. Still, had some miracle
brought his vessel to the surface before the end, who knows but that, in
the confessional of his own memory, he might have acknowledged a very
delirium of terror? Who knows but that between the period of one
unflinching paragraph and the capital of the next, there may have been
intervals of wallowing in the trough of physical despair?

At least with me there were many fears. The night went by a road of
nightmare and thirst which led to no haven of rest. I slept fitfully and
in terror, and awoke at its end to a feeling of exhaustion. For a while
I dreaded to rise and face the possibilities of a new day. It was only
the burning torture of thirst that finally outweighed panic and drove me
in search of water. I held timidly to the shore, distrusting the jungle
and dodging furtively from rock to rock, with straining eyes and ears.
Climbing among the ragged boulders which were strewn like fragments of
fallen masonry at the foot of the cliff, I shortly came upon a thread of
clear water, where I lay and slaked my thirst. After that came a renewed
freshness and a sudden return of vigor. I began also to feel a healthful
hunger, and when, in clambering to the top of a steep rock, I frightened
a shrieking gull from her nest, I fell avidly on the eggs she left
behind.

As the sun climbed, a tepid humidity freighted the air, but the
trade-wind, rising steadily and freshly, tempered it and stirred the
delicate fronds of palm and fern.

The cliff was honeycombed with small irregular caverns and rifts. Some
were mere grottoes, but others went back into somber recesses deeper
than I, with no means of lighting my steps, cared to explore. For my
dwelling place I selected one that broadened from a twisted and narrow
fissure to a crude chamber large enough for a wolf's den, or at need a
man's refuge. A fern-fringed brooklet trickled across the opening.

For my door yard I had a small plateau with a sheer wall of cliff at my
back and a steep drop at the front. One must climb to reach the place
which is an advantage where the tenant may desire to roll stones down
upon the heads of his visitors.

The _Wastrel_ must have gone to the bottom near by, for incoming tides
from time to time deposited on my shore strange and satirical scraps of
flotsam. The sardonic humor of the sea mocked me by delivering on my
beach a tattered fragment of old newspaper and an empty biscuit tin.

It was two days after my arrival that I