But what made my breath come hard and my heart take to pumping--as I stood looking up the tall side of the _City of Boston_, being certain that I never had come down it and so must be off my course entirely--was my conviction that in this forest of the ocean, if I may call it so, there were no signs which would help me to find my way. All around me was the same wild hopeless confusion of broken wrecks jammed tight together, or only a little separated by narrow spaces thick-grown with weed; and everywhere overhanging it heavily, growing denser the deeper that I got into the tangle, was the haze that made it more confusing still. And under the haze--and because of it, I suppose--was a soft languorish warmth that seemed to steal my strength away and a good deal of my courage too. But I knew that to give way to the feeling of dull fright, having somehow a touch of awe in it, that was creeping over me would be to put myself into a panic; and that once my wits fairly were addled my chance of getting back to the _Hurst Castle_ again would be pretty much gone. And to get back to her seemed to me the only way of keeping my heart up and of keeping myself alive. She was the one ship, in all that great dismal fleet, aboard of which I could be sure that nothing horrible had happened, and in which I could be certain that no loathsome sights were to be come upon suddenly in shadowy nooks and corners to which dying men had crept in their extremity--trying, since none ever would bury them, to hide away a little their own bodies against the time when death should be upon them and corruption should begin. And so I pulled myself together as well as I could and tried to do a little quiet thinking; and presently I came to the conclusion that I must find my way back to the brig against which the two ships were lying and start afresh from her; since it was pretty certain that it was there, by boarding the wrong ship, that I had got off my course. But because of my certain knowledge of what horridness the brig sheltered, and of the noisome stench that I must encounter there, it took a good deal of resolution to put this plan into practice; so much, indeed, that for a while I wavered about it, and succeeded at last in starting back again only by setting going the full force of my will.