For a moment he fancied some colossal remains, as of an animal long since extinct, were lying there in the clinging embrace of the creepers. He decided, then, it was a boat, but dismissed this notion as preposterous, so high above the water's edge, and so near the island's center, did it lie. About ready to conclude that certain giant shadows contributed much to round out a half-imagined form, his gaze encountered a bowsprit thrust through all the foliage, its identity not to be mistaken. The hull of a ship was undoubtedly there. He hastened down, expectantly, to make its better acquaintance. The wonder when he came there was--how it came to be stranded so high and far above the water. As for the vessel itself, it was merely a rotted old shell, with its cargo bursting through its ribs. So far as Grenville could judge from its fast-decaying remains, it had been an inferior type of the old-fashioned barque, and of very modest dimensions. Its masts, however, were gone, together with every accessible piece of metal that eager hands could remove. Its moldy and slimy old cabin had partially collapsed. Without effecting an entrance through the treacherous deck, Sidney could discover nothing respecting its interior. He could peer through the ribs at several places along the hull, and even near the keel, by stooping low, but the most he could determine by such a superficial examination was that there was nothing even here that he could use. The cargo he thought for a moment to be chalk, or lime. He scraped a clean sample from the weathered heap, and rubbed it in his palm. Its crystalline structure was not that of either lime or chalk. When he placed a particle on his tongue, he dropped all he held with no further interest. The stuff was common saltpeter. That the vessel had been westward bound, perhaps from Borneo, with this mineral common to so much of that tropical section, he understood at once. But to find her stranded thus so loftily was amazing. He scraped at the soil with the toe of his boot to dig below the surface. As he had rather expected, seashells and pebbles of a former beach were readily brought to view. Some old upheaval had undoubtedly lifted beach, vessel, and all to this altitude above the tides, and left it there to decay. Considerably disappointed to find the hulk so completely stripped of the metal furnishings of which he might have wrought some sort of tools or weapons, Grenville hesitated between an impulse to continue home to Elaine without greater delay, and a strong desire to investigate the cabin of the barque. The latter temptation was not to be resisted. He grasped the branch of an overhanging tree and, by dint of much active scrambling, clawing, and thrusting his toes into various chinks, at length gained the planks of the slanted deck and broke his way into the one-time sanctum of the captain and his mates.