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Updated: May 20, 2025
Our companion knocked at a low green door, and we were admitted to a passage into which a wooden stairway descended. A brother-in-law of our host was waiting for us; in his wake we mounted the ladder-like stairs and entered a long room with a florid French carpet and a set of gilt furniture to match.
"The village is built on the shoulder of a mountain, not half way up, and only accessible by a ladder-like path on either side. It consists of about 200 miserable huts, and is as dirty and filthy as any place I ever was in, with numerous half-starved pigs and dogs running about it.
The fellow pulled his forelock in response to his master's nod, then shouldered his way through the press to the ladder-like stairs that led to the upper gallery. Haward, standing at his ease, looked about him, recognizing this or that acquaintance with his slow, fine smile and an inclination of his head.
This platform is called the "top," and its principal object is to extend the ladder-like ropes, called "shrouds," that reach from its outer edge to the head of the mast next above, which latter is the topmast. It must here be observed that the "masts" of a ship, as understood by landsmen, are each divided into a number of pieces in the reckoning of a sailor.
There were thirty of them, and they all came down the steep, ladder-like steps by ones and twos and threes and sixes and sevens. Bobbie and Phyllis and Peter counted them as they passed.
And presently the ladder-like stairs were cleared, and, one after another, woman after woman was assisted up the narrow way, and came sailing into the zone of light from the polished reflectors, elder women first, then slender, sparkling-eyed damsels whose white teeth gleamed as they chatted with their escorts. Two undeniably attractive, Spanish-looking girls were objects of most assiduous care.
The knocking ceased, and now the form seemed to bend down and grope along the floor; and then, an instant later, it began to descend the ladder-like steps and abruptly Rhoda Gray, too, moved forward. It wasn't Danglar. That was what had instantly taken hold of her mind, and she knew a sudden relief now.
As he walked he glanced curiously up at the ladder-like door-steps which may well suggest to the future archaeologist that all the streets of New York were once canals; at the spectral tracery of the trees about St. Luke's, the fretted mass of the Cathedral, and the mean vista of the long side-streets.
"We'll go in, I think," he laughed. And, leaving the patient donkey for the moment to her fate, he led the way indoors. A match illumined for a moment the hallway, showing a ladder-like stair to a trap door above, and then, sputtering faintly in the musty air, went out. Since matches were scarce, he deftly made a torch of a paper from his pocket with better success.
No, there had been no wreck, yet all about her lay the wave-sodden flotsam and jetsam of many past disasters. A broken mast stump was imbedded upright in the sand at one spot. In another, a ladder-like pair of stairs, suggesting a ship's companionway, lay half out of the water. Sundry casks and barrels dotted the beach, some empty, some still untouched.
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