t had not returned, wearied with useless and
dangerous waiting.

As night came on, and the firelight showed strange shadows waving from
the corners of the enormous vault, while the dismal abysses beneath him
murmured and muttered with uncouth and ghastly utterance, there
fell upon the lonely man the terror of Solitude. Was this marvellous
hiding-place that he had discovered to be his sepulchre? Was he--a
monster amongst his fellow-men--to die some monstrous death, entombed
in this mysterious and terrible cavern of the sea? He had tried to
drive away these gloomy thoughts by sketching out for himself a plan of
action--but in vain. In vain he strove to picture in its completeness
that--as yet vague--design by which he promised himself to wrest from
the vanished son of the wealthy ship-builder his name and heritage.
His mind, filled with forebodings of shadowy horror, could not give
the subject the calm consideration which it needed. In the midst of his
schemes for the baffling of the jealous love of the woman who was to
save him, and the getting to England, in shipwrecked and foreign guise,
as the long-lost heir to the fortune of Sir Richard Devine, there arose
ghastly and awesome shapes of death and horror, with whose terrible
unsubstantiality he must grapple in the lonely recesses of that dismal
cavern. He heaped fresh wood upon his fire, that the bright light might
drive out the gruesome things that lurked above, below, and around him.
He became afraid to look behind him, lest some shapeless mass of mid-sea
birth--some voracious polype, with far-reaching arms and jellied mouth
ever open to devour--might slide up over the edge of the dripping caves
below, and fasten upon him in the darkness. His imagination--always
sufficiently vivid, and spurred to an unnatural effect by the exciting
scenes of the previous night--painted each patch of shadow, clinging
bat-like to the humid wall, as some globular sea-spider ready to drop
upon him with its viscid and clay-cold body, and drain out his chilled
blood, enfolding him in rough and hairy arms. Each splash in the water
beneath him, each sigh of the multitudinous and melancholy sea, seemed
to prelude the laborious advent of some mis-shapen and ungainly
abortion of the ooze. All the sensations induced by lapping water
and regurgitating waves took material shape and surrounded him. All
creatures that could be engendered by slime and salt crept forth into
the firelight to stare at h