But all this is description, and it takes me long to submit to you what I beheld in a few breathless moments of wonder, and awe, and admiration. We were here to load dollars, not to muse and marvel.
“Sort o’ ole penguin smell knocking round, aint there?” said one of the crew.
“Only a Dago could have managed this job,” said another. “Why don’t Dagoes stay ashore? Blast me if even a Dutchman would have made such a muck of it.”
“Hold your jaw!” I roared, in a rage; and my cry went in an echo through the cave, rebounding as a billiard ball from its cushion.
What is more diabolically and instantaneously fatal to sentiment than the vulgar talk of a vulgar Englishman? A Spaniard, an Italian, a Portuguese, a Greek—blasphemes in your presence, and his coarseness adds to the romantic colors of the idealism you are musing on; but let an Englishman come alongside of you, and drop an h, and emotion is shivered as by a thunderbolt.
The remarks of the sailor woke me up. We were alongside the ship, and the fellow in the bow had hooked on to one of the huge main-chain plates. I crawled into the channel, and over the rail, and dropped upon the deck. It was like entering a vault, and there was an odd, damp, earthy flavor in the air. I wonder, thought I, if there are two dead men in the forecastle, locked in each other’s arms? But why locked in each other’s arms? Ah, why? Fancy will give body to wild conceits at such a time and on such an occasion as this.
I stood a moment at the rail; the water flowed black as ink into the blackness over the stern. In the mysterious twilight that shrouded the ship, her decks and masts looked unearthly; it was hard to conceive that human hands had fashioned her, that the echoes of the mortal calker had resounded through her. I thought of the ship in Lycidas
Built in th’ eclipse and rigged with curses dark.
Sternward the craft died out in gloom. The roundhouse, or some such contrivance of deck structure, hung in a swollen shadow with the yellow shaft of the mizzen mast shooting straight up out of it. I seemed to catch a faint gleam of glass, a dim and ghostly outline of doorway, of skylight, of crane-like davits. The deck of a ship viewed at midnight, by the light of froth breaking round about, would shadowily and glimmeringly show as this Spaniard did from the gangway to the taffrail. But forward there was light; the radiance of the day hung, like a sheet of blue silver, in front of the opening of the cave, and against that brilliance—compact and undiffused, like the light upon the object glass of a telescope—the bows of the ship stood out in indigo, the tracery of the rigging exquisitely marked till it vanished in the gloom overhead.
I bade one man remain in the boat, and the rest to come on board and bring the lanterns, tackles, slings, and materials for securing the damaged chests of dollars. I then lighted one of the lanterns and walked aft, looking with the utmost curiosity around me, as though this ship, forsooth, instead of being a vessel of my own time, was coeval with this cave, and but a little younger than Noah.