Stories by English Authors: the Sea | Page 7

my thirst somewhat, I opened my knife and cut a
little raw steak, and ate it. The moisture in the flesh refreshed me, and,
that the sun might not spoil the carcass, I carried it to the shadow made
by the ship, and put it under one of the waterfalls that the play might
keep it sweet. There was plenty more dead fish in the numerous holes,
and I picked out two and put them in the shade; but I knew that the
great heat must soon taint them and rot the rest, whence would come a
stench that might make the island poisonous to me.
I sat down under the bends of the ship for the shadow it threw, and
gazed at the sea. Perhaps I ought to have felt grateful for the miraculous
creation of this spot of land, when, but for it, I must have miserably
perished in the life-buoy, dying a most dreadful, slow, tormenting death,
if some shark had not quickly despatched me; but the solitude was so
frightful, my doom seemed so assured, I was threatened with such dire
sufferings ere my end came, that, in the madness and despair of my
heart, I could have cursed the intervention of this rock, which promised
nothing but the prolongation of my misery. There was but one live
spark amid the ashes of my hopes; namely, that the island lay in the
highway of ships, and that it was impossible a vessel could sight so
unusual an object without deviating from her course to examine it. That
was all the hope I had; but God knows there was nothing in it to keep
me alive when I set off against it the consideration that there was no
water on the island, no food; that a ship would have to sail close to
remark so flat and little a point as this rock; and that days, ay, and
weeks might elapse before the rim of yonder boundless surface,
stretching in airy leagues of deep blue to the azure sky at the horizon,

should be broken by the star-like shining of a sail.
Happily, the wondrous incrusted bulk was at hand to draw my thoughts
away from my hideous condition; for I verily believe, had my eye
found nothing to rest upon but the honeycombed pumice, my brain
would have given way. I stood up and took a long view of the petrified
shell-covered structure, feeling a sort of awe in me while I looked, for it
was a kind of illustration of the saying of the sea giving up its dead, and
the thing stirred me almost as though it had been a corpse that had risen
to the sun, after having been a secret of the deep for three hundred
years.
It occurred to me that if I could board her she might furnish me with a
shelter from the dew of the night. She had channels with long plates, all
looking as if they were formed of shells; and stepping round to the side
toward which she leaned, I found the fore channel-plates to be within
reach of my hands. The shells were slippery and cutting; but I was a
sailor, and there would have been nothing in a harder climb than this to
daunt me. So, after a bit of a struggle, I succeeded in hauling myself
into the chains, and thence easily dragged myself over the rail on to the
deck.
The sight between the bulwarks was far more lovely and surprising
than the spectacle presented by the ship's sides. For the decks seemed
not only formed of shells of a hundred different hues; there was a great
abundance of branching corals, white as milk, and marine plants of
kinds for which I could not find names, of several brilliant colours; so
that, what with the delicate velvet of the moss, the dark shades of
seaweed of figurations as dainty as those of ferns, and the different
sorts of shells, big and little, all lying as solid as if they had been set in
concrete, the appearance of the ship submitted was something
incredibly fantastic and admirable. Whether the hatches were on or not
I could not tell, so thickly coated were the decks; but whether or not,
the deposits and marine growths rendered the surface as impenetrable
as iron, and I believe it would have kept a small army of labourers
plying their pickaxes for a whole week to have made openings into the
hold through that shelly coating of mail.
My eye was taken by a peculiar sort of protuberance at the foot of the
mainmast. It stood as high as I did, and had something of the shape of a
man, and, indeed, after staring at it for some time, I