The light having become sufficiently strong for him to see thoroughly well, he made another heroic effort, and commenced to explore his prison. And as soon as he did so, he realized how long this dangerous obstruction had been drifting about the ocean. For she was literally undistinguishable, except to a seaman’s eye, from a worn and sea-beaten rock. Through the crevices in her deck and the gap made by the Kafirstan, he could see hosts of fish, legions of crabs of various kinds, and nowhere, except at the point where she had been run into, was there a square inch that was not thickly hidden by the sea-growth of weed and shells. He dragged himself up to the stump of the mainmast, and, bracing himself erect against it, looked long and earnestly around the lowering horizon; but he was quite alone. Not a gleam of sail or a wreath of smoke was to be seen. But he was a man who, while never very sanguine about his “luck,” had a wonderful fund of hope, and in spite of the dismal outlook, he felt no despair. Nevertheless, that he might not brood, he determined to be busy, and dragging himself aft with the utmost caution that he might not slide off that slimy slope into the cold sea to leeward, he reached the yawning cavity, where once the companion or entrance to the lower cabin had been. Peering down, the sight was not encouraging, although the dark water did not here come so close up to the deck as forward. But he was bound to explore, even if he had to swim, if only for the sake of employment; so crawling over the edge, he dropped below into water up to his waist, and immediately struggled to windward, where to his content he found he could move about above water. He entered what he took to be the skipper’s cabin, noticing with a queer feeling of sympathy the few remnants of clothing hanging from hooks like silent witnesses of the tragedy of long ago. To his surprise, he found that everything was left as if in the midst of ordinary life; the owner had been carried off without a moment in which to return for anything he might value. Even the bed-clothes, dank and sodden, lay as they had been jumped out of, well tucked in at the foot of the bunk by a careful steward. With a sense of sacrilege that he found it hard to shake off, John tried the drawers, and the woodwork fell away at his touch. Clothes, papers, photographs within lay in pulpy masses where the invading sea had so long drained through on to them. But the searcher turned all over, listlessly, mechanically, until the hot blood suddenly surged to his head as he heard a musical jingle. With feverish haste he pulled out the lumps of dank stuff until at the bottom of the drawer he found a heap of gold coins which he had evidently disturbed by twitching at the rotted bag which had contained them. Gathering them all together without counting, he shovelled them into the two inner pockets of his pea-coat, afterwards tearing open the lining and securing the necks of the pockets by a piece of roping twine, of which he was never without a small ball.