‘As the darkness, thick and impenetrable, closed me in, I lay down thinking to sleep a little, but my rest was disturbed and broken. Always, as I dozed off, I was clambering painfully up that terrible rock, with bleeding hands and feet, staggering under huge burdens of rope and iron. Once I dreamt that my shipmate’s body had floated off the islet, and was, even now, with white clammy fingers, striving to lift itself into the boat, whilst the ghastly face peered at me over the side. This effectually awoke me; but so strong was the impression, that I seized a fire-stick, and, making it blaze up, searched sharply around. I had my trouble for my pains. But further attempt at sleep for me was out of the question. ‘My dawn, such as it was, came at last. I had already detached the grapnel from its chain, and unrove the halliards from the mast. These last I wound round and round my body, fully thirty feet of line, small “Europe” rope, but tough and strong. The disposal of my precious grapnel, which, luckily, was one of the smallest of its kind, only used, as we had used it, for a temporary holdfast, bothered me a good deal. ‘Finally, I placed my head between two of the flukes, one of which then rested on each shoulder, whilst the stock hung down my back, swinging loosely. To make sure of the flukes not slipping, I passed a piece of line from one to the other, and knotted it securely. ‘It was a most uncomfortable fixture altogether, a tight fit for my neck into the bargain, but I could think of no other way. ‘I’m not going to inflict upon you a detailed description of how I reached the top—I believe it must have been fully five hundred feet—carrying that half-hundred weight of iron, to say nothing of the rope. Indeed, I hardly know myself. However, get there I did; but, as you may guess, in a very evil plight. ‘I recollect, when still some thirty feet from the top, unable to bear any longer the horrible chafing of the flukes, which had broken through the skin, and were grinding against the bone, that I rested, or, rather, balanced myself on a sharp ledge, whilst casting the grapnel adrift from my shoulders, and unwinding the rope from my body. Then, making one end of the line fast to the ring in the stock, I fastened the other round my waist, the grapnel all this time resting loosely on the rock. ‘Leaving it there, and paying out the line cautiously into the void below me, away I went again, bracing myself at every step to withstand the awful jerk should the grapnel slip off, and tighten the rope with the momentum of its fall. If such a thing had happened, and the chances were many, my fate was certain—a few scrambling clutches and annihilation. But where it went I had made up my mind to go also. ‘It was my only and last hope, that bit of crooked four-clawed iron! Death was in every step I took, and I believe that it was in those last few feet that my hair turned its colour, so terrible was the suspense and expectation.