Page:The Great Secret.djvu/98

82 did not know where to go even if I had been free, for I felt as if I must get some directions on that point. I felt no discomfort, although under so many-fathoms of water with that occasionally illuminated darkness all round me. A great desolation and loneliness was upon my spirit, yet I seemed able to breathe down there as easily as I had done while in the saloon of the Rockhampton.

"I had seen the sharks tear my flesh to ribbons, and had borne the remnant of my bones down with me; they were still lying at my feet, yet I was the same as before, all my limbs perfect, clothed in the same raiment and without any bodily pain, only dreary, lonely and unutterably desolate.

"The ship in which I now was had been an old fifteenth or sixteenth century vessel, and by the occasional flashes I counted seven skeletons in the saloon,—three large male frames, two slight ones, and two that looked as if they had belonged to children. What clothes they may once have worn had been torn from them or rotted away, so that not a shred remained; while the skeletons were grim with age, my poor bones were the only things that gleamed whitely there.

"A quaint cabin it was, with heavy stanchions and beams and deep panels, and with some large chests and lockers lying against the walls. She must have gone down suddenly in some tropic storm, for there was nothing much disturbed within her, while the cabin doors had not been closed: they stood wide open, allowing whatever liked to, free ingress and egress.

"I crouched on the floor, and waited for what and how long I cannot say, for there was no day and no night there, only the lurid flaring up of light as a shoal of fish darted through, followed by some larger enemy,