Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

The rain began to fall again; first like a wet mist, then with a
heavier touch, thickening into a smart, perpendicular downpour;
and the hiss and thump of the approaching steamer was coming
extremely near. Decoud, with his eyes full of water, and lowered
head, asked himself how long it would be before she drew past,
when unexpectedly he felt a lurch. An inrush of foam broke
swishing over the stern, simultaneously with a crack of timbers
and a staggering shock. He had the impression of an angry hand
laying hold of the lighter and dragging it along to destruction.
The shock, of course, had knocked him down, and he found himself
rolling in a lot of water at the bottom of the lighter. A violent
churning went on alongside; a strange and amazed voice cried out
something above him in the night. He heard a piercing shriek for
help from Senor Hirsch. He kept his teeth hard set all the time.
It was a collision!

The steamer had struck the lighter obliquely, heeling her over
till she was half swamped, starting some of her timbers, and
swinging her head parallel to her own course with the force of
the blow. The shock of it on board of her was hardly perceptible.
All the violence of that collision was, as usual, felt only on
board the smaller craft. Even Nostromo himself thought that this
was perhaps the end of his desperate adventure. He, too, had
been flung away from the long tiller, which took charge in the
lurch. Next moment the steamer would have passed on, leaving the
lighter to sink or swim after having shouldered her thus out of
her way, and without even getting a glimpse of her form, had it
not been that, being deeply laden with stores and the great
number of people on board, her anchor was low enough to hook
itself into one of the wire shrouds of the lighter's mast. For
the space of two or three gasping breaths that new rope held
against the sudden strain. It was this that gave Decoud the
sensation of the snatching pull, dragging the lighter away to
destruction. The cause of it, of course, was inexplicable to
him. The whole thing was so sudden that he had no time to think.
But all his sensations were perfectly clear; he had kept complete
possession of himself; in fact, he was even pleasantly aware of
that calmness at the very moment of being pitched head first over
the transom, to struggle on his back in a lot of water. Senor
Hirsch's shriek he had heard and recognized while he was
regaining his feet, always with that mysterious sensation of
being dragged headlong through the darkness. Not a word, not a
cry escaped him; he had no time to see anything; and following
upon the despairing screams for help, the dragging motion ceased
so suddenly that he staggered forward with open arms and fell
against the pile of the treasure boxes. He clung to them
instinctively, in the vague apprehension of being flung about
again; and immediately he heard another lot of shrieks for help,
prolonged and despairing, not near him at all, but unaccountably
in the distance, away from the lighter altogether, as if some
spirit in the night were mocking at Senor Hirsch's terror and
despair.