ere twilight is unknown, the sun, just
now shining brightly, suddenly sinks below the horizon.

In the midst of profound darkness, the unhappy man pursues this fatal
race, leading to inevitable destruction. During a part of this
terrible night, he hears the frail frame-work which supports him
cracking beneath his feet. How long must his sufferings last? He knows
not. At last, jostled by adverse waves, shaken to its centre, the raft
begins to whirl around, and something heavier than the shock of the
wave comes repeatedly to give it new and rude blows. The first rays of
the rising moon, far from calming the terrors of the unhappy mariner,
increase them. In his dizzy brain, these wan rays which silver the
surface of the sea, seem so many phantoms coming to be present at his
last moments. Pale, bent double, with his hair standing upright,
clinging to some projection of his barque, he in vain attempts to fix
his glance on certain strange objects which he sees ascending,
descending, and rolling around him.

They are the trunks of the trees which formed a part of his raft,
limbs detached from its body, and which, now drawn into the same
whirlpool, are by their repeated shocks, aiding in his complete
destruction.

In face of this imminent, implacable death, Selkirk ceases to struggle
against it. He has now but one resource; the belief in another life.
The religious instinct, which has already come to his assistance,
revives with force. Clinging with his hands and feet to these wavering
timbers, which are almost disjoined, half inundated by the wave, which
is encroaching more and more upon his last asylum, he directs his
steps towards the spot where he had deposited his arms and furs; he
takes from among them his Bible, not to read it, but to clasp it to
his heart, whose agitation and terror seem to grow calm beneath its
sacred contact.

He then attempts to absorb his thoughts in God; he blames himself for
not having been contented with the gifts he had received from Him; he
might have lived happily in Scotland, or in the royal navy. It is this
perpetual desire for change, these aspirations after the unknown,
which have occasioned his ruin.

At this moment, raising his eyes towards heaven, he sees, beneath the
pale rays of the moon, a mass of rocks rising at a little distance,
which he immediately recognizes. There is the bay of the Seals, the
peak of the Discovery. That hollow, lying in the shadow, is the valley
of the O