It occurred to me that if I could board her she might furnish me
with a shelter from the dew of the night. She had channels with
long plates, all looking as if they were formed of shells; and
stepping round to the side toward which she leaned, I found the
fore channel-plates to be within reach of my hands. The shells were
slippery and cutting; but I was a sailor, and there would have been
nothing in a harder climb than this to daunt me. So, after a bit
of a struggle, I succeeded in hauling myself into the chains, and
thence easily dragged myself over the rail on to the deck.

The sight between the bulwarks was far more lovely and surprising
than the spectacle presented by the ship's sides. For the decks
seemed not only formed of shells of a hundred different hues;
there was a great abundance of branching corals, white as milk,
and marine plants of kinds for which I could not find names, of
several brilliant colours; so that, what with the delicate velvet
of the moss, the dark shades of seaweed of figurations as dainty
as those of ferns, and the different sorts of shells, big and
little, all lying as solid as if they had been set in concrete,
the appearance of the ship submitted was something incredibly
fantastic and admirable. Whether the hatches were on or not I could
not tell, so thickly coated were the decks; but whether or not, the
deposits and marine growths rendered the surface as impenetrable
as iron, and I believe it would have kept a small army of labourers
plying their pickaxes for a whole week to have made openings into
the hold through that shelly coating of mail.

My eye was taken by a peculiar sort of protuberance at the foot
of the mainmast. It stood as high as I did, and had something of