In the Sargasso Sea, Thomas A. Janvier [ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗
- Author: Thomas A. Janvier
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swimming in my head—so sudden and so violent that I lurched forward
and was close to pitching over the rail of the bridge into the sea.
For a moment I fancied that the ship had taken a quick plunge; and
then a sick feeling in my own stomach, and a blurring of my eyes that
made everything seem misty and shadowy, settled for me the fact that
it was I who was reeling about and that the ship was still—and I had
sense enough to lie down at full length on the bridge, between the
wheel-house and the rail, where I was safe against rolling off. And
then the shadows about me got deeper and blacker, and a horrible sense
of oppression came over me, and I seemed to be falling endlessly while
myriads of black specks arranged themselves in curious geometrical
figures before my eyes—and then the black specks and everything else
vanished suddenly, and my consciousness left me with what seemed to me
a great crash and bang.
Had I begun matters by being roundly sick I might have pulled through
my attack without being much the worse for it. But as that did not
happen—my weakness, I suppose, not giving nature a chance to set
things right in her own way—I had a good deal more to suffer before I
began to mend. After a while I got enough of my senses back to know
that my head was aching as though it would split open, and to realize
how utterly miserable I was lying there on the bridge with the hot
sunshine simmering down on me through the haze; and then to think how
delightful it would be if only I were back in the cabin again—where
the sun could not stew me, and where my berth would be easy and soft.
How I managed to get to the cabin I scarcely know. I faintly remember
working my way along the bridge on my hands and knees, and going
backward down the steps in the same fashion for fear of falling; and
of trying to walk upright when I got to the deck, so that I should not
get wet above my knees in the water there, and of falling souse into
it and getting soaked all over; and then of crawling aft very
slowly—stopping now and then because of my pain and dizziness—and
down the companionway and through the passage, and so into the cabin
at last; and then, all in my wet clothes, of tumbling anyhow into my
berth—and after that there is only a long dead blank.
When I caught up with myself again, night had come and I was in pitch
darkness. My head still ached horridly, and I was burning hot all
over, and yet from time to time shivering with creeping chills. What I
wanted most in the world was a drink of water; but when I tried to get
up, in the hope of finding some in the jug that no doubt was in the
stateroom, I went so dizzy that I had to plump back into my berth
again. As the night went on, and I lay there thinking how deliciously
the water would taste going cool and sweet down my throat, I got quite
crazy with longing for it; and, in a way, really crazy—for through
most of the night I was light-headed and saw visions that sometimes
comforted me and sometimes made me afraid. The comforting ones were of
fresh green meadows with streams running through them, and of shady
glens in the woods where springs welled up into little basins
surrounded by ferns—just such as I remembered in the woods which
bordered the creek where I used to go swimming when I was a boy. The
horrible ones were not clear at all, and for that were the more
dreadful—being of a fire that was getting nearer and nearer to me,
and of a blazing sun that fairly withered me, and of huge hot globes
or ponderously vague masses of I knew not what which were coming
straight on to crush me and from which I could not get away.
At last I got so worn out with it all that I fell off into an uneasy
sleep, which yet was better than no sleep and a little rested me. When
I woke again there was enough light in the room for me to see the
water-jug, and that gave me strength to get to it—and most blessedly
it was nearly full. And so I had a long drink, that for a time checked
the heat of my fever; and then I lay down in my berth again, with the
jug on the floor at my side.
For a while I was almost comfortable. Then the fever came back, and
the visions with it—but no longer so painful as those which had been
begotten of my thirst. I seemed to be in a region dreamy and unreal.
Sometimes I would see far stretches of mountain peaks, and sometimes
the crowded streets of cities; but for the most part my visions were
of the sea—tall ships sailing, and little boats drifting over calm
water in moonlight, and black steamers gliding quickly past me; and
still more frequently, but always in a calm sea, the broken hulks of
wrecked ships with shattered masts and tangled rigging and with dead
men lying about their decks, and sometimes with a dead man hanging
across the wheel and moving a little with the hulk’s motion so that in
a horrible sort of way he seemed to be half alive.
Night came again, bringing me more pain and the burning of a stronger
fever; and then another day, in which the fever rose still higher and
the visions became almost intolerable—because of their intense
reality, and of my conviction all the while that they were unreal and
that I must be well on the way toward a raving madness in which I
would die.
It was at the end of this day—or it may have been at the end of still
another day, for I have no clear reckoning of how the time
passed—that my worst vision came to me; hurting me not because it was
terrifying in itself, but because it made me feel that even hope had
parted company with me at last. And it was more like a dream than a
vision, seemingly being brought to my sight by my own bodily
movement—not something which floated before my eyes as I lay still.
As the afternoon went on my fever increased a good deal; but in a way
that was rather pleasant to me, for the pain in my head lessened and I
seemed to be getting back my strength. After a while I began to long
to get out of the cabin and up on deck, and so have a look around me
over the open sea; and with my longing came the feeling that I was
strong enough to realize it.
My getting up seemed entirely real and natural, as did my firm
walking—without a touch of dizziness—after I fairly was on my feet;
and all the rest of it seemed real too. Even when I came to the
companionway I seemed to go up the stairs easily, and to step out on
the deck as steadily as though I had been entirely well.
The sun was near setting, but as I came on the deck my back was toward
the sunset and I saw only its red light touching the soft swell of the
weed-covered sea extending far before me, and the same red light
shimmering in the mist and caught up more strongly on a bank of
lowlying clouds. The outlook was much the same as that which I had
had from the bridge, only the weed seemed to be packed more closely
and there was wreckage about me everywhere. Masts and spars and planks
were in sight in all directions, sometimes floating singly and
sometimes tangled together in little heaps; half a mile away was what
seemed to be a large ship lying bottom upward; near me was a perfectly
sound boat, having in its stern-sheets a bit of sail that fell in such
folds as to make me think that a human form lay under it; and off
toward the horizon was a large raft, with a sort of mast fitted to it,
and at the foot of the mast I fancied that I saw a woman in a white
robe of some sort stretched out as though asleep. And it seemed to me,
though I could not tell why, that all this flotsam, and my own hulk
along with it, slowly was drifting closer and closer together; and was
packing tighter and tighter in the soft oozy tangle of the weed, which
everywhere was matted so thickly that the water did not show at all.
Then I seemed to walk around to the other side of my hulk and to look
down into the west—and to feel all hope dying with the sight that I
saw there. Far away, under the red mist, across the red gleaming weed
and against a sunset sky bloody red, I seemed to see a vast ruinous
congregation of wrecks; so far-extending that it was as though all the
wrecked ships in the world were lying huddled together there in a
miserably desolate company. And with sight of them the certain
conviction was borne in upon me that my own wreck presently would take
its station in that shattered fleet for which there was no salvation;
and that it would lie among them rotting slowly, as they were
rotting, through months or years—until finally, in its turn, it would
drop down from amidst those lepers of the ocean, and would sink with
all its foulness upon it into the black depths beneath the oozy weed.
And I knew, too, that whether I already were dead and went down with
it, or saved my life for a while longer by getting aboard of another
hulk which still floated, sooner or later my end must come to me in
that same way. On one or another of those rotting dead ships my own
dead body surely must sink at last.
XIIII HEAR A STRANGE CRY IN THE NIGHT
That was the end of my visions. Through the night that followed—my
fever having run its course, I suppose—I slept easily; and when
another day came and I woke again my fever was gone. I was pretty weak
and ragged, but the cut in my head was healing and no longer hurt me
much, and my mind was clear. There still was water left in the jug,
and I drank freely and felt the better for it; and toward afternoon I
felt so hungry that I managed to get up and go to the pantry on a
foraging expedition for something to eat.
This time I was careful not to stuff myself. I found a box of light
biscuit and ate a couple of them; and then I filled my water-jug at
the tank and brought it and the biscuit back to my stateroom without
going on the deck at all. My light meal greatly refreshed me; and in
an hour or two I ate another biscuit—and kept on nibbling at them off
and on through the night when I happened to wake up. In between whiles
my sleep was of a sort to do me good; not deep, but restful. With the
coming of another morning I felt so strong that I went to the pantry
again for food of a better sort—venturing to eat a part of a tin of
meat with my biscuit and to add to my water a
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