We floated forward with the arrested blades poised over the water. It was burning hot; the sun stood nearly overhead, and the surface of this strange natural harbor shone like new tin, tingling in fibers and needles of white fire back again into the light that it reflected. We were within a musket-shot of the entrance of the cave.
“On which side did you board, men?”
“To starboard, sir.”
“Give way gently, and, bow there, stand by with your boathook.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
WE TRANSHIP THE DOLLARS.
Although the hour was approaching high noon, and the day very glorious, no light was in the cave beyond the length of the ship’s bowsprit. A wall of darkness came to the bows of the ship; it might have been something material, something you could lean against or stick with a knife; the daylight touched it and made a twilight of it at the mouth, then died out. The long and short of it is—it is my way, anyhow, of explaining the strange thing—the filthy colored scoriæ, the gloomy masses of cinder, pumice, lava—call it what you will—were unreflective; light smote the stuff and perished, or was not returned, so that a thin veil of dusk clothed with deepest obscurity any hollow it lay in.
The water brimmed blue to the mouth of the cave, and then, at a few boats’ lengths, slept black and thick as ink, wholly motionless this day; though I might suppose that when a large swell ran outside the breakwaters, the smaller swell of the harbor put a pulse into the black tide of the cave, though without weight enough to stir the stern-stranded ship. Yet you saw much of her when you were still on the threshold of the cavern. Her huge bows sprawling with head-boards loomed out of the darkness, advancing the yellow bowsprit till the cap of it was almost flush with the sides of the opening. Had the jib booms stood, they would have forked far into daylight and, perhaps, long ago have challenged the attention of a passing ship, and brought her people to explore the Spaniard and enrich themselves. Her lower masts were yellow, and they showed ghastly in the gloom. She had immense round tops, black and heavy, and shrouds of an almost hawser-like thickness, with a wide spread of channels and massive chain plates. Most of the yards were across, and squared as though the machinery of the braces had worked to the music of the boatswain’s pipe. Her sides were tall; she carried some swivels on her poop rail, and a few pieces calked with tompions crouched through a half dozen of ports, like motionless beasts of a strange shape about to spring.
To look up! To behold that lofty fabric and complication of mast and spar and rigging soaring to the dark roof, against which the topgallant masts had been ground away to the topmast heads!
Be seated in a small boat alongside a ship of six hundred or seven hundred tons, with such a height of side as this Spaniard had, lifting her platform of deck a full eighteen feet above the water for the eye to follow the ascent of the lower masts from; I say from the low level of a small boat, look up to the altitude of the starry trucks of such a ship as this Perfecta Casada; if you be no sailor, your eye will swim as you trace the mastheads to their airy points. To an immeasurable height will those spars seem to soar above you, yea, though they rise no higher than the cross-trees. But here was a vast cave in which a great ship—and a ship of seven hundred tons was a great ship in my time—could lie; and in this cave a lofty ship was lying, partly afloat, partly stranded; the darkness in which she slumbered magnified her proportions; she loomed upon the sight as tall again as she was, and half the wonder of this wonderful show lay in the height of the black ceiling against which her topmast heads were pressed, jamming her into the position she had taken up, as though a shipwright and his men had dealt with her.
The atmosphere struck cold as snow after the outer heat. A hush fell upon us as we floated in, with the bowman erect ready to hook on, and the silence was horrible, and the more horrible for the sound thrice heard in the hush that fell upon us, of a greasy gurgle of water, like a low, villainous, chuckling laugh.