We pulled through the opening of the reefs, and I headed straight for the cave. So strong was my excitement that it felt like a sort of illness. I breathed with labor; the sweat lay like oil in the palms of my hands, though my hands were cold. It was not now the thoughts of the money. My excitement was no dollar madness then. I was oppressed, to a degree I find incommunicable, by the marvelous picture, as I was now beholding it for the first time, of the big ship clothed in the dusk of the mighty tomb into which she had backed and where she had brought up. I had had no leisure for the sight during my first excursion; had but glanced at it, my head being then full of the shipwrecked people we were bringing off, and of fancies of what might be lurking on shore. But now, our approach being leisurely, the expanse of water to be measured considerable, I could gaze, wonder, realize, until emotion grew overwhelming and became a sensation of sickness in me. Were you to split a big stone open and find a live toad in it you would marvel. Hundreds would assemble to view the wonder, and a poor man might get money by exhibiting it; but how many much stranger things than a live toad imprisoned in a stone would I, as a sailor, exact the relation and sight of, ere admitting that half the sum of that marvel of a great ship at rest in a huge cave was approached? At first sight the fabric looked like a piece of nature’s handiwork as it lay in the gloom of the interior it had miraculously penetrated. It looked, I say, as though the volcanic spasm, which had shorn the lofty cliff into its bald front and wrought the prodigious fissure, had contrived the hundred fragments and ruins of rocks, the splinters, the serpentine lengths, the massive bulks, the pillar-shaped fragments into the aspect of a ship, building the wonder in a sudden roar of earthquake, and leaving it a faultless similitude. “Oars!” cried I. We floated forward with the arrested blades poised over the water. It was burning hot; the sun stood nearly overhead, and the surface of this strange natural harbor shone like new tin, tingling in fibers and needles of white fire back again into the light that it reflected. We were within a musket-shot of the entrance of the cave. “On which side did you board, men?” “To starboard, sir.” “Give way gently, and, bow there, stand by with your boathook.” CHAPTER XVIII. WE TRANSHIP THE DOLLARS.