, when within forty yards of the promontory, was
seized broadside by an enormous wave, and dashed against the cliff, as
one might dash a glass-phial against a stone-wall. One blow completed
the work of destruction; she went rolling in entire from keel to
mast-head, and returned, on the recoil of the broken surge, a mass of
shapeless fragments, that continued to dance idly amid the foam, or were
scattered along the beach. But of the poor men, whom the spectators had
seen but a few seconds before running wildly about the deck, there
remained not a trace; and the saddened spectators returned to their
homes to say that all had perished. Four days after,--on the morning of
the following Sabbath,--the sole survivor of the crew, saved, as if by
miracle, climbed up the precipice, and presented himself to a group of
astonished and terrified country people, who could scarce regard him as
a creature of this world. The fissure, which at the top of the cliff
forms but a mere angular inflection, is hollowed below into a low-roofed
cave of profound depth, into the farther extremity of which the tide
hardly ever penetrates. It is floored by a narrow strip of shingly
beach; and on this bit of beach, far within the cave, the sailor found
himself, half a minute after the vessel had struck and gone to pieces,
washed in, he knew not how. Two pillows and a few dozen red herrings,
which had been swept in along with him, served him for bed and board; a
tin cover enabled him to catch enough of the fresh-water droppings of
the roof to quench his thirst; several large fragments of wreck that had
been jammed fast athwart the opening of the cave broke the violence of
the wind and sea; and in that doleful prison, day after day, he saw the
tides sink and rise, and lay, when the surf rolled high at the fall of
the tide, in utter darkness even at mid-day, as the waves outside rose
to the roof, and inclosed him in a chamber as entirely cut off from the
external atmosphere as that of a diving bell. He was oppressed in the
darkness, every time the waves came rolling in and compressed his
modicum of air, by a sensation of extreme heat,--an effect of the
condensation; and then, in the interval of recession, and consequent
expansion, by a sudden chill. At low ebb he had to work hard in clearing
away the accumulations of stone and gravel which had been rolled in by
the previous tide, and threatened to bury him up altogether. At length
he succeeded, after many a