o see those two vessels lying in the daylight after eighty,
aye, and perhaps a hundred years of the green silence hundreds of
fathoms deep, locked in the same posture in which they had gone down,
making you almost fancy that you could hear the thunder of their guns,
witness the flashing of cutlasses, and the rush of the boarders to the
bulwarks amidst a hurricane note of huzzaing and shrieks of the
wounded.

They were both of them handsomely crusted with shells, not of the
barnacle sort, but such as you would pick up anywhere in Ceylon or the
Andaman, some of them finely coloured, many of them white as milk, of
a thousand different patterns; and there was not one of them but what
was beautiful.

"Let's board her," says Jackson.

"Ah, but if that whale be alive!" says Fallows.

"No fear of that," said I; "if he was alive there'd be some stir in
him. The whale's not the danger; it's the lashing, which may part at
any moment. It should be in a fair way of rottenness after so many
years of salt water, and if it goes the vessels go."

"I'm for boarding her all the same," says Jackson.

But first of all we pulled round to betwixt the bows of the craft to
see what it was that connected them, and we found that they were held
together by something stronger than an old grapnel. The bluff of the
bows came together like walls cemented by sand and shell, and it was
easy by a mere glance to perceive that they would hold together whilst
the sea continued tranquil. Betwixt their heels was a hollow which the
round of the whale nicely filled, and there they all three lay, very
slowly and solemnly rolling upon the swell in as deep a silence as
ever they had risen from.

We hung upon our oars speculating awhile, and then fell to talking
ourselves into extravagant notions. Fallows said that if she had been
a privateer she might have money in her, or some purchase anyway worth
coming at. I was not for ridiculing the fancy, and Jackson gazed at
the craft with a yearning eye.

"Let's get aboard," says he.

"Very well," says I, and we agreed that Fallows should keep in the
boat ready to pick us up, if the hulk should go down suddenly under
us. We easily got aboard. From the gunwale of our boat we could place
our hands upon the level of the deck, where the bulwarks were gone,
and the shells were like steps to our feet. There was nothing much to
be seen, however; the decks were coated with shells as the sides were,
and they went flush