ed to burst. I was dimly conscious that I
was falling backward, and I knew no more.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

CAPTAIN RENOUF.

Where was I? What was this darksome, foul, and evil-smelling place?
Who was that forbidding-looking individual sitting there smoking under
that swaying, smoky, dimly-burning, miserable apology for a lamp? And,
finally, what had happened that my limbs should feel heavy as lead, and
that I should be too weak to turn upon my cruelly-hard, box-like pallet?

Such were the questions that slowly and laboriously formed themselves
within my mind when I at length awoke from that state of blessed
unconsciousness which I had believed to be death. For some time I lay
painfully revolving these questions in my mind, groping about for
information in a sort of dim, mental twilight, so obscure that I was not
even certain of my own identity. Gradually, however--very gradually,--
the twilight brightened with returning life and reason, and I found
myself beginning to identify my surroundings. I became conscious of a
rhythmical rising and falling and swaying movement, accompanied by a
creaking, grinding sound, and the wash and gurgle of water outside the
planking that formed two of the three walls of the triangular apartment
in which I found myself, and I somehow recognised these movements and
sounds as familiar. Then I heard a voice at some distance, shouting
something that I could not distinguish, answered by two or three voices
almost immediately overhead. There was a noise of ropes being thrown
down upon planking, and a further outcry of voices, accompanied by a
creaking sound and the flapping of canvas. And then it suddenly dawned
upon me that I was lying in a bunk in a ship's forecastle, and that the
forbidding-looking stranger must be one of the crew.

But why was it, I asked myself, that this man was a stranger to me?
Why, indeed, was it that all my surroundings were strange to me; for I
could not recall that I had ever seen any of them before? And then, as
I lay puzzling over this perplexing problem, the past gradually unfolded
itself before me; first of all confusedly, as one recalls the images and
incidents of an imperfectly remembered dream, and then more clearly,
until it had all come back to me in the fulness of its hideous reality.
I recollected everything, my memories beginning, strangely enough, as I
think, with the incidents of my earliest childhood, and gradually
extending through the y