The nearest edge of this mass of wreckage was not a quarter of a mile off from me; but it swept away in a great irregular curve to the right and left and vanished into the golden haze softly--and straight ahead I could see it stretching dimly away from me, getting thicker and closer until it seemed to be almost as solid as a real island would have been. And, indeed, it had a good deal the look of being a real island; the loom through the haze of countless broken masts rising to various heights and having frayed ropes streaming from them having much the effect of trees growing there, while the irregularities of the surface made it seem as though little houses were scattered thickly among the trees. But in spite of the golden light which hung over it, and which ought to have given it a cheerful look, it was the most desolate and sorrowful place I ever saw; for it seemed to belong--and in a way really did belong, since every hulk in all that fleet was the slowly wasting dead body of a ship slain by storm or disaster--to that outcast region of mortality in which death has achieved its ugliness but to which the cleansing of a complete dissolution has not yet been brought by time. Yet the curious interest that I found in this strange sight kept me from feeling only the horror of it. In my talks with Bowers about the old-time sea-wonders which must be hidden in the Sargasso Sea my imagination had been fired; and when I thus found myself actually in the way to see these wonders I half forgot how useless the sight was to me--being myself about the same as killed in the winning of it--and was so full of eagerness to press forward that I grew almost angry because of the infinite slowness with which my hulk drifted on to its place in the ruined ranks. There was no hurrying my progress. Around me the weed and wreckage were packed so closely that the wonder was that my hulk moved through it at all. Of wind there was not a particle; indeed, as I found later, under that soft golden haze was a dead calm that very rarely in those still latitudes was ruffled by even the faintest breeze. Only a weak swirl of current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward; and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching that I could see--yet even then could not be quite certain about it--that my position a very little had changed.