It was my elder brother, and my heart leaped for joy, for I had
made sure that he was overboard--but the next moment all this joy was
turned into horror--for he put his mouth close to my ear, and screamed
out the word '_Moskoe-str?¶m_!'
"No one-will ever know what my feelings were at that moment. I shook
from head to foot as if I had had the most violent fit of the ague. I
knew what he meant by that one word well enough--I knew what he wished
to make me understand. With the wind that now drove us on, we were
bound for the whirl of the Str?¶m, and nothing could save us!
"You perceive that in crossing the Str?¶m _channel_, we always went a
long way up above the whirl, even in the calmest weather, and then had
to wait and watch carefully for the slack--but now we were driving
right upon the pool itself, and in such a hurricane as this! 'To be
sure,' I thought, 'we shall get there just about the slack--there is
some little hope in that--but in the next moment I cursed myself for
being so great a fool as to dream of hope at all. I knew very well
that we were doomed, had we been ten times a ninety-gun ship.
"By this time the first fury of the tempest had spent itself, or
perhaps we did not feel it so much as we scudded before it; but at all
events the seas, which at first had been kept down by the wind, and
lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains.
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