Every morning I watched the beams of the sun gilding the peak of a lofty rock, ere he rose from the sea; they stole down inch by inch, and foot by foot, as the god of day ascended into the sky, till the waves at its base glittered in light. At eve, these waves were the first that grew dark; then the light stole slowly upward, as the cold shade of night ascended like a rising tide, till the last farewell ray of the already set sun beamed on the sharp volcanic peak, and again the lonely isle "was left to darkness and to me."
CHAPTER LIII.
THE TREASURE SHIP.
Necessity compelled me to invent certain means for the sustenance of life, and for the preservation of health; for I was daily in hope of seeing some vessel appear, either bound for the Spanish Main, or for the Bay of Honduras. Seven days stole away, yet not a topsail had appeared above the horizon, and I was afraid almost to sleep, lest a vessel might pass in the night.
The heavy dews so productive of fever and ague were my chief dread. For the first three nights I slept under a ledge of impending rock. On the fourth day I had found the fragments of a boat upon the beach in a place where they were almost hidden by the sprouting mangroves. Of these fragments I constructed a kind of hut, by covering them with turf and plantain-leaves, and therein I burrowed cosily enough at night, and secured myself from insects, reptiles, and the devouring land-crabs.
Hither I dragged the topsail-yard, and, by repeatedly striking the mountings and sling, which were of iron, with a hard stone, I succeeded in producing sparks which ignited the dead, dry leaves, and occasionally made a fire whereon to broil a tortoise or roast a yam. A sharp stone served me for a knife when opening cocoanuts; the kernel was food—the milk was drink. I ate only to sustain nature, for my heart was heavy, and hope grew faint as day after day rolled on.
So strange is the effect of an overwrought imagination, that amid the awful solitude by which I was surrounded, I thrice imagined that I distinctly heard a voice calling my name.
In troubled dreams, my mother's kind face and sweet smile came before me, and I heard the merry voice of Lotty, who used to sing as constantly as the blackbirds for whom she spread crumbs every morning on her window-sill; and then I awoke to find it but a vision, and that those who loved me were far, far away.
On a part of the beach which shelved abruptly down towards the sea, I found, half-buried among the rank luxuriance of the place, a rusty cannon of antique form—some relic, perhaps, of the buccaneers, as it seemed much more than a hundred years old, and bore upon its breech, in Spanish, "La Lima."
In another place I discovered a more solemn memorial of mankind—a grave, with the remains of a mahogany cross at its head. Who lay interred there? Had he, or she, been earthed up in their last home by the survivor whose bones were scattered on the cliff, which, perhaps, he was daily in the habit of climbing to gaze on the silent sea for a passing sail, even as I now daily climbed it, and gazed hopelessly? This solitary grave gave me food for many mournful reflections, and caused a hundred vague surmises. Its solitude seemed all the more awful in that voiceless isle of the Caribean Sea, and—I scarce know why—but I always shunned the place at night, lest I might see the dim outline of some ancient Spanish mariner, with peaked beard and slashed doublet, or of some grim buccaneer seated at the head of his own grave. Solitude and thought were fast making me timid and superstitious.