He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him sick going down.

And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart he'd cooked up,

as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty miles away.



"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink

and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean

and straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we

used to speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers,

who'd started two days before us, were getting on, until our sides

fairly ached. We all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it

was a curious crew, all officers and no men--and there stood the

diving-dress waiting its turn. Young Sanders was a humorous sort of

chap, and there certainly was something funny in the confounded

thing's great fat head and its stare, and he made us see it too.

'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and talk to it like a Christian.

Asked if he was married, and how Mrs. Goggles was, and all the little

Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And every blessed day all of us

used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew his eye

and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty

mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum.

It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell you--little

suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.



"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry,

you know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where

the Ocean Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy

grey rock--lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had

to lay off about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was

a thundering row who should stop on board. And there she lay just

as she had gone down, so that you could see the top of the masts

that was still standing perfectly distinctly. The row ending in

all coming in the boat. I went down in the diving-dress on Friday

morning directly it was light.



"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly.

It was a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People

over here think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore

and palm trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance,

wasn't a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined

by waves; but great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps,

with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and things just waving

upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and clear,

and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with huge flaring

red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting

things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and pools

and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again after

the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other way

forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it?--ambytheatre of black

and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay

in the middle.



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