But even when found the difficulties had only begun.  The tenacious, elastic sand defied all tools or leverage:  no petard could blast so fickle and treacherous a substance.  Wit and ingenuity can devise where ordinary art or engineering has failed.  The diver took a lesson from the neighboring gold-miner, whose hydrostatic pump chisels away the mountain-side to lay bare the mother quartz.  Fitted with such an engine, he swept the silted sand from the deck of the prize, and dug it out of the elastic matrix after the fashion of Macduff’s birth.

By a great misfortune, incipient jealousies and the eager spirit of covetousness now showed themselves.  It was at first whispered, and then asseverated, that if the bullion was once recovered the rebel might whistle for his sixty per cent. salvage.  It was a bitter, bad time—­a time of mistrust and suspicion—­and the plan of defrauding the diver was only too feasible.  He would be involved in a suit with a wealthy company at a time when prejudice, if not the form of law, regarded him as having forfeited a citizen’s right.  It placed him in a difficult position—­more difficult because he could get no safe assurance, and was evidently suspected and watched.  The diver concluded that his only way to secure his sixty per cent. salvage was to take it.

So it was that, with something of the feelings of the resurrectionists, a bold, dark party went to rob the charnel-house of the sea, to spoil it of its golden bones and wedgy ingots of silver.  They chose a mirky night, when the thick air seemed too clotted and moist to break into hurly-burly of storm, and yet too heavy and dank to throw off the black envelope of fog and cloud.  The black, oleaginous water seemed to slope from the muffled oar in a gluey, shining wave, and the heavy ripple at the bow of their boat parted in a long, adhesive roll, sloping away, but not breaking into froth or glisten of electric fire.  The air and the sea seemed brooding in a heavy, hopeless misery, and the strange sense of plundering, not the living, but the dead, as if the sunken vessel was a huge coffin, was upon them.  With that cautious sense of superstitious dread choking their muttered whispers, they reached the spot and prepared to descend.  The task of sinking through that pitchy consistence, into the intricacy of that black, coffin-like hold, among the drowned corpses, to do a deed of doubtful right, must have intensified the horror of great darkness and that sublimity of silence that in the under-sea peoples the void shadows with horrible existences and fills the concave with voices.  But it was done; and with trembling eagerness the weighty ingots, the unalloyed bars, were safely shipped, loading down the boat.  Then louder and louder came the dash of oars.  For a few moments they felt the way with muffled stroke into the shrouding shadows.  But practiced ears caught the softened roll in the rollocks, and keen eyes marked the shadowy boat in the deepening gloom.  It must be the skilled oar