I did not try to board this adjoining wreck, but only clambered up on the rail of the brig so that I could look well at it--and when I got my look I came more nearly to breaking down completely than I had done at any time since I had been cast overboard from the _Golden Hind_, For there, showing faintly in the gloom below me, was the gun-set deck of a war-ship, and over the deck dimly-gleaming bones were scattered--and in that moment I knew that the whole of my wandering had been but a circle, and that I was come back again at the weary ending of it to the _Wasp_. But what crushed the heart of me was not that my afternoon of toil had been wasted, but the strong conviction--from which I no longer saw any way of escaping--that I had strayed too deep into that hideous sea-labyrinth ever to find my way out of it, and that I must die there slowly for lack of water and of food. XX HOW I SPENT A NIGHT WEARILY I got down from the rail and seated myself on the brig's deck, leaning my back against her bulwarks and a little sheltered by their old-fashioned in-board overhang. But I had no very clear notion of what I was doing; and my feeling, so far as I had any feeling, was less that I was moving of my own volition than that I was being moved by some power acting from outside of me--the sensation of irresponsibility that comes to one sometimes in a dream. Indeed, the whole of that night seemed to me then, and still seems to me, much more a dream than a reality: I being utterly wearied by my long hard day's work in scrambling about among the wrecks, and a little light-headed because of my stomach's emptiness, and feverish because of my growing thirst, and my mind stunned by the dull pain of my despair. And it was lucky for me, I suppose, that my thinking powers were so feeble and so blunted. Had I been fully awake to my own misery I might very well have gone crazy there in the darkness; or have been moved by a sharp horror of my surroundings to try to escape them by going on through the black night from ship to ship--which would have ended quickly by my falling down the side of one or another of them and so drowning beneath the weed.