Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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“Of what?” said I.

“My men,” he continued, taking no notice of my interruption, “were, no doubt, considerably astonished to observe me hacking at the cargo with a heavy ax, as though I had fallen mad, and splintering and smashing up what I saw through sheer lunatic wantonness. I did not care what they thought so long as they did not form correct conclusions. I regained the deck, and bid the fellows put the hatches on while I explored the cabins for the ship’s papers. There was a number of cabins under the roundhouse, and in one of them, which had, undoubtedly, been occupied by the captain, I found a stout tin box, locked; but I had a bunch of keys in my pocket, and, strangely enough, the key of a tin box in which I kept my own papers on board the Hero fitted this box. I opened it, and seeing at once that the contents were the ship’s papers, I put them into my pocket and called to my men to bring the boat alongside. But I had not yet completed my explorations. I threw the ax into the boat, entered her, and pulled into the harbor to look at the weather and to see where the Hero was. The Hero lay at the distance of a mile, hove-to. The weather was wonderfully fine and calm. We pulled into the cave again to the bows of the ship, and cut off a short length of the hemp cable that was hanging up and down from the hawse-pipe, having parted at about two feet above the edge of the water. The cable was perfectly dry. We unlaid the strands and worked them up into torches and set fire to three of them—that is to say, I and two of the men held aloft these blazing torches, while the other two pulled us slowly into the cave past the ship. There was not much to see after all. The cavern ended abruptly at about a hundred yards astern of the ship. The roof sloped, as I had supposed, almost to the wash of the water, it and the walls working into the shape of a wedge. I had thought to see some fine formations—stalactites, natural columns, extraordinary incrustations, and so forth. There was nothing of the sort. The cave was as like the tunneling of a coal mine as anything I can think of to compare it with; but how gigantic, to comfortably house a vessel of at least seven hundred tons, finding room for her aloft to the height of her topmast head! It was more like a nightmare than a reality, to look from the black extremity of the cave toward the entrance, and see there the dim green of the day—for the light showed in a faint green—with the upright fabric of the ship black as ink against that veil of green faintness. The water brimmed with a gleam as of black oil to the black walls. One of my men said: