Although the hour was approaching high noon, and the day very glorious, no light was in the cave beyond the length of the ship’s bowsprit. A wall of darkness came to the bows of the ship; it might have been something material, something you could lean against or stick with a knife; the daylight touched it and made a twilight of it at the mouth, then died out. The long and short of it is--it is my way, anyhow, of explaining the strange thing--the filthy colored scoriæ, the gloomy masses of cinder, pumice, lava--call it what you will--were unreflective; light smote the stuff and perished, or was not returned, so that a thin veil of dusk clothed with deepest obscurity any hollow it lay in. The water brimmed blue to the mouth of the cave, and then, at a few boats’ lengths, slept black and thick as ink, wholly motionless this day; though I might suppose that when a large swell ran outside the breakwaters, the smaller swell of the harbor put a pulse into the black tide of the cave, though without weight enough to stir the stern-stranded ship. Yet you saw much of her when you were still on the threshold of the cavern. Her huge bows sprawling with head-boards loomed out of the darkness, advancing the yellow bowsprit till the cap of it was almost flush with the sides of the opening. Had the jib booms stood, they would have forked far into daylight and, perhaps, long ago have challenged the attention of a passing ship, and brought her people to explore the Spaniard and enrich themselves. Her lower masts were yellow, and they showed ghastly in the gloom. She had immense round tops, black and heavy, and shrouds of an almost hawser-like thickness, with a wide spread of channels and massive chain plates. Most of the yards were across, and squared as though the machinery of the braces had worked to the music of the boatswain’s pipe. Her sides were tall; she carried some swivels on her poop rail, and a few pieces calked with tompions crouched through a half dozen of ports, like motionless beasts of a strange shape about to spring. To look up! To behold that lofty fabric and complication of mast and spar and rigging soaring to the dark roof, against which the topgallant masts had been ground away to the topmast heads!