‘I would rather die,’ she said, ‘than enter that part of this horrid ship.’
‘Well,’ said I, mildly, ‘we will first see what is going to happen.’
At half-past five or thereabouts we got what the sailors would have called our supper. There was indeed plenty to eat, enough to last us some weeks, with husbandry. All the casked meat, it is true, was uncooked, but enough galley utensils had come ashore—a big kettle, I remember, and a couple of saucepans—to enable us to boil our pork and beef when our stock of preserved food should be exhausted. Our supply of water, however, justified uneasiness. One’s thirst was incessant under skies of brass, and on an island whose crust was as hot as the shell of a newly-boiled egg. But then, to be sure, the surface was honeycombed with wells. In a very short time the salt water would have dried out of the deepest of them, and we might hope that the next thunder-shower would yield us drink enough to last out this intolerable imprisonment.
But when was it to end? I stood up to take a view of the sea. The galleon’s forecastle probably showed a height of between thirty and forty feet above the water-line, and one seemed to command a wide prospect of ocean; but not a gleam of the size of a tip of feather met the eye the whole wide stagnant sweep around. The sun was now low in the heart of the dark masses of vapour in the west, a sickly purple shadow underhung the clouds upon the sea and glanced back with an eye of fire to every lightning dart that flashed from above. Overhead the sky had fainted into a sickly hectic, and it was an ugly sallow sort of green down in the east, with a large star there trembling mistily.
‘It’s coming on a black thundering night,’ I heard Cutbill say as he stood up to send a look into the west, with the inverted bowl of a sooty pipe showing past his whisker and a large sweatdrop glancing like a jewel at the end of his nose.
‘There’ll be wind there,’ exclaimed Finn.
‘What signs do you find to read?’ said I.
‘Well, your honour, there’s a haze of rain if ye look at the foot of that smother down there,’ he answered, pointing with the sharp of his hand, ‘and the verse concerning manifestations of that sort is gospel truth: When the rain before the wind, Then your tops’l halliards mind.’
‘If it’s coming on a breeze of wind,’ said Dowling, who like the others felt himself privileged by stress of shipwreck to join freely in any conversation that was going forward, ‘this here sail’ll blow away and we shall lose it,’ meaning the jib that we had stretched as an awning.
‘Pity to lose it,’ exclaimed Finn; ‘shall we take it in, sir, whilst there’s light?’