In the Sargasso Sea, Thomas A. Janvier [ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗

>the most modern build.

 

As the first step in carrying out my plan—and it seemed to be such a

good plan that I felt almost lighthearted over it—I got up on the

rail of the old brig and jumped back to the less-old Wasp again:

landing in her main-channels, and thence easily boarding her by

scrambling up what was left of the chains. But in taking my next step

I had no choice in the matter, as only one other vessel was in touch

with the sloop—a heavily-built little schooner that had the look of

being quite as old as the brig which I had just left. And her age

was so evident as I came aboard of her—having crossed the deck of the

Wasp hastily, picking my way among the scattered bones—that of a

sudden my faith in my fine plan for getting out of the tangle began

to wane.

 

In a general way, of course, the conclusion which I had arrived at was

a sound one. Broadly speaking, it was certain that could I pass in a

straight line from the centre to the circumference of that vast

assemblage of wrecks I constantly would find vessels of newer build;

and so at last, upon the outermost fringe, would come to the wrecks of

ships belonging to my own day. But one weak point in my calculations

was my inability to hold to a straight line, or to anything like

one—because I had to advance from one wreck to another as they

happened to touch or to be within jumping distance of each other, and

therefore went crookedly upon my course and often fairly had to double

on it. And another weak point was that the sea in its tempests

recognizes no order of seniority, but destroys in the same breath of

storm ships just beginning their lives upon it and ships which have

withstood its ragings for a hundred years: so that I very well might

find—as I actually did find in the case of the Wasp—a

comparatively modern-built vessel lying hemmed in by ancient craft,

survivals of obsolete types, which had lingered so long upon the

ocean that in their lives as in their deaths they merged and blended

the present and the past.

 

Thus a check was put upon my plan at the very outset; yet in a stolid

sort of way—knowing that to give it up entirely would be to bring

despair upon me, for I could not think of a better one—I tried still

to hold by it: going on from the clumsy little old schooner to that

one of two vessels lying beyond her which I fancied, though both of

them belonged to a long past period, was the more modern-looking in

her build. And so I continued to go onward over a dozen craft of one

sort or another, holding by my rule—or trying to believe that I was

holding by it, for all of the wrecks which I crossed were of an

antique type—and now and then being left with no chance for choosing

by finding open to me only a single way. And all this while the

daylight was leaving me—the sun having gone down a ruddy globe beyond

the forest of wrecks westward, and heavy purple shadows having begun

to close down upon me through the low-hanging haze.

 

The imminence of nightfall made clear to me that I had no chance

whatever of getting out from among those long-dead ships before the

next morning; and this certainty was the harder to bear because I was

desperately hungry—more than six hours having passed since I had

eaten anything—and thirsty too: though my thirst, because of the

dampness of the haze I suppose, was not very severe. But the belief

that I really was advancing toward the coast of my strange floating

continent and that I should find both food and drink when I got there,

made me press forward; comforting myself as well as I could with the

reflection that even though I did have to keep a hungry and thirsty

vigil among those old withered hulks I yet should be the nearer, by

every one of them that I put behind me that night, to the freshly come

in wrecks on the coast line—where I made sure of finding a breakfast

on the following day. Moreover, I knew how forlornly miserable I

should be the moment that I lost the excitement of scrambling and

climbing and just sat down there among the ancient dead, with the

darkness closing over me, to wait for the slow coming of another day.

And my dread of that desolate loneliness urged me to push forward

while the least bit of daylight was left by which to see my way.

 

It was ticklish work, as the dusk deepened, getting from one wreck to

another; and at last—after nearly going down into the weed between

two of them, because of a rotten belaying-pin that I caught at

breaking in my hand—I had to resign myself to giving over until

morning any farther attempt to advance. But I was cheered by the

thought that I had got on a good way in the hour or more that had gone

since I had left the Wasp behind me; and so I tried to make the

best of things as I cast around me for some sheltered nook on the deck

of the vessel I had come aboard of—a little clumsy old brig—where my

night might be passed. As to going below, either into the cabin or the

forecastle, I could not bring myself to it; for my heart failed me at

the thought of what I might touch in the darkness there, and my

mind—sore and troubled by all that I had passed through, and by the

dim dread filling it—certainly would have crowded those black depths

with grisly phantoms until I very well might have gone mad.

 

And so, as I say, I cast about the deck of the brig for some nook that

would shelter me from the dampness while I did my best to sleep away

into forgetfulness my hunger and my thirst; but was troubled all the

while that I was making my round of investigation by a haunting

feeling that I had been on that same deck only a little while before.

Growing stronger and stronger, this feeling became so insistent that I

could not rest for it; and presently compelled me to try to quiet it

by taking a look at the wreck next beyond the brig to see if I

recognized that too—as would be likely, since I must have crossed it

also, had I really come that way.

 

I did not try to board this adjoining wreck, but only clambered up on

the rail of the brig so that I could look well at it—and when I got

my look I came more nearly to breaking down completely than I had

done at any time since I had been cast overboard from the _Golden

Hind_, For there, showing faintly in the gloom below me, was the

gun-set deck of a war-ship, and over the deck dimly-gleaming bones

were scattered—and in that moment I knew that the whole of my

wandering had been but a circle, and that I was come back again at the

weary ending of it to the Wasp.

 

But what crushed the heart of me was not that my afternoon of toil had

been wasted, but the strong conviction—from which I no longer saw any

way of escaping—that I had strayed too deep into that hideous

sea-labyrinth ever to find my way out of it, and that I must die there

slowly for lack of water and of food.

XX

HOW I SPENT A NIGHT WEARILY

 

I got down from the rail and seated myself on the brig’s deck, leaning

my back against her bulwarks and a little sheltered by their

old-fashioned inboard overhang. But I had no very clear notion of

what I was doing; and my feeling, so far as I had any feeling, was

less that I was moving of my own volition than that I was being moved

by some power acting from outside of me—the sensation of

irresponsibility that comes to one sometimes in a dream.

 

Indeed, the whole of that night seemed to me then, and still seems to

me, much more a dream than a reality: I being utterly wearied by my

long hard day’s work in scrambling about among the wrecks, and a

little light-headed because of my stomach’s emptiness, and feverish

because of my growing thirst, and my mind stunned by the dull pain of

my despair. And it was lucky for me, I suppose, that my thinking

powers were so feeble and so blunted. Had I been fully awake to my own

misery I might very well have gone crazy there in the darkness; or

have been moved by a sharp horror of my surroundings to try to escape

them by going on through the black night from ship to ship—which

would have ended quickly by my falling down the side of one or another

of them and so drowning beneath the weed.

 

Yet the sort of stupor that I was in did not hold fast my inner

consciousness; being rather a numbing cloud surrounding me and

separating me from things external—though not cutting me off from

them wholly—while within this wrapping my spirit in a way was awake

and free. And the result of my being thus on something less than

speaking terms with my own body was to make my attitude toward it that

of a sympathizing acquaintance, with merely a lively pity for its

ill-being, rather than that of a personal partaker in its pains. And

even my mental attitude toward myself was a good deal of the same

sort: for my thoughts kept turning sorrowfully to the sorrow of my own

spirit solitary there, shrinking within itself because of its chill

forsakenness and lonely pain of finding itself so desolate—the one

thing living in that great sea-garnering of the dead.

 

And after a while—either because my light-headedness increased, or

because I dozed and took to dreaming—I had the feeling that the dense

blackness about me, a gloom that the heavily overhanging mist made

almost palpable, was filling with all those dead spirits come to

peer curiously into my living spirit; and that they hated it and were

envious of it because it was not as they were but still was alive. And

from this, presently, I went on to fancying that I could see them

about me clad again dimly in the forms which had clothed them when

they also in their time had been living men. At first they were

uncertain and shadowy, but before long they became so distinct that I

plainly saw them: shaggy-bearded resolute fellows, roughly dressed in

strange old-fashioned sea-gear, with here and there among them others

in finer garb having the still more resolute air of officers; and all

with the fierce determined look of those old-time mariners of the

period when all the ocean was a battling-place where seamen spent

their time—and most of them, in the end, spent their lives also—in

fighting with each other and in fighting with the sea.

 

Gradually this throng of the sea-dead filled the whole deck about me

and everywhere hemmed me in; but they gave no heed to me, and were

ranged orderly at their stations as though the service of the ship was

being carried on. Among themselves they seemed to talk; but I could

hear nothing of what they were saying, though I fancied that there was

a humming sound filling the air about me like the murmur of a far-away

crowd. Now and then an angry bout would spring up suddenly between two

or three of