Without stopping to explore her--and, indeed, after what I had found on the steamer, I had no fancy for explorations which might end in my stumbling upon still more horrors--I went on to a trim little brig lying on the other side of her; a beautiful little vessel, with all her spars and rigging save her bow-hamper in perfect order for sea-going--but showing by her broken bow-sprit that she had been in collision, and by her depth in the water that after the collision she had filled. Naturally enough, her boats were gone too; and so I left her and went on. In the course of the next two hours or so I must have traversed more than a hundred wrecks--scrambling up or down from one to another, as they happened to lie low in the water or high out of it--and with all their differences of size and build finding them in one way the same: all of them were dead ships which some sort of a sea-disaster had slain. And not one of them had a sound boat left on board. The same reason that kept me from exploring the first of them kept me from exploring any of them: the dread of finding in their shadowy depths grisly horrors in the way of dead men long lying there; and, indeed, I was distinctly warned to hurry away from some of them by the vile stenches which came to me and made my stomach turn sickish and my blood go cold. I must have walked for a good mile, I suppose, over the dead bodies of these sea-killed ships--and it was the most dismal walk that ever I had taken--before I realized that even if I found a boat and got it overboard it would be of no use to me, since there was no possibility of my getting back in it to my own hulk through that densely packed mass of wrecks and weed. Indeed, I should have perceived this plain certainty sooner had not the wondering curiosity which this strange walk bred in me lured me on and on. And then, being brought at last to a halt by my rational reflection, there came over me suddenly a queer shiver of doubt as to the direction in which the _Hurst Castle_ lay; and then a still more shivering doubt as to whether I should be able to get back to her again by the way that I had come, or by any way at all.