Amongst the passengers, who seemed only to have escaped this danger to be hurled against the rocks, or crushed in the encounter of the two vessels, one group was especially worthy of the most tender and painful interest.
Taking refuge abaft, a tall old man, with bald forehead and gray moustache, had lashed himself to a stanchion, by winding a piece of rope round his body, whilst he clasped in his arms, and held fast to his breast, two girls of fifteen or sixteen, half enveloped in a pelisse of reindeer-skin.A large, fallow, Siberian dog, dripping with water, and barking furiously at the waves, stood close to their feet.
These girls, clasped in the arms of the old man, also pressed close to each other; but, far from being lost in terror, they raised their eyes to heaven, full of confidence and ingenuous hope, as though they expected to be saved by the intervention of some supernatural power.
A frightful shriek of horror and despair, raised by the passengers of both vessels, was heard suddenly above the roar of the tempest.At the moment when, plunging deeply between two waves, the broadside of the steamer was turned towards the bows of the ship, the latter, lifted to a prodigious height on a mountain of water, remained, as it were, suspended over the "William Tell," during the second which preceded the shock of the two vessels.
There are sights of so sublime a horror, that it is impossible to describe them.Yet, in the midst of these catastrophes, swift as thought, one catches sometimes a momentary glimpse of a picture, rapid and fleeting, as if illumined by a flash of lightning.
Thus, when the "Black Eagle," poised aloft by the flood, was about to crash down upon the "William Tell," the young man with the angelic countenance and fair, waving locks bent over the prow of the ship, ready to cast himself into the sea to save some victim.Suddenly, he perceived on board the steamer, on which he looked down from the summit of the immense wave, the two girls extending their arms towards him in supplication.They appeared to recognize him, and gazed on him with a sort of ecstacy and religious homage!
For a second, in spite of the horrors of the tempest, in spite of the approaching shipwreck, the looks of those three beings met.The features of the young man were expressive of sudden and profound pity; for the maidens with their hands clasped in prayer, seemed to invoke him as their expected Saviour.The old man, struck down by the fall of a plank, lay helpless on the deck.Soon all disappeared together.
A fearful mass of water dashed the "Black Eagle" down upon the "William Tell," in the midst of a cloud of boiling foam.To the dreadful crash of the two great bodies of wood and iron, which splintering against one another, instantly foundered, one loud cry was added--a cry of agony and death--the cry of a hundred human creatures swallowed up at once by the waves!
And then--nothing more was visible!
A few moments after, the fragments of the two vessels appeared in the trough of the sea, and on the caps of the waves--with here and there the contracted arms, the livid and despairing faces of some unhappy wretches, striving to make their way to the reefs along the shore, at the risk of being crushed to death by the shock of the furious breakers.