The island toward which we were heading is associated in the minds of
men with a Horror.
A ship had called there once, two hundred years in advance of the
_Glarus_--a ship not much unlike the crank high-prowed caravel of
Hudson, and her company had landed, and having accomplished the evil
they had set out to do, made shift to sail away. And then, just after
the palms of the island had sunk from sight below the water's edge, the
unspeakable had happened. The Death that was not Death had arisen from
out the sea and stood before the ship, and over it, and the blight of
the thing lay along the decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the
terror of that which is yet without a name.
Twenty men died in the first week, all but six in the second. These six,
with the shadow of insanity upon them, made out to launch a boat,
returned to the island and died there, after leaving a record of what
had happened.
The six left the ship exactly as she was, sails all set, lanterns all
lit--left her in the shadow of the Death that was not Death.
She stood there, becalmed, and watched them go. She was never heard of
again.
Or was she--well, that's as may be.
But the main point of the whole affair, to my notion, has always been
this. The ship was the last friend of those six poor wretches who made
back for the island with their poor chests of plunder. She was their
guardian, as it were, would have defended and befriended them to the
last; and also we, the Three Black Crows and myself, had no right under
heaven, nor before the law of men, to come prying and peeping into this
business--into this affair of the dead and buried past.
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