I sat down under the bends of the ship for the shadow it threw,
and gazed at the sea. Perhaps I ought to have felt grateful for
the miraculous creation of this spot of land, when, but for it, I
must have miserably perished in the life-buoy, dying a most dreadful,
slow, tormenting death, if some shark had not quickly despatched
me; but the solitude was so frightful, my doom seemed so assured,
I was threatened with such dire sufferings ere my end came, that,
in the madness and despair of my heart, I could have cursed the
intervention of this rock, which promised nothing but the prolongation
of my misery. There was but one live spark amid the ashes of my
hopes; namely, that the island lay in the highway of ships, and
that it was impossible a vessel could sight so unusual an object
without deviating from her course to examine it. That was all the
hope I had; but God knows there was nothing in it to keep me alive
when I set off against it the consideration that there was no water
on the island, no food; that a ship would have to sail close to
remark so flat and little a point as this rock; and that days, ay,
and weeks might elapse before the rim of yonder boundless surface,
stretching in airy leagues of deep blue to the azure sky at the
horizon, should be broken by the star-like shining of a sail.

Happily, the wondrous incrusted bulk was at hand to draw my thoughts
away from my hideous condition; for I verily believe, had my eye
found nothing to rest upon but the honeycombed pumice, my brain would
have given way. I stood up and took a long view of the petrified
shell-covered structure, feeling a sort of awe in me while I looked,
for it was a kind of illustration of the saying of the sea giving
up its dead, and the thing stirred me almost as though it had been
a corpse that had risen to the sun, after having been a secret of
the deep for three hundred years.