He awoke with a racking headache in pitchy darkness; and with the twilight of returning consciousness there grew in him an awful fear that he had been coffined and buried alive. For he lay at full length in a bed which yet was unlike any bed of his acquaintance, being so narrow that he could neither turn his body nor put out an arm to lift himself into a sitting posture; and again, when he tried to move his legs, to his horror they were compressed as if between bandages. In his ear there sounded, not six inches away, a low lugubrious moaning. It could not come from a bed-fellow, for he had no bed-fellow.… No, it could be no earthly sound.
With a strangled cry he flung a hand upwards, fending off the horrible darkness. It struck against a board, and at the same instant his cry was echoed by a sharp scream close beside him.
"Angels and ministers of Gerrace defend us!" The scream sank to a hoarse whisper and was accompanied by a clank of chains. "Not dead? You—you are not dead?"
The Major lay back in a cold sweat. "I—I thought I was," he quavered at length. But at this point his mysterious bed seemed to sway for a moment beneath him, and he caught his breath. "Where am I?" he gasped.
"At sea," answered the voice in a hollow tone.
"At sea!" In a sudden spasmodic attempt to sit upright, the Major almost rolled himself out of his hammock.
"Ay, poor comrade—if you are indeed he whom I saw lifted aboard unconscious from the tender—'tis the dismal truth."
"Beneath the Orlop's darksome shade
Unknown to Sol's bright ray,
Where no kind chink's assistant aid
Admits the cheerful day.
"Beneath the Orlop's darksome shade
Unknown to Sol's bright ray,
Where no kind chink's assistant aid
Admits the cheerful day.
"I am not, in the practical sense, seaman enough to determine if this noisome den be the precise part of the ship alluded to by the poet under the name of Orlop. But the circumstances correspond; and my stomach informs me that the vessel is in motion."