Howard’s voice came to her from afar off. “No,” he murmured, sadly. “It is not land. It is wreckage. We have reached our destination.”
Moved by a slight breeze, the haze shredded away and there, on the waters before them, stretching away to right and to left, lay an interminable mass of wrecks of every shape and description, banked together so thickly that they seemed to touch—and did touch—each other. Dead! all of them. Some newly dead; others long dead; but all unburied, waiting in the haven of dead ships for the long-deferred end. The trees were not trees, but masts hung with ravelled cordage; the beaches were the black hulls of ships; and the white houses were deck-houses or patches of canvas.
For a moment no one spoke. Dorothy stood staring, every muscle tense, while the tears dripped slowly from her distended eyes. Jackson’s mouth fell open; his pistol hand fell nerveless to his side. For the first time he realized the situation.
As they gazed, the sun with tropic suddenness dropped below the horizon and hid the scene.
Howard’s voice broke the silence. “Now,” he encouraged, “we can get to work.”
VII
It was late that night before the voyagers dropped into uneasy slumber. The wonder of their situation, suddenly brought home to them, had roused them all to unusual volubility. In the excitement consequent on the discovery of the massed wrecks even Jackson forgot his suspicions, and the three talked together freely. Howard had promised that they should join the wrecks, and they had done so. Now he would have a chance to keep his other promise to get them out; in the first flush of arrival they did not doubt that he would do so.
But Jackson, at least, changed his opinion the next morning when he came on deck and viewed the scene before him.
During the night the Queen, drawn by the same natural attraction that holds the planets in their sphere and brings floating chips together in a basin, had taken its place with the dead ships. Under her counter lay a water-logged schooner; beside her rubbed a dismasted sailing-ship; over her submerged bow hung a tramp steamer, whose blackened masts, bare of cordage, gave evidence of the flames that had ravaged her. Beyond, stretched a mass of wreckage, ship pressing upon ship, in an endless iteration of ruin. Only to the west the view was open, and there stretched the weed in slimy convolutions.
Over all screamed the sea-birds.