As Abel Keeling lay on the galleon's deck, held from rolling down it only
by his own weight and the sun-blackened hand that lay outstretched upon
the planks, his gaze wandered, but ever returned to the bell that hung,
jammed with the dangerous heel-over of the vessel, in the small
ornamental belfry immediately abaft the mainmast. The bell was of cast
bronze, with half-obliterated bosses upon it that had been the heads of
cherubs; but wind and salt spray had given it a thick incrustation of
bright, beautiful, lichenous green. It was this colour that Abel
Keeling's eyes liked.

For wherever else on the galleon his eyes rested they found only
whiteness--the whiteness of extreme eld. There were slightly varying
degrees in her whiteness; here she was of a white that glistened like
salt-granules, there of a greyish chalky white, and again her whiteness
had the yellowish cast of decay; but everywhere it was the mild,
disquieting whiteness of materials out of which the life had departed.
Her cordage was bleached as old straw is bleached, and half her ropes
kept their shape little more firmly than the ash of a string keeps its
shape after the fire has passed; her pallid timbers were white and clean
as bones found in sand; and even the wild frankincense with which (for
lack of tar, at her last touching of land) she had been pitched, had
dried to a pale hard gum that sparkled like quartz in her open seams. The
sun was yet so pale a buckler of silver through the still white mists
that not a cord or timber cast a shadow; and only Abel Keeling's face and
hands were black, carked and cinder-black from exposure to his pitiless
rays.

The galleon was the _Mary of the Tower_, and she had a frightful list to
starboard. So canted was she that her mainyard dipped one of its steel