‘Finn,’ I exclaimed, ‘this is too grand and incomparable a spectacle to witness only in part. If we are to come off with our lives in this galleon, there,’ said I, pointing into the hold, ‘is the chance of a memory that I should bitterly reproach myself for not grasping and making the most of. Can you lower Miss Laura and myself into that hold on to that dry, smooth heap there, clear of where those figures lie?’
‘Why, yes, your honour, easy as lighting a pipe. William, fetch the chair, will ’ee, and overhaul the whip, and bring ’em along?’
The chair was procured, and a turn taken round the stump of the mainmast. I seated myself and was lowered, then down sank Laura and I lifted her out; a moment after the four seamen sprang from the edge of the hatch. Now indeed we could behold the glowing interior as it deserved to be seen. The galleon was apparently bulk-headed from her forecastle deck down to the keelson, and the fore hold, accessible doubtless by a hatch in the lower forecastle deck, was hidden from us. But aft the vault-like interior stretched in view to plumb with the poop deck, past which nothing of the after hold was to be seen; but the vessel’s great beam and such length of her as we commanded submitted a large area of illuminated wonders, and as you stood gazing around it made you feel as if you were under the sea, as if you had penetrated to the silent lighted hall of a dumb ocean god that was eyeing you, for all you knew, from some ambush of glittering green growth whither he had fled on your approach.
The irradiation was phosphoric, I was sure, by the hue and character of it, but how kindled I could not imagine; the water had sunk low; in the death-like stillness you could hear through the hatchway the sounds of it gushing on to the rocks from the perforations. It lay black with gleams of green fire upon it, deep down amid the billowy sheathing of shell under which we might be sure was secreted such of the cargo as had not been washed out of the vessel. Pendent from the upper deck was a very forest of multitudinous vegetation; the sides, far as the eye could pierce, were thickly covered; the writhings of the grave-like glow quickened the snake-shaped plants, the bulbous forms, the distended fingers as of gigantic hands, green outlines which the imagination easily wrought into the aspect of the heads of men and beasts and such wild sights as one traces in clouds; these writhings vitalised all such sights into an aspect of growing and increasing life; they seemed to stir uneasily, to mop and mow, to elongate and shrink.
‘It’s almost worth being cast away,’ cried Cutbill, ‘to see such a picter as this. Lord, now for a steamer to tow her into port! My precious eyes! what a fortune as a mere sightseeing job!’
‘If there’s treasure aboard there’s where it’ll lie stowed,’ cried Dowling, pointing aft; his figure with his long outstretched arm looking like a drawing in phosphorus. Indeed, in that astonishing light we all had a most unhuman, unearthly appearance. Laura’s hair and skin were blended indistinguishably into a faint greenish outline, in the midst of which her violet eyes glowed black as her sister’s by lamplight. Suddenly I felt her hand tremble upon my arm.
‘I feel a little faint,’ she said softly; ‘the atmosphere here is oppressive—and then those——’ She averted her eyes in a shuddering way from the skeletons.
As she spoke the hatch was flashed into a dazzling blaze of sun-bright light.
‘Quick, lads,’ I cried, ‘or the storm will be on us! Hark, how near the thunder rattles!’