For a while I knelt over it, dazed and blinded, lost; then I slowly plunged my hands into it, and let the pieces pour and pour through them, literally bathing them in gold and silver, as I had read of misers doing.

Meanwhile, I talked insanely to myself, made all sorts of inarticulate noises, sang shreds of old songs.  Rising at length, I capered up and down the gallery, talking aloud to the “King” as though he had been there, and anon breaking out again into absurd song, roaring it out at the top of my voice, laughing and war-whooping between: 

    “There was chest on chest of Spanish gold,
    With a ton of plate in the middle hold,
    And the cabin’s riot of loot untold.”

Then suddenly I broke out into an Irish jig—­never having had any notion of doing such a thing before.

In fact I behaved as I have read of men doing, whom a sudden fortune has bereft of reason.  For the time, at all events, I was a gibbering madman.  Certainly, there was to be no sleep for me that night!  But, in the full tide of my frenzy, I suddenly noticed something that brought me up sharp.  Out beyond the doorway it was growing light.  It was only a dim tremulous suffusion of it, indeed, but it was real daylight—­oozing in from somewhere or other—­the blessed, blessed, daylight!  God be praised!

CHAPTER XVI

In Which I Understand the Feelings of a Ghost!

So, I surmised, I had been underground a whole day and two nights, and this was the morning of the second day after Calypso’s disappearance.  What had been happening to her all this time!  My flesh crept at the thought, and, with that daylight stealing in like a living presence, and the sound and breath of the sea, my anguish returned a hundredfold.  It was like coming to, after an anaesthetic, for I realised that, actively as I had been occupied in trying to escape, I had been, all the time, under a curious numbing spell.  Just as my ears had seemed muffled with a silence that was more than the stillest silence above ground; silence that was itself a captive, airless and gasping, so to say, with the awful pressure of all that oblivious earth above and around; a silence that made me realise with a dreadful reality what had been a mere phrase before, “the silence of the grave”; silence literally buried alive, with eyes fixed in a trance of horror; just in the same way, all my feelings of mind and heart, memory and emotion, had likewise been deadened, as with some heavy narcotic of indifference, so that I felt and yet did not feel—­remembered and yet did not remember.

The events of a few hours before, and the dearly loved friends taking part in them, seemed infinitely remote, for all their clearness, as when we see a figure waving to us from a distance, and know that it is calling to us, but yet we cannot hear a word.  Even so one lies back in the grip of a deadly sickness, and all that formerly had been so important and moving seems like a picture, definite yet remote, in which one has no part any more.