained in the creek they would have been wiped out long before the dawn, irrationally he still blamed himself the more. Shackleton, of all the men that ever lived, maybe Ernest Shackleton could have helped them now. But not Keith Mallory. There was nothing he could do, no more than the others were doing, and they were just waiting for the end. But he was the leader, he thought dully, he should be planning something, he should be doing something. . . . But there was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone on God's earth could do. The sense of guilt, of utter inadequacy, settled and deepened with every shudder of the ancient timbers. He dropped his bucket, grabbed for the security of the mast as a heavy wave swept over the deck, the breaking foam quick-silver in its seething phosphorescence. The waters swirled hungrily round his legs and feet, but he ignored them, stared out into the darkness. The darknessthat was the devil of it. The old caique rolled and pitched and staggered and plunged, but as if disembodied, in a vacuum. They could see nothingnot where the last wave had gone, nor where the next was coming from. A sea invisible and strangely remote, doubly frightening in its palpable immediacy. Mallory stared down into the hold, was vaguely conscious of the white blur of Miller's face: he had swallowed some seawater and was retching painfully, salt water laced with blood. But Mallory ignored it, involuntarily: all his mind was concentrated elsewhere, trying to reduce some fleeting impression, as vague as it had been evanescent, to a coherent realisation. It seemed desperately urgent that he should do so. Then another and still heavier wave broke over the side and all at once he had it. The wind! The wind had dropped away, was lessening with every second that passed. Even as he stood there, arms locked round the mast as the second wave fought to carry him away, he remembered how often in the high hills at home he had stood at the foot of a precipice as vivitar vivicam digital camera 7 mp an onrushing wind, seeking the path of least resistance, had curved and lifted up the sheer face, leaving him standing in a pocket of relative immunity. It was a common enough mountaineering phenomenon. And these two freak wavesthe surging backwash! The significance struck at him like a blow. The cliffs! They were on the cliffs of Navarone! With a hoarse, wordless cry of warning, reckless of his own safety, he flung himself aft, dived full length through the swirling waters for the engine-room hatchway. "Full astern!" he shouted. The startled white smudge that was Casey Brown's face twisted up to his. "For God's sake, man, full astern! We're heading for the cliffs!" He scrambled to his feet, reached the wheelhouse in two strides, hand pawing frantically for the flare pocket. "The cliffs, Stevens! We're almost on them! AndreaMiller's still down below!" He flicked a glance at Stevens, caught the slow nod of the set, blood-masked face, followed the line of sight of the expressionless eyes, saw the whitely phosphorescent line ahead, irregular but almost continuous, blooming and fading, blooming and fading, as the pounding seas smashed against and fell back from cliffs still invisible in the darkness. Desperately his hands fumbled with the flare. And then, abruptly, it was gone, hissing and spluttering along the near-horizontal trajectory of its ifight. For a moment, Mallory thought it had gone out, and he clenched his fists in impotent bitterness. Then it smashed against the rock face, fell back on to a ledge about a dozen feet above the water, and lay there smoking and intermittently burning in the driving rain, in the heavy spray that cascaded from the booming breakers. The light was feeble, but it was enough. The cliffs were barely fifty yards away, black and wetly shining in the fitful radiance of the flarea flare that illuminated a vertical circle of less than five yards in radius, and left the cliff below the ledge shrouded in the treacherous dark. And straight ahead, twenty, maybe fifteen yards from the shore, stretched the evil length of a reef, gaptoothed and needle-pointed, vanishing at either end into the outer darkness. "Can you take her through?" he yelled at Stevens. "God knows! I'll try!" He shouted something else about "steerage way," but Mallory was already half-way to the for'ard cabin. As always in an emergency, his mind was