In the Sargasso Sea, Thomas A. Janvier [ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗
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have a good light upon them, and could gloat upon the yellow gleam of
them, and could make some sort of a guess at how much each of them
represented in golden coin. From that I went on to calculating how
much the whole of them were worth together; and when I got to the end
of my figuring I fairly was dazed.
In a rough way I estimated that each ingot weighed at least five
pounds, and as each of the little boxes contained ten of them the
value of every single box stored there was not less than fifteen
thousand dollars. As well as I could make out, the boxes were in rows
of ten and there were ten rows of them—which gave over a million and
a half of dollars for the top tier alone; and as there certainly was
an undertier the value of my treasure at the least was three
millions. But actually, as I found by digging down through the ingots
until I came to the solid flooring, there were in all five tiers of
boxes; and what made the whole of them worth close upon eight millions
of our American money, or well on toward two millions of English
pounds. My brain reeled as I thought about it. The treasure that I had
possession of was a fortune fit for a king!
I had swung myself up from the little chamber and was standing in the
cabin while I made these calculations, and when at last I got to my
sum total I felt so light-headed that it seemed as though I were
walking on air. Indeed, I fairly was stunned by my tremendous good
fortune and could not think clearly: and it was because my mind thus
was turned all topsy-turvy, I suppose, that the odd thought popped
into it that in the matter of weight my gold ingots were pretty much
the same as the tins of beans to get which I was about to return to
the barque—a foolish notion which so tickled my fancy that I burst
out into a loud laugh.
The jarring sound of my laughter, which rang out with a ghastly
impropriety in that deathly place, brought me to my senses a little
and made me calmer. But my mind ran on for a moment or so upon the odd
notion that had provoked it, and in that time certain other thoughts
flashed into my head which had only to get there to spill out of me
every bit of my crazy joy. For first I realized that since I could
carry only the same weight of gold that I could carry of food my
actual wealth was but a single back-load, which brought my millions
down to a few beggarly thousands; and on top of that I realized—and
this came like a douse of ice-water—that for every ingot that I
carried away with me I must leave a like weight of food behind: which
meant neither more nor less than that my great treasure, for all the
good that ever it would be to me—so little could I venture to take of
it on these terms—might as well be already at the bottom of the sea.
And then, being utterly dispirited and broken, I fell to thinking how
little difference it made one way or the other—how even a single
ingot would be a vain lading—since I had no ground for hoping that
ever again would I get to a region where I would have use for gold.
And with that—though I kept on staring in a dull way at the ingots
scattered over the floor of the cabin—I thought of the treasure no
longer: my heart being filled with a great sorrowing pity for myself,
because of the doom upon me to live out whatever life might be left
me in the most horrid solitude into which ever a man was cast.
For a long while I stood despairing there; and then at last the hope
of life began to rise in me again—as it always must rise, no matter
how desperate are the odds against it, in the mind of a sound and
vigorous man. And with this saner feeling came again my desire to push
on in the direction that offered me a chance of deliverance—leaving
all my treasure behind me, since it was worth less to me than food;
and presently came the farther hope that when I had succeeded in
finding a way out of my sea-prison, and so was sure of my life once
more, I might be able to return to the galleon and take away with me
at least some portion of the great riches that I had found.
Because of this foolish hope, and the very human comfort that I found
in knowing myself to be the possessor of such prodigious wealth, I
needs must jump down again to where it was and take another survey of
it before I left it behind. And then, being cooler and looking more
carefully, I noticed that the box to which the tackle had been made
fast was not like the other boxes—though about the same size with
them—but was a little coffer that seemed once to have been locked and
that still had around it the rusty remnants of iron bands. This
difference in the make of it put into my head the notion that its
contents were more precious than the contents of the other
boxes—though how that could be I did not well see; and my notion
seemed the more reasonable as I reflected that if the coffer really
were of an extraordinary value there would have been sense in trying
to save it even in a time of great peril—which was more than could be
said of trying to load down boats launched in the midst of some final
disaster with any of those heavy boxes of gold.
My mind became excited by another mirage of riches as these thoughts
went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a
grip on the coffer—which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes
and held together—and managed by a good deal of straining to lift it
up through the hatch into the cabin, where I could examine it at
my ease.
When it was new an axe would not have made much impression upon it, so
strongly had it been put together; but there were left only black
stains to show where the iron had bound it, and the wood had rotted
until it was softer than the softest bit of pine. Indeed, I had only
to give a little jerk to the lid to open it: both the lock and the
hinges being gone with rust, and the lid held in place only by a sort
of sticky slime.
But when I did get it open the first thing that came out of it was a
stench so vile that I had to jump up in a hurry and rush to the open
deck until the worst of it had ebbed away; and this exceeding evil
odor was given off by a slimy ooze of rotted leather—as I knew a
little later by finding still unmelted some bits of small leather bags
in which what was stored there had been tied. But even as I jumped up
and left the cabin my eyes caught a gleam of brightness in the horrid
slimy mess that set my heart to beating hard again; and it pounded
away in my breast still harder when I came back and made out clearly
what I had found.
For there in the rotten ooze, strewn thickly, was such a collection of
glittering jewels that my eyes fairly were dazzled by them; and when I
had turned the coffer upside down on the deck so that the slime flowed
away stickily—giving off the most dreadful stench that ever I have
encountered—I saw a heap of precious stones such as for size and
beauty has not been gathered into one place, I suppose—unless it may
have been in the treasury of some Eastern sovereign—since the very
beginning of the world. At a single glance I knew that the great
treasure of gold, which had seemed to me overwhelming because of its
immensity, was as nothing in comparison with this other treasure
wherein riches were so concentrate and sublimate that I had the very
essence of them: and I reeled and trembled again as I hugged the
thought to me that by my finding of it I was made master of it all.
XXVIOF A STRANGE SIGHT THAT I SAW IN THE NIGHT-TIME
I was pretty much mooning mad for a while, I suppose: sometimes
walking about the cabin and thrusting with my feet contemptuously at
the gold ingots strewn over the floor of it, and sometimes standing
still in a sort of rapt wonder over my heap of jewels—and anything
like sensible thinking was quite beyond the power of my unbalanced
mind. But at last I was aroused, and so brought to myself a little, by
the daylight waning suddenly: as it did in that region when the sun
dropped down into the thick layer of mist lying close upon the
water—making at first a strange purplish dusk, and then a rich
crimson after-glow that deepened into purple again, and so turning
slowly into blackness as night came on.
When I had come aboard the galleon, about noon-time, and had found her
so sodden with wet and so reeking with foul odors—as, indeed, were
all of the very ancient ships which made the mid-part of that sea
graveyard—I had made my mind up to a forced march in the afternoon
that I hoped would carry me through the worst of all that rottenness,
and so to a ship partly dry and less ill-smelling for the night. But
when I came out from the cabin and looked about me, and saw how thick
and black were the shadows in the clefts between the wrecks, I knew
that I could not venture onward, but must pass the night where I was.
And this was a prospect not at all to my mind.
The cabin, of course, was the only place for me, the soaked deck with
the soaked moss on top of it being quite out of the question; but even
the cabin was not fit for a dog to lie in, so chill and damp was it
and so foul with the stench rising and spreading from the slime of
rotted leather that I had emptied from the coffer and that made a
little vile pool upon the floor. And through the open hatch there came
up a dismal heavy odor of all the rotten stuff down there that almost
turned my stomach, and that made the air laden with it hard to
breathe—though in my hot excitement I had not noticed it at all. But
this last I got the better of in part by covering again the opening,
though I had to move the hatch very gently and carefully to keep it
from falling into rotten fragments in my hands. Yet because it was so
dense with moisture, when I did get it set in place, it pretty well
kept the stench down. And then I kicked away some of the ingots into a
corner, and so cleared a space on the floor where I could stretch
myself just within the cabin door.
These matters being attended to, I seated myself in the same place
where I had eaten my dinner—just outside the door, under the little
sort of porch overhanging it—and ate the short ration that I allowed
myself for my supper, and found it very much less than
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