Surely they were nearing land! But nothing was in sight from where they sat. Only the burning sky, only the heaving sea!
A bright-eyed butterfly flew on board one day, and the negro boy shouted for joy. But Tom heeded it not; he was past heeding anything. Pain was gone though. He felt nothing. His very mind seemed to have fled. He remembered looking down at his own hands holding the oars, and wondering to whom they belonged. The birds screaming around the boat became spirits with human voices and kept saying things to him, and awful-looking black lizards swam in the water near.
Then through the mist and haze that had gathered before his eyes he could dimly see the negro lad approach nearer. The boy took someone’s oars gently out of his hand, and laid someone down in the bottom of the boat. But who was the someone, Tom wondered. It could not be himself, for he felt nothing.
Then all was a blank.
When he opened his eyes again he was no longer in the boat. The boy was pouring something down his throat. It revived him, and he sat up.
He pointed to some immense lizards—the same he had seen in the sea. They were lying together on some igneous rocks in the sunlight, as large as young alligators but ten times more ugly—broad in head with spreading legs, squalid, hideous, fearsome.
Tom tried to speak as he pointed to them, but could only utter a series of unintelligible vowel-sounds with the back of his throat.
But poor little Brandy understood him.
“Yes, sah, dey are dere all right. You not dream at all, sah. I see dem.”
Then the boy took a stick and forced them off the rock; though some of them turned round as if to bite, and others caught the stick in their hands in a way that curdles one’s blood to think of.