‘Certainly not,’ she replied from the bulwark, where she stood staring seawards, and answering without turning her head.
Laura seemed a little reluctant. ‘Come, my love,’ I whispered; ‘is not a beautiful sight, even according to Finn’s theory of beauty, worth seeing?’
I took her hand and together we proceeded to the open hatch.
On peeping down, my first instinctive movement was one of recoil. I protest I believed the interior of the hull to be on fire. The whole scene was lighted up by crawling fluctuations, creepings and blinkings of vivid phosphoric flame. It might be that the atmosphere of this storm-laden evening was heavily charged with electricity; yet since the gloom had drawn down I had often cast my eyes upon the sea in the direction where the shadow of the tempest lay and where the water brimmed darkly to the slope of the beach, and therefore had the ocean been phosphorescent even to a small extent I should have observed it; yet no further signs of fire were apparent than a thin dim edging of wire-drawn, greenish light, flickering on the lip of the brine as it stealthily, almost imperceptibly, crept up and down the declivity of the rock. But in this hold the sparkling was so brilliant that every object the eye rested upon showed even to the most delicate details of its conformation, though the hue was uniform (a pale green), so that there was no splendour of tint, nothing but the wonder of a phosphoric revelation, grand, striking, miraculous to my sight, so unimaginable a spectacle was it. It was like, indeed, a glimpse of another world, of a creation absolutely different from all scenes this earth had to submit, as though, in truth, one were taking a peep into some lunar cave rich with stalactites, wondrous with growths which owed nothing to the sun, all robed with the colour of death—the pale pearl of the moonbeam!
Laura, whose hand grasped my arm, held her breath.
‘Did ever man see the like of such a thing afore!’ exclaimed Finn in an awed voice, as though amazement were of slow growth in him.
Immediately on a line with the hatch, resting on a heap of shells, whose summit rose to within an easy jump, lay the two skeletons in that embrace of theirs which was so full of horror, of pathos, of suggestion of anguish. Ah, Heaven, what a light to view them in! And yet they communicated an inexpressibly impressive element of unreality to the picture. It was as though the hand of some sorcerer had lifted a corner of the black curtain of the future and enabled you to catch a glimpse of the secret principality of the King of Terrors.
‘One sees so little of this marvel here,’ exclaimed Laura. ‘How magnificent must be the scene viewed from the depths there!’
‘Have you courage to descend?’ said I.
She was silent a moment, eyeing askant with averted face the two skeletons immediately beneath, then fetching an eager breath of resolution, she said, ‘Yes, I have courage to go—with you.’