glanced at the slope behind to keep me to my bearings, and once
more sought the haven; but the rock that had formed it was gone, the
blue swell rolled brimming past the line of shore there, and my eye
following the swing of a fold, I saw the boat about three cables length
distant out upon the water, swinging steadily away into the south, and
showing and disappearing with the heave.

The dead man's cloak fell from my arm; I uttered a cry of anguish; I
clasped my hands and lifted them to God, and looked up to Him. I was for
kicking off my boots and plunging into the water, but, mad as I was, I
was not so mad as that; and mad I should have been to attempt it, for I
could not swim twenty strokes, and had I been the stoutest swimmer that
ever breasted the salt spray, the cold must speedily put an end to my
misery.

What was to be done? Nothing! I could only look idly at the receding
boat with reeling brain. The full blast of the wind was upon her, and
helping the driving action of the billows. I perceived that she was
irrecoverable, and yet I stood watching, watching, watching! my head
burning with the surgings of twenty impracticable schemes. I cast myself
down and wept, stood up afresh and looked at the boat, then cried to God
for help and mercy, bringing my hands to my throbbing temples, and in
that posture straining my eyes at the fast vanishing structure. She was
the only hope I had--my sole chance. My little stock of provisions was
in her--oh, what was I to do?

Though I was at some distance from the place where what I have called my
haven had been, there was no need for me to approach it to understand
how my misfortune had come about. It was likely enough that the very
crevice in which I had jammed the mast to secure the boat by was a deep
crack that the increased swell had wholly split, so that the mast had
tumbled when the rock floated away and liberated the boat.

The horror that this white and frightful scene of desolation had at the
beginning filled me with was renewed with such violence when I saw that
my boat was lost, and I was to be a prisoner on the death-haunted waste,
that I fell down in a sort of swoon, like one partly stunned, and had
any person come along and seen me he would have thought me as dead as
the body on the hill or the corpse that kept its dismal look-out from
the deck of the schooner.

My senses presently returning, I got up, and the rock upon which I stood
being level, I fell to pacing