Robinson had long before this made a good supply of very fair candles from the tallow of the goats he had killed, and next day he returned to the cave with six of these, and his tinder-box to light them with.  In those days there were no matches, and men used to strike a light with a flint and steel, and tinder, which was a stuff that caught fire very easily from a spark.

Entering the cave, Robinson found, on lighting a candle, that the goat was now dead.  Moving it aside, to be buried later, he went down on his hands and knees, and crawled about ten yards through the small passage, till at last he found himself in a great chamber, the roof of which was quite twenty feet high.  On every side the walls reflected the light of his candle, and glittered like gold, or almost like diamonds, he thought.  The floor was perfectly dry and level, even on the walls there was no damp, and Robinson was delighted with his discovery.  Its only drawback was the low entrance; but, as he decided to use the cave chiefly as a place to retreat to if he should ever be attacked, that was in reality an advantage, because one man, if he had firearms could easily defend it against hundreds.

At once Robinson set about storing in it all his powder, except three or four pounds, all his lead for making bullets, and his spare guns and muskets.  When moving the powder, he thought he might as well open a barrel which had drifted ashore out of the wreck ’after the earthquake, and though water had got into it, there was not a great deal of damage done, for the powder had crusted on the outside only, and in the inside there was about sixty pounds weight, quite dry and good.  This, with what remained of the first lot, gave him a very large supply, enough to last all his life.

For more than two-and-twenty years Robinson had now been in the island, and he had grown quite used to it, and to his manner of living.  If he could only have been sure that no savages would come near him, he felt almost that he would be content to spend all the rest of his days there, to die at last, as the goat he found in the cave had died, of old age.

At times, when his spirits were more than usually low, when the burden of the lonely years pressed most heavily upon him, Robinson used to think that surely if the savages could come to his land, he could go to theirs.  How far did they come?  Where was their country?  What kind of boats had they?  And so eager to go was he sometimes, that he forgot to think of what he would do when he got there, or what would become of him if he fell into the hands of the savages.  His mind was utterly taken up with the one thought of getting to the mainland, and even his dreams were of little else.