‘Here’s where the door is,’ roared Cutbill.
We saw the line of what was manifestly a doorway showing in a space clear of shells, and in a moment we all fell upon it and presently laid it bare—a little door about five feet high close against the starboard heap of shells which buried the poop ladder there.
‘Don’t smash it if ’ee can help it,’ called out Finn.
But it would not yield to any sort of coaxing short of Cutbill’s thunderous hammer, which he swung with such Herculean muscle, that after half a dozen blows the door went to pieces and tumbled down with a clatter as of the fragments of iron. It was pitch dark inside, of course, but for that we were prepared. Dowling and Head were for thrusting in at once.
‘Back!’ bawled Finn. ‘What sort of air for breathing d’ye think this is after being bottled up afore your great-grandmothers was born.’
Yet for my part, though I stood close, I tasted nothing foul. The first breath of the black atmosphere came out with a wintry edge of ice, and the chill of it went sifting into the sultry daylight of the open air till I saw Laura, who stood some little distance away watching us, recoil from the contact of it.
‘There’s nothing to be done in there without a light of some kind,’ said I. ‘How was this cabin illuminated? From the deck, I presume, as well as by portholes.’
‘Let me go and see, sir,’ said Finn.
The gang of us armed with tools crawled up the line of shells against the door and gained the poop-deck. There was a coffin-shaped heap of glittering incrustation close to where the mizzen-mast had probably stood; the form of it indicated a buried skylight. We fell upon it, and after we had chipped and hammered for some quarter of an hour, the mass of it broke away, and went thundering into the cabin below. The sweep of cold air that rose drove us back.
‘Casements of this skylight were blown out, I reckon, when she settled,’ said Finn; ‘’stonishing how them shells should have filled up the cavity without anything to settle on.’