ghing and war-whooping between:

"There was chest on chest of Spanish gold,
With a ton of plate in the middle hold,
And the cabin's riot of loot untold."

Then suddenly I broke out into an Irish jig--never having had any notion
of doing such a thing before.

In fact I behaved as I have read of men doing, whom a sudden fortune has
bereft of reason. For the time, at all events, I was a gibbering madman.
Certainly, there was to be no sleep for me that night! But, in the full
tide of my frenzy, I suddenly noticed something that brought me up
sharp. Out beyond the doorway it was growing light. It was only a dim
tremulous suffusion of it, indeed, but it was real daylight--oozing in
from somewhere or other--the blessed, blessed, daylight! God be
praised!

CHAPTER XVI

_In Which I Understand the Feelings of a Ghost!_

So, I surmised, I had been underground a whole day and two nights, and
this was the morning of the second day after Calypso's disappearance.
What had been happening to her all this time! My flesh crept at the
thought, and, with that daylight stealing in like a living presence, and
the sound and breath of the sea, my anguish returned a hundredfold. It
was like coming to, after an anaesthetic, for I realised that, actively
as I had been occupied in trying to escape, I had been, all the time,
under a curious numbing spell. Just as my ears had seemed muffled with a
silence that was more than the stillest silence above ground; silence
that was itself a captive, airless and gasping, so to say, with the
awful pressure of all that oblivious earth above and around; a silence
that made me realise with a dreadful reality what had been a mere phrase
before, "the silence of the grave"; silence literally buried alive, with
eyes fixed in a trance of horror; just in the same way, all my feelings
of mind and heart, memory and emotion, had likewise been deadened, as
with some heavy narcotic of indifference, so that I felt and yet did
not feel--remembered and yet did not remember.

The events of a few hours before, and the dearly loved friends taking
part in them, seemed infinitely remote, for all their clearness, as when
we see a figure waving to us from a distance, and know that it is
calling to us, but yet we cannot hear a word. Even so one lies back in
the grip of a deadly sickness, and all that formerly had been so
important and moving seems like a picture, definite yet remote, in which
one has no p