Telleth How The Fight Ended

When sight returned to me at last, I was yet staring up at the moon, but now she had climbed the zenith and looked down on me through a dense maze, a thicket of close-twining branches (as it were) whose density troubled me mightily. But in a little I saw that these twining branches were verily a mass of ropes and cordage, a twisted tangle that hung above me yet crushed me not by reason of a squat column that rose nearby, and staring on this column I presently knew it for the shattered stump of the mizzenmast. For a great while I lay staring on this (being yet much dazed) and thus gradually became aware that the guns had fallen silent; instead of their thunderous roar was a faint clamour, hoarse, inarticulate, and very far away. I was yet wondering dreamily and pondering this when I made the further discovery that by some miraculous chance the chain which had joined my fettered wrists was broken in sunder and I was free. Nevertheless I lay awhile blinking drowsily up at the moon until at last, impelled by my raging thirst, I got to my knees (though with strange reluctance) and strove to win clear from the tangle of ropes that encompassed me; in the which labour I came upon the body of a dead man and beyond this, yet another. Howbeit I was out of this maze at last and rising to my feet, found the deck to heave oddly 'neath my tread, and so (like one walking in a dream) came stumbling to the quarter-ladder and paused there awhile to lean against the splintered rail and to clasp my aching head, for I was still greatly bemused and my body mighty stiff and painful.