I looked about me for a forecastle or maindeck hatch or any signs of an entrance into the silent interior under foot, but the crust of shells and the grass and plants and vegetation concealed everything. Both the front of the poop and that of the short raised quarter-deck seemed inlaid with shells like a grotto. There was doubtless a cabin under the poop, with probably a door off the quarter-deck, and windows in the cabin front to be come at by beating and scraping. It might furnish us with a shelter, but how would it show? What apparel had the sea clothed it with? An emotion of deep awe filled and subdued me when I looked at this ship. I was sufficiently well acquainted with old types of craft to guess the century to which this vessel had belonged, and even supposing her to have been one of the very last of the ships of her particular build and shape, yet even then I might make sure that she could not be of a less age than a hundred and twenty or thirty years, so that I might safely assume that she had been resting in the motionless dark-green depths of this ocean for above a hundred years. She had been a three-masted vessel, but all traces of her mizen-mast had vanished. Her figure made one think of a tub, the sides slightly pressed in. All about her bows was so thickly encrusted with shells that it was impossible to guess the character of the structure there. I traced the outline of a beak or projection at the stem head with a hollow betwixt it and the fore part of the forecastle deck. Little more was to be gathered, for all curves and outlines here were thickened into grotesque bigness of round and surface out of their original proportions and shape by deposits of shells. Indeed, the well in the head was choked with marine vegetation. It was like a square of tropic soil loaded with the eager growths of a fat and irresistible vitality, appearances as of guinea grass, wondrous imitations of tufts of rushes, beds of pink and feathering mosses, star blossoms, thickets of delicate filaments, gorgeous heads in velvet, snake-like trailings, sea-roses, dark satin masses of plants of a crimson colour, and a hundred other such things, with a subsoil of shells, whose dyes glanced through the growth in gleams of purple and orange and pearl and apple-green, in shapes of mitres, harps, volutes, and so forth.