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Title: Masterpieces of Adventure—Stories of the Sea and Sky


Editor: Nella Braddy

Release date: August 9, 2020 [eBook #62888]

Language: English

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MASTERPIECES OF ADVENTURE—STORIES OF THE SEA AND SKY ***



Produced by Al Haines









  Masterpieces of
  Adventure

  _In Four Volumes_


  STORIES OF THE SEA AND SKY


  Edited by
  Nella Braddy



  Garden City New York
  Doubleday, Page & Company
  1921




  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
  INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN




  GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
  TO
  BLANCHE COLTON WILLIAMS, PH.D.




EDITOR'S NOTE

In these volumes the word _adventure_ has been used in its broadest
sense to cover not only strange happenings in strange places but also
love and life and death--all things that have to do with the great
adventure of living.  Questions as to the fitness of a story were
settled by examining the qualities of the narrative as such rather
than by reference to a technical classification of short stories.

It is the inalienable right of the editor of a work of this kind to
plead copyright difficulties in extenuation for whatever faults it
may possess.  We beg the reader to believe that this is why his
favorite story was omitted while one vastly inferior was included.




CONTENTS


I. THE SHIP THAT SAW A GHOST
    _Frank Norris_

II. A NIGHTMARE OF THE DOLDRUMS
    _W. Clark Russell_

III. THE KITE
    _Major-General E. D. Swinton, D.S.O._

IV. SUPERDIRIGIBLE "GAMMA-I"
    _Donn Byrne_

V. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER OF ASPINWALL
    _Henryk Sienkiewicz_

VI. THE WRECK
    _Guy de Maupassant_

VII. A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM
    _Edgar Allan Poe_




MASTERPIECES OF ADVENTURE




  Masterpieces of
  Adventure

  _STORIES OF THE SEA
  AND SKY_

I

THE SHIP THAT SAW A GHOST

FRANK NORRIS

Very much of this story must remain untold, for the reason that if it
were definitely known what business I had aboard the tramp
steam-freighter _Glarus_, three hundred miles off the South American
coast on a certain summer's day, some few years ago, I would very
likely be obliged to answer a great many personal and direct
questions put by fussy and impertinent experts in maritime law--who
are paid to be inquisitive.  Also, I would get "Ally Bazan," Strokher
and Hardenberg into trouble.

Suppose on that certain summer's day, you had asked of Lloyds's
agency where the _Glarus_ was, and what was her destination and
cargo.  You would have been told that she was twenty days out from
Callao, bound North to San Francisco in ballast; that she had been
spoken by the bark _Medea_ and the steamer _Benevento_; that she was
reported to have blown out a cylinder head, but being manageable was
proceeding on her way under sail.

That is what Lloyds's would have answered.

If you know something of the ways of ships and what is expected of
them, you will understand that the _Glarus_, to be some half a dozen
hundred miles south of where Lloyds's would have her, and to be still
going South, under full steam, was a scandal that would have made her
brothers and sisters ostracize her finally and forever.

And that is curious, too.  Humans may indulge in vagaries
innumerable, and may go far afield in the way of lying; but a ship
may not so much as quibble without suspicion.  The least lapse of
"regularity," the least difficulty in squaring performance with
intuition, and behold she is on the black list, and her captain,
owners, officers, agents and consignors, and even supercargoes, are
asked to explain.

And the _Glarus_ was already on the black list.  From the beginning
her stars had been malign.  As the _Breda_, she had first lost her
reputation, seduced into a filibustering escapade down the South
American coast, where in the end a plain-clothes United States
detective--that is to say, a revenue cutter--arrested her off Buenos
Ayres and brought her home, a prodigal daughter, besmirched and
disgraced.

After that she was in some dreadful blackbirding business in a far
quarter of the South Pacific; and after that--her name changed
finally to the _Glarus_--poached seals for a syndicate of Dutchmen
who lived in Tacoma, and who afterward built a clubhouse out of what
she earned.

And after that we got her.

We got her, I say, through Ryder's South Pacific Exploitation
Company.  The "President" had picked out a lovely little deal for
Hardenberg, Strokher and Ally Bazan (the Three Black Crows), which he
swore would make them "independent rich" the rest of their respective
lives.  It is a promising deal (B. 300 it is on Ryder's map), and if
you want to know more about it you may write to ask Ryder what B. 300
is.  If he chooses to tell you, that is his affair.

For B. 300--let us confess it--is, as Hardenberg puts it, as crooked
as a dog's hind leg.  It is as risky as barratry.  If you pull it off
you may--after paying Ryder his share--divide sixty-five, or possibly
sixty-seven, thousand dollars between you and your associates.  If
you fail, and you are perilously like to fail, you will be sure to
have a man or two of your companions shot, maybe yourself obliged to
pistol certain people, and in the end fetch up at Tahiti, prisoner in
a French patrol-boat.

Observe that B. 300 is spoken of as still open.  It is so, for the
reason that the Three Black Crows did not pull it off.  It still
stands marked up in red ink on the map that hangs over Ryder's desk
in the San Francisco office; and anyone can have a chance at it who
will meet Cyrus Ryder's terms.  Only he can't get the _Glarus_ for
the attempt.

For the trip to the island after B. 300 was the last occasion on
which the _Glarus_ will smell blue water or taste the trades.  She
will never clear again.  She is lumber.

And yet the _Glarus_ on this very blessed day of 1902 is riding to
her buoys off Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, complete in every
detail (bar a broken propeller shaft), not a rope missing, not a
screw loose, not a plank started--a perfectly equipped steam
freighter.

But you may go along the "Front" in San Francisco from Fisherman's
Wharf to the China steamships' docks and shake your dollars under the
seamen's noses, and if you so much as whisper _Glarus_ they will edge
suddenly off and look at you with scared suspicion, and then, as like
as not, walk away without another word.  No pilot will take the
_Glarus_ out; no captain will navigate her; no stoker will feed her
fires; no sailor will walk her decks.  The _Glarus_ is suspect.  She
has seen a ghost.

* * * * * * *

It happened on our voyage to the island after this same B. 300.  We
had stood well off from shore for day after day, and Hardenberg had
shaped our course so far from the track of navigation that since the
_Benevento_ had hulled down and vanished over the horizon no stitch
of canvas nor smudge of smoke had we seen.  We had passed the equator
long since, and would fetch a long circuit to the southard, and bear
up against the island by a circuitous route.  This to avoid being
spoken.  It was tremendously essential that the _Glarus_ should not
be spoken.

I suppose, no doubt, that it was the knowledge of our isolation that
impressed me with the dreadful remoteness of our position.  Certainly
the sea in itself looks no different at a thousand than at a hundred
miles from shore.  But as day after day I came out on deck at noon,
after ascertaining our position on the chart (a mere pin-point in a
reach of empty paper), the sight of the ocean weighed down upon me
with an infinitely great awesomeness--and I was no new hand to high
seas even then.

But at such times the _Glarus_ seemed to me to be threading a
loneliness beyond all worlds and beyond all conception desolate.
Even in more populous waters, when no sail notches the line of the
horizon, the propinquity of one's kind is nevertheless a thing
understood, and to an unappreciated degree comforting.  Here,
however, I knew we were out, far out in the desert.  Never a keel for
years upon years before us had parted these waters; never a sail had
bellied to these winds.  Perfunctorily, day in and day out we turned
our eyes through long habit toward the horizon.  But we knew, before
the look, that the searching would be bootless.  Forever and forever,
under the pitiless sun and cold blue sky stretched the indigo of the
ocean floor.  The ether between the planets can be no less empty, no
less void.

I never, till that moment, could have so much as conceived the
imagination of such loneliness, such utter stagnant abomination of
desolation.  In an open boat, bereft of comrades, I should have gone
mad in thirty minutes.

I remember to have approximated the impression of such empty
immensity only once before, in my younger days, when I lay on my back
on a treeless, bushless mountainside and stared up into the sky for
the better part of an hour.

You probably know the trick.  If you do not, you must understand that
if you look up at the blue long enough, the flatness of the thing
begins little by little to expand, to give here and there; and the
eye travels on and on and up and up, till at length (well for you
that it lasts but the fraction of a second), you all at once see
space.  You generally stop there and cry out, and--your hands over
your eyes--are only too glad to grovel close to the good old solid
earth again.  Just as I, so often on short voyage, was glad to wrench
my eyes away from that horrid vacancy, to fasten them upon our
sailless masts, and stack, or to lay my grip upon the sooty smudged
taffrail of the only thing that stood between me and the Outer Dark.

For we had come at last to that region of the Great Seas where no
ship goes, the silent sea of Coleridge and the Ancient One, the
unplumbed, untracked, uncharted Dreadfulness, primordial, hushed, and
we were as much alone as a grain of star-dust whirling in the empty
space beyond Uranus and the ken of the greater telescopes.

So the _Glarus_ plodded and churned her way onward.  Every day and
all day the same pale-blue sky and the unwinking sun bent over that
moving speck.  Every day and all day the same black-blue water-world,
untouched by any known wind, smooth as a slab of syenite, colourful
as an opal, stretched out and around and beyond and before and behind
us, forever, illimitable, empty.  Every day the smoke of our fires
veiled the streaked whiteness of our wake.  Every day Hardenberg (our
skipper) at noon pricked a pin-hole in the chart that hung in the
wheel-house, and that showed we were so much farther into the
wilderness.  Every day the world of men, of civilization, of
newspapers, policemen and street-railways receded, and we steamed on
alone, lost and forgotten in that silent sea.

"Jolly lot o' room to turn raound in," observed Ally Bazan, the
colonial, "withaout steppin' on y'r neighbour's toes."

"We're clean, clean out o' the track o' navigation," Hardenberg told
him.  "An' a blessed good thing for us, too.  Nobody ever comes down
into these waters.  Ye couldn't pick no course here.  Everything
leads to nowhere."

"Might as well be in a bally balloon," said Strokher.

I shall not tell of the nature of the venture on which the _Glarus_
was bound, further than to say it was not legitimate.  It had to do
with an ill thing done more than two centuries ago.  There was money
in the venture, but it was to be gained by a violation of metes and
bounds which are better left intact.

The island toward which we were heading is associated in the minds of
men with a Horror.  A ship had called there once, two hundred years
in advance of the _Glarus_--a ship not much unlike the crank
high-prowed caravel of Hudson, and her company had landed, and having
accomplished the evil they had set out to do, made shift to sail
away.  And then, just after the palms of the island had sunk from
sight below the water's edge, the unspeakable had happened.  The
Death that was not Death had arisen from out the sea and stood before
the ship, and over it, and the blight of the thing lay along the
decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the terror of that which is
yet without a name.

Twenty men died in the first week, all but six in the second.  These
six, with the shadow of insanity upon them, made out to launch a
boat, returned to the island and died there, after leaving a record
of what had happened.

The six left the ship exactly as she was, sails all set, lanterns all
lit--left her in the shadow of the Death that was not Death.

She stood there, becalmed, and watched them go.  She was never heard
of again.

Or was she--well, that's as may be.

But the main point of the whole affair, to my notion, has always been
this.  The ship was the last friend of those six poor wretches who
made back for the island with their poor chests of plunder.  She was
their guardian, as it were, would have defended and befriended them
to the last; and also we, the Three Black Crows and myself, had no
right under heaven, nor before the law of men, to come prying and
peeping into this business--into this affair of the dead and buried
past.  There was sacrilege in it.  We were no better than
body-snatchers.

* * * * * * *

When I heard the others complaining of the loneliness of our
surroundings, I said nothing at first.  I was no sailor man, and I
was on board only by tolerance.  But I looked again at the maddening
sameness of the horizon--the same vacant, void horizon that we had
seen now for sixteen days on end, and felt in my wits and in my
nerves that same formless rebellion and protest such as comes when
the same note is reiterated over and over again.

It may seem a little thing that the mere fact of meeting with no
other ship should have ground down the edge of the spirit.  But let
the incredulous--bound upon such a hazard as ours--sail straight into
nothingness for sixteen days on end, seeing nothing but the sun,
hearing nothing but the thresh of his own screw, and then put the
question.

And yet, of all things, we desired no company.  Stealth was our one
great aim.  But I think there were moments--toward the last--when the
Three Crows would have welcomed even a cruiser.

Besides, there was more cause for depression, after all, than mere
isolation.

On the seventh day Hardenberg and I were forward by the cat-head,
adjusting the grain with some half-formed intent of spearing the
porpoises that of late had begun to appear under our bows, and
Hardenberg had been computing the number of days we were yet to run.

"We are some five hundred odd miles off that island by now," he said,
"and she's doing her thirteen knots handsome.  All's well so far--but
do you know, I'd just as soon raise that point o' land as soon as
convenient."

"How so?" said I, bending on the line.  "Expect some weather?"

"Mr. Dixon," said he, giving me a curious glance, "the sea is a queer
proposition, put it any ways.  I've been a seafarin' man since I was
big as a minute, and I know the sea, and what's more, the Feel o' the
sea.  Now, look out yonder.  Nothin', hey?  Nothin' but the same ol'
skyline we've watched all the way out.  The glass is as steady as a
steeple, and this ol' hooker, I reckon, is as sound as the day she
went off the ways.  But just the same if I were to home now,
a-foolin' about Gloucester way in my little dough-dish--d'ye know
what?  I'd put into port.  I sure would.  Because why?  Because I got
the Feel o' the Sea, Mr. Dixon.  I got the Feel o' the Sea."

I had heard old skippers say something of this before, and I cited to
Hardenberg the experience of a skipper captain I once knew who had
turned turtle in a calm sea off Trincomalee.  I asked him what this
Feel of the Sea was warning him against just now (for on the high sea
any premonition is a premonition of evil, not of good).  But he was
not explicit.

"I don't know," he answered moodily, and as if in great perplexity,
coiling the rope as he spoke.  "I don't know.  There's some blame
thing or other close to us, I'll bet a hat.  I don't know the name of
it, but there's a big Bird in the air, just out of sight som'eres,
and," he suddenly exclaimed, smacking his knee and leaning forward,
"I--don't--like--it--one--dam'--bit."

The same thing came up in our talk in the cabin that night, after the
dinner was taken off and we settled down to tobacco.  Only, at this
time, Hardenberg was on duty on the bridge.  It was Ally Bazan who
spoke instead.

"Seems to me," he hazarded, "as haow they's somethin' or other
a-goin' to bump up pretty blyme soon.  I shouldn't be surprised,
naow, y'know, if we piled up on some bally uncharted reef along o'
to-night and went strite daown afore we'd had a bloomin' charnce to
s'y 'So long, gen'lemen all.'"

He laughed as he spoke, but when, just at that moment, a pan
clattered in the galley, he jumped suddenly with an oath, and looked
hard about the cabin.

Then Strokher confessed to a sense of distress also.  He'd been
having it since day before yesterday, it seemed.

"And I put it to you the glass is lovely," he said, "so it's no blow.
I guess," he continued, "we're all a bit seedy and ship-sore."

And whether or not this talk worked upon my own nerves, or whether in
very truth the Feel of the Sea had found me also, I do not know; but
I do know that after dinner that night, just before going to bed, a
queer sense of apprehension came upon me, and that when I had come to
my stateroom, after my turn upon deck, I became furiously angry with
nobody in particular, because I could not at once find the matches.
But here was a difference.  The other man had been merely vaguely
uncomfortable.  I could put a name to my uneasiness.  I felt that we
were being watched.

* * * * * * *

It was a strange ship's company we made after that.  I speak only of
the Crows and myself.  We carried a scant crew of stokers, and there
was also a chief engineer.  But we saw so little of him that he did
not count.  The Crows and I gloomed on the quarterdeck from dawn to
dark, silent, irritable, working upon each other's nerves till the
creak of a block would make a man jump like cold steel laid to his
flesh.  We quarrelled over absolute nothings, glowered at each other
for half a word, and each one of us, at different times, was at some
pains to declare that never in the course of his career had he been
associated with such a disagreeable trio of brutes.  Yet we were
always together, and sought each other's company with painful
insistence.

Only once were we all agreed, and that was when the cook, a Chinaman,
spoiled a certain batch of biscuits.  Unanimously we fell foul of the
creature with as much vociferation as fishwives till he fled the
cabin in actual fear of mishandling, leaving us suddenly seized with
noisy hilarity--for the first time in a week.  Hardenberg proposed a
round of drinks from our single remaining case of beer.  We stood up
and formed an Elk's chain and then drained our glasses to each
other's health with profound seriousness.

That same evening, I remember, we all sat on the quarterdeck till
late and--oddly enough--related each one his life's history up to
date; and then went down to the cabin for a game of euchre before
turning in.

We had left Strokher on the bridge--it was his watch--and had
forgotten all about him in the interest of the game, when--I suppose
it was about one in the morning--I heard him whistle long and shrill.
I laid down my cards and said:

"Hark!"

In the silence that followed we heard at first only the muffled lope
of our engines, the cadenced snorting of the exhaust, and the ticking
of Hardenberg's big watch in his waistcoat that he had hung by the
arm-hole to the back of his chair.  Then from the bridge, above our
deck, prolonged, intoned--a wailing cry in the night--came Strokher's
voice:

"Sailoh-h-h!"

And the cards fell from our hands, and, like men turned to stone, we
sat looking at each other across the soiled red cloth for what seemed
an immeasurably long minute.

Then stumbling and swearing, in a hysteria of hurry, we gained the
deck.

There was a moon, very low and reddish, but no wind.  The sea beyond
the taffrail was as smooth as lava, and so still that the swells from
the cutwater of the _Glarus_ did not break as they rolled away from
the bows.

I remember that I stood staring and blinking at the empty
ocean--where the moonlight lay like a painted stripe reaching to the
horizon--stupid and frowning, till Hardenberg, who had gone on ahead,
cried:

"Not here--on the bridge!"

We joined Strokher, and as I came up the others were asking:

"Where?  Where?"

And there, before he had pointed, I saw--we all of us saw----  And I
heard Hardenberg's teeth come together like a spring trap, while Ally
Bazan ducked as though to a blow, muttering:

"Gord 'a' mercy, what nyme do ye put to a ship like that?"

And after that no one spoke for a long minute, and we stood there,
moveless black shadows, huddled together for the sake of the blessed
elbow touch that means so incalculably much, looking off over our
port quarter.

For the ship that we saw there--oh, she was not a half-mile
distant--was unlike any ship known to present day construction.

She was short, and high-pooped, and her stern, which was turned a
little toward us, we could see, was set with curious windows, not
unlike a house.  And on either side of this stern were two great iron
cressets such as once were used to burn signal-fires in.  She had
three masts with mighty yards swung 'thwart-ship, but bare of all
sails save a few rotting streamers.  Here and there about her a
tangled mass of rigging drooped and sagged.

And there she lay, in the red eye of the setting moon, in that
solitary ocean, shadowy, antique, forlorn, a thing the most
abandoned, the most sinister I ever remember to have seen.

Then Strokher began to explain volubly and with many repetitions.

"A derelict, of course.  I was asleep; yes, I was asleep.  Gross
neglect of duty.  I say I was asleep--on watch.  And we worked up to
her.  When I woke, why--you see, when I woke, there she was," he gave
a weak little laugh, "and--and now, why, there she is, you see.  I
turned around and saw her sudden like--when I woke up, that is."

He laughed again, and as he laughed the engines far below our feet
gave a sudden hiccough.  Something crashed and struck the ship's
sides till we lurched as we stood.  There was a shriek of steam, a
shout--and then silence.

The noise of the machinery ceased; the _Glarus_ slid through the
still water, moving only by her own decreasing momentum.

Hardenberg sang, "Stand by!" and called down the tube to the
engine-room.

"What's up?"

I was standing close enough to him to hear the answer in a small,
faint voice:

"Shaft gone, sir."

"Broke?"

"Yes, sir."

Hardenberg faced about.

"Come below.  We must talk."  I do not think any of us cast a glance
at the Other Ship again.  Certainly I kept my eyes away from her.
But as we started down the companionway I laid my hand on Strokher's
shoulder.  The rest were ahead.  I looked him straight between the
eyes as I asked:

"Were you asleep?  Is that why you saw her so suddenly?"

It is now five years since I asked the question.  I am still waiting
for Strokher's answer.

Well, our shaft was broken.  That was flat.  We went down into the
engine-room and saw the jagged fracture that was the symbol of our
broken hopes.  And in the course of the next five minutes'
conversation with the chief we found that, as we had not provided
against such a contingency, there was to be no mending of it.  We
said nothing about the mishap coinciding with the appearance of the
Other Ship.  But I know we did not consider the break with any degree
of surprise after a few moments.

We came up from the engine-room and sat down to the cabin table.

"Now what?" said Hardenberg, by way of beginning.

Nobody answered at first.

It was by now three in the morning.  I recall it all perfectly.  The
ports opposite where I sat were open and I could see.  The moon was
all but full set.  The dawn was coming up with a copper murkiness
over the edge of the world.  All the stars were yet out.  The sea,
for all the red moon and copper dawn, was gray, and there, less than
half a mile away, still lay our consort.  I could see her through the
portholes with each slow careening of the _Glarus_.  "I vote for the
island," cried Ally Bazan, "shaft or no shaft.  We rigs a bit o'
syle, y'know----" and thereat the discussion began.

For upward of two hours it raged, with loud words and shaken
forefingers, and great noisy bangings of the table, and how it would
have ended I do not know, but at last--it was then maybe five in the
morning--the lookout passed word down to the cabin:

"Will you come on deck, gentlemen?"  It was the mate who spoke, and
the man was shaken--I could see that--to the very vitals of him.  We
started and stared at one another, and I watched little Ally Bazan go
slowly white to the lips.  And even then no word of the ship, except
as it might be this from Hardenberg:

"What is it?  Good God Almighty, I'm no coward, but this thing is
getting one too many for me."

Then without further speech he went on deck.

The air was cool.  The sun was not yet up.  It was that strange,
queer mid-period between dark and dawn, when the night is over and
the day not yet come, just the gray that is neither light nor dark,
the dim dead blink as of the refracted light from extinct worlds.

We stood at the rail.  We did not speak; we stood watching.  It was
so still that the drip of steam from some loosened pipe far below was
plainly audible, and it sounded in that lifeless, silent grayness
like--God knows what--a death tick.

"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's no
mistake about it.  She is moving--this way."

"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets
her toward us."

Would the morning never come?

Ally Bazan--his parents were Catholic--began to mutter to himself.

Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.

"I particularly don't want--that--out--there--to cross our bows.  I
don't want it to come to that.  We must get some sails on her."

"And I put it to you as man to man," said Strokher, "where might be
your wind."

He was right.  The _Glarus_ floated in absolute calm.  On all that
slab of ocean nothing moved but the Dead Ship.

She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed toward
us, the water turning from her forefoot.  She came on; she was near
at hand.  We saw her plainly--saw the rotted planks, the crumbling
rigging, the rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping
deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her
sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean.
She made no sound.  No single thing stirred aboard the hulk of
her--but she moved.

We were helpless.  The _Glarus_ could stir no boat in any direction;
we were chained to the spot.  Nobody had thought to put out our
lights, and they still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of
place in their red-and-green garishness, like maskers surprised by
daylight.

And in the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half-light
between dawn and day, at six o'clock, silent as the settling of the
dead to the bottomless bottom of the ocean, gray as fog, lonely,
blind, soulless, voiceless, the Dead Ship crossed our bows.

I do not know how long after this the Ship disappeared, or what was
the time of day when we at last pulled ourselves together.  But we
came to some sort of decision at last.  This was to go on--under
sail.  We were too close to the island now to turn back for--for a
broken shaft.

The afternoon was spent fitting on the sails to her, and when after
nightfall the wind at length came up fresh and favourable, I believe
we all felt heartened and a deal more hardy--until the last canvas
went aloft, and Hardenberg took the wheel.  We had drifted a good
deal since the morning, and the bows of the _Glarus_ were pointed
homeward, but as soon as the breeze blew strong enough to get
steerageway Hardenberg put the wheel over and, as the booms swung
across the deck, headed for the island again.

We had not gone on this course half an hour--no, not twenty
minutes--before the wind shifted a whole quarter of the compass and
took the _Glarus_ square in the teeth, so that there was nothing for
it but to tack.  And then the strangest thing befell.

I will make allowance for the fact that there was no centre-board nor
keel to speak of to the _Glarus_.  I will admit that the sails upon a
nine-hundred-ton freighter are not calculated to speed her, nor
steady her.  I will even admit the possibility of a current that set
from the island toward us.  All this may be true, yet the _Glarus_
should have advanced.  We should have made a wake.

And instead of this, our stolid, steady, trusty old boat was--what
shall I say?

I will say that no man may thoroughly understand a ship--after all.
I will say that new ships are cranky and unsteady; that old and
seasoned ships have their little crotchets, their little fussinesses
that their skippers must learn and humour if they are to get anything
out of them; that even the best ships may sulk at times, shirk their
work, grow unstable, perverse, and refuse to answer helm and
handling.  And I will say that some ships that for years have sailed
blue water as soberly and as docilely as a street-car horse has
plodded the treadmill of the 'tween-tracks, have been known to balk,
as stubbornly and as conclusively as any old Bay Billy that ever wore
a bell.  I know this has happened, because I have seen it.  I saw,
for instance, the _Glarus_ do it.

Quite literally and truly we could do nothing with her.  We will say,
if you like, that that great jar and wrench when the shaft gave way
shook her and crippled her.  It is true however, that whatever the
cause may have been, we could not force her toward the island.  Of
course, we all said "current"; but why didn't the log-line trail?

For three days and three nights we tried it.  And the _Glarus_ heaved
and plunged and shook herself just as you have seen a horse plunge
and rear when his rider tries to force him at the steam-roller.

I tell you I could feel the fabric of her tremble and shudder from
bow to stern-post, as though she were in a storm; I tell you she fell
off from the wind, and broad-on drifted back from her course till the
sensation of her shrinking was as plain as her own staring lights and
a thing pitiful to see.

We roweled her, and we crowded sail upon her, and we coaxed and
bullied and humoured her, till the Three Crows, their fortune only a
plain sail two days ahead, raved and swore like insensate brutes, or
shall we say like mahouts trying to drive their stricken elephant
upon the tiger--and all to no purpose.  "Damn the damned current and
the damned luck and the damned shaft and all," Hardenberg would
exclaim, as from the wheel he would catch the _Glarus_ falling off.
"Go on, you old hooker--you tub of junk!  My God, you'd think she was
scared!"

Perhaps the _Glarus_ was scared, perhaps not; that point is
debatable.  But it was beyond doubt of debate that Hardenberg was
scared.

A ship that will not obey is only one degree less terrible than a
mutinous crew.  And we were in a fair way to have both.  The stokers,
whom we had impressed into duty as A.B.'s, were of course
superstitious; and they knew how the _Glarus_ was acting, and it was
only a question of time before they got out of hand.

That was the end.  We held a final conference in the cabin and
decided that there was no help for it--we must turn back.

And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, and
the "current" helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of
the _Glarus_, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log-line
ran out from the trail and strained back as the ship worked homeward.

We had never a mishap from the time we finally swung her about; and,
considering the circumstances, the voyage back to San Francisco was
propitious.

But an incident happened just after we had started back.  We were
perhaps some five miles on the homeward track.  It was early evening
and Strokher had the watch.  At about seven o'clock he called me up
on the bridge.

"See her?" he said.

And there, far behind us, in the shadow of the twilight, loomed the
Other Ship again, desolate, lonely beyond words.  We were leaving her
rapidly astern.  Strokher and I stood looking at her till she
dwindled to a dot.  Then Strokher said:

"She's on post again."

And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast
anchor off the "Front" our crew went ashore as soon as discharged,
and in half a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors'
boarding-house and in every seaman's dive, from Barbary Coast to
Black Tom's.

It is still there, and that is why no pilot will take the _Glarus_
out, no captain will navigate her, no stoker feed her fires, no
sailor walk her decks.  The _Glarus_ is suspect.  She will never
smell blue water again, nor taste the trades.  She has seen a Ghost.




II

A NIGHTMARE OF THE DOLDRUMS*

W. CLARK RUSSELL


*Reprinted by permission of Alexandrina Clark Russell and of
Frederick A. Stokes Company.


The _Justitia_ was a smart little barque of 395 tons.  I had viewed
her with something of admiration as she lay in mid-stream in the
Hooghly--somewhere off the Coolie Bazaar, I think it was.  There was
steam then coming to Calcutta, though not as steam now is; very
little of it was in any sense palatial, and some of the very best of
it was to be as promptly distanced under given conditions of weather
by certain of the clippers, clouded with studding sails and
flying-kites to the starry buttons of their skysail mastheads, as the
six-knot ocean tramp of to-day is to be outrun by the four-masted
leviathan thrashing through it to windward with her yards fore and
aft.

I--representing in those days a large Birmingham firm of dealers in
the fal-lal industries--had wished to make my way from Calcutta to
Capetown.  I saw the _Justitia_ and took a fancy to her; I admired
the long, low, piratic run of her hull as she lay with straining
hawsepipes on the rushing stream of the Hooghly; upon which, as you
watched, there might go by in the space of an hour some half-score at
least of dead natives made ghastly canoes of by huge birds, erect
upon the corpses, burying their beaks as they sailed along.

I found out that the _Justitia_ was one of the smartest of the Thames
and East India traders of that time, memorable on one occasion for
having reeled off a clean seventeen knots by the log under a main
topgallant-sail, set over a single-reefed topsail.  It was murmured,
indeed, that the mate who hove that log was drunk when he counted the
knots; yet the dead reckoning tallied with the next day's
observations.  I called upon the agents, was told that the _Justitia_
was not a passenger ship, but that I could hire a cabin for the run
to Capetown if I chose; a sum of rupees, trifling compared with the
cost of transit by steam, was named.  I went on board, found the
captain walking up and down under the awning, and agreeably killed an
hour in a chat with as amiable a seaman as ever it was my good
fortune to meet.

We sailed in the middle of July.  Nothing worth talking about
happened during our run down the Bay of Bengal.  The crew aforemast
were all of them Englishmen; there were twelve, counting cook and
steward.  The captain was a man named Cayzer; the only mate of the
vessel was one William Perkins.  The boatswain, a rough, short,
hairy, immensely strong man, acted as second mate and kept a lookout
when Perkins was below.  But he was entirely ignorant of navigation,
and owned to me that he read with difficulty words of one syllable,
and could not write.

I was the only passenger.  My name, I may as well say here, is Thomas
Barren.  Our run to the south Ceylon parallels was slow and
disappointing.  The monsoon was light and treacherous, sometimes
dying out in a sort of laughing, mocking gust till the whole ocean
was a sheet-calm surface, as though the dependable trade wind was
never again to blow.

"Oh, yes," said Captain Cayzer to me, "we're used to the unexpected
hereabouts.  Monsoon or no monsoon, I'll tell you what: you're always
safe in standing by for an Irishman's hurricane down here."

"And what sort of a breeze is that?" I asked.

"An up-and-down calm," said he, "as hard to know where it begins as
to guess where it'll end."

However, thanks to the frequent trade puffs and other winds, which
tasted not like the monsoon, we crawled through those latitudes which
Ceylon spans, and fetched within a few degrees of the equator.  In
this part of the waters we were to be thankful for even the most
trifling donation of a catspaw, or for the equally small and
short-lived mercy of the gust of the electric cloud.  I forget how
many days we were out from Calcutta: the matter is of no moment.  I
left my cabin one morning some hour after the sun had risen, by which
time the decks had been washed down, and were already dry, with a
salt sparkle as of bright white sand on the face of the planks, so
roasting was it.  I went into the head to get a bath under the pump
there.  I feel in memory, as I write, the exquisite sensation of that
luxury of brilliant brine, cold as snow, melting through me from head
to foot to the nimble plying of the pump-brake by a seaman.

It was a true tropic morning.  The sea, of a pale lilac, flowed in a
long-drawn, gentle heave of swell into the southwest; the glare of
the early morning brooded in a sort of steamy whiteness in the
atmosphere; the sea went working to its distant reaches, and floated
into a dim blending of liquid air and water, so that you couldn't
tell where the sky ended; a weak, hot wind blew over the taffrail,
but it was without weight.  The courses swung to the swell without
response to the breathings of the air; and on high the light
cotton-white royals were scarcely curved by the delicate passage of
the draught.

Yet the barque had steerage way.  When I looked through the grating
at her metalled forefoot I saw the ripples plentiful as harp strings
threading aft, and whilst I dried myself I watched the slow approach
of a piece of timber hoary with barnacles, and venerable with long
hairs of seaweed, amid and around which a thousand little fish were
sporting, many-coloured as though a rainbow had been shivered.

I returned to my cabin, dressed, and stepped on the quarter-deck,
where I found some men spreading the awning, and the captain in a
white straw hat viewing an object out upon the water through a
telescope, and talking to the boatswain, who stood alongside.

"What do you see?" I asked.

"Something that resembles a raft," answered the captain.

The thing he looked at was about a mile distant, some three points on
the starboard bow.  On pointing the telescope, I distinctly made out
the fabric of a raft, fitted with a short mast, to which midway a
bundle--it resembled a parcel--was attached.  A portion of the raft
was covered by a white sheet or cloth, whence dangled a short length
of something chocolate-coloured, indistinguishable even with the
glass, lifting and sinking as the raft rose and fell upon the flowing
heave of the sea.

"This ocean," said the captain, taking the glass from me, "is a big
volume of tragic stories, and the artist who illustrates the book
does it in that fashion," and he nodded in the direction of the raft.

"What do you make of it, boatswain?" I asked.

"It looks to me," he answered in his strong, harsh, deep voice, "like
a religious job--one of them rafts the Burmuh covies float away their
dead on.  I never seen one afore, sir, but I've heard tell of such
things."

We sneaked stealthily toward the raft.  It was seven bells--half-past
seven--and the sailors ate their breakfast on the forecastle, that
they might view the strange contrivance.  The mate, Mr. Perkins, came
on deck to relieve the boatswain, and, after inspecting the raft
through the telescope, gave it as his opinion that it was a Malay
floating bier--"a Mussulman trick of ocean burial, anyhow," said he.
"There should be a jar of water aboard the raft, and cakes and fruit
for the corpse to regale on, if he ha'n't been dead long."

The steward announced breakfast; the captain told him to hold it back
awhile.  He was as curious as I to get a close view of the queer
object with its white cloth and mast and parcel half out like a
barge's leeboard, and he bade the man at the helm put the wheel over
by a spoke or two; but the wind was nearly gone, the barque scarcely
responded to the motion of her rudder, the thread-like lines at the
cutwater had faded, and a roasting, oppressive calm was upon the
water, whitening it out into a tingling sheen of quicksilver with a
fiery shaft of blinding dazzle, solitary and splendid, working with
the swell like some monstrous serpent of light right under the sun.

The raft was about six cables' lengths off us when the barque came to
a dead stand, with a soft, universal hollowing in of her canvas from
royal to course, as though, like something sentient, she delivered
one final sigh before the swoon of the calm seized her.  But now we
were near enough to resolve the floating thing with the naked eye
into details.  It was a raft formed of bamboo canes.  A mast about
six feet tall was erected upon it; the dark thing over the edge
proved a human leg, and, when the fabric lifted with the swell and
raised the leg clear, we saw the foot had been eaten away by fish, a
number of which were swimming about the raft, sending little flashes
of foam over the pale surface as they darted along with their back or
dorsal fins exposed.  They were all little fish; I saw no sharks.
The body to which the leg belonged was covered by a white cloth.  The
captain called my attention to the parcel attached to the mast, and
said that it possibly contained the food which the Malays leave
beside their dead after burial.

"But let's go to breakfast now, Mr. Barren," said he, with a slow,
reproachful, impatient look round the breathless scene of ocean.  "If
there's any amusement to be got out of that thing yonder there's a
precious long, quiet day before us, I fear, for the entertainment."

We breakfasted, and due course returned on deck.  The slewing of the
barque had caused the raft to shift its bearings, otherwise its
distance remained as it was when we went below.

"Mr. Perkins," said the captain, "lower a boat and bring aboard that
parcel from the raft's jury-mast, and likewise take a peep at the
figure under the cloth, and report its sex and what it looks like."

I asked leave to go in the boat, and when she was lowered, with three
men in her, I followed Mr. Perkins, and we rowed over to the raft.
All about the frail contrivance the water was beautiful with the
colors and movements of innumerable fish.  As we approached we were
greeted by an evil smell.  The raft seemed to have been afloat for a
considerable period; its submerged portion was green with marine
adhesions or growths.  The fellow in the bows of the boat,
manoeuvring with the boat-hook, cleverly snicked the parcel from the
jury-mast and put it beside him without opening it, for that was to
be the captain's privilege.

"Off with that cloth," said Mr. Perkins, "and then backwater a bit
out of this atmosphere."

The bowman jerked the cloth clear of the raft with his boathook; the
white sheet floated like a snowflake upon the water for a few
breaths, then slowly sank.  The body exposed was stark naked and
tawny.  It was a male.  I saw nothing revolting in the thing: it
would have been otherwise perhaps had it been white.  The hair was
long and black, the nose aquiline, the mouth puckered into the aspect
of a harelip; the gleam of a few white teeth painted a ghastly
contemptuous grin upon the dead face.  The only shocking part was the
footless leg.

"Shall I hook him overboard, sir?" said the bow-man.

"No, let him take his ease as he lies," answered the mate, and with
that we returned to the barque.

We climbed over the side, the boat was hoisted to the davits, and Mr.
Perkins took the parcel out of the stern-sheets and handed it to the
captain.  The cover was a kind of fine canvas, very neatly stitched
with white thread.  Captain Cayzer ripped through the stitching with
his knife, and exposed a couple of books bound in some kind of skin
or parchment.  They were probably the Koran, but the characters none
of us knew.  The captain turned them about for a bit, and I stood by
looking at them; he then replaced them in their canvas cover and put
them down upon the skylight, and by-and-by, on his leaving the deck,
he took them below to his cabin.

The moon rose about ten that night.  She came up hot, distorted, with
a sullen face belted with vapor, but was soon clear of the dewy
thickness over the horizon and showering a pure greenish silver upon
the sea.  She made the night lovely and cool; her reflection sparkled
in the dew along the rails, and her beam whitened out the canvas into
the tender softness of wreaths of cloud motionless upon the summit of
some dark heap of mountain.  I looked for the raft and saw it
plainly, and it is not in language to express how the sight of that
frail cradle of death deepened the universal silence and expanded the
prodigious distances defined by the stars, and accentuated the
tremendous spirit of loneliness that slept like a presence in that
wide region of sea and air.

There had not been a stir of wind all day: not the faintest breathing
of breeze had tarnished the sea down to the hour of midnight when,
feeling weary, I withdrew to my cabin.  I slept well, in spite of the
heat and the cockroaches, and rose at seven.  I found the steward in
the cabin.  His face wore a look of concern, and on seeing me he
instantly exclaimed--

"The captain seems very ill, sir.  Might you know anything of physic?
Neither Mr. Perkins nor me can make out what's the matter."

"I know nothing of physic," I answered, "but I'll look in on him."

I stepped to his door, knocked, and entered.  Captain Cayzer lay in a
bunk under a middling-sized porthole; the cabin was full of the
morning light.  I started and stood at gaze, scarce crediting my
sight, so shocked and astounded was I by the dreadful change which
had happened in the night in the poor man's appearance.  His face was
blue, and I remarked a cadaverous sinking of the eyeballs; the lips
were livid, the hands likewise blue, but strangely wrinkled like a
washer-woman's.  On seeing me he asked in a husky whispering voice
for a drink of water.  I handed him a full panikin, which he drained
feverishly, and then began to moan and cry out, making some weak
miserable efforts to rub first one arm, then the other, then his legs.

The steward stood in the doorway.  I turned to him, sensible that my
face was ashen and asked some question.  I then said, "Where is Mr.
Perkins?"  He was on deck.  I bade the steward attend to the captain,
and passed through the hatch to the quarter-deck, where I found the
mate.

"Do you know that the captain is very ill?" said I.

"Do I know it, sir?  Why, yes.  I've been sitting by him chafing his
limbs and giving him water to drink, and attending to him in other
ways.  What is it, d'ye know, sir?"

"_Cholera!_" said I.

"Oh, my God, I hope not!" he exclaimed.  "How could it be cholera.
How could cholera come aboard?"

"A friend of mine died of cholera at Rangoon when I was there," said
I.  "I recognize the looks, and will swear to the symptoms."

"But how could it have come aboard?" he exclaimed, in a voice low but
agitated.

My eyes, as he asked the question, were upon the raft.  I started and
cried, "Is that thing still there?"

"Aye," said the mate, "we haven't budged a foot all night."

The suspicion rushed upon me whilst I looked at the raft, and ran my
eyes over the bright hot morning sky and the burnished surface of
sea, sheeting into dimness in the misty junction of heaven and water.

"I shouldn't be surprised," said I, "to discover that we brought the
cholera aboard with us yesterday from that dead man's raft yonder."

"How is cholera to be caught in that fashion?" exclaimed Mr. Perkins,
pale and a bit wild in his way of staring at me.

"We may have brought the poison aboard in the parcel of books."

"Is cholera to be caught so?"

"Undoubtedly.  The disease may be propagated by human intercourse.
Why not then by books which have been handled by cholera-poisoned
people, or by the atmosphere of a body dead of the plague?" I added,
pointing at the raft.

"No man amongst us is safe, then, now?" cried the mate.

"I'm no doctor," said I, "but I know this, that contagious poisons
such as scarlet fever and glanders, may retain their properties in a
dormant state for years.  I've heard tell of scores of instances of
cholera being propagated through articles of dress.  Depend upon it,"
said I, "that we brought the poison aboard with us yesterday from
that accursed death-raft yonder."

"Aren't the books in the captain's cabin?" said the mate.

"Are they?"

"He took them below yesterday, sir."

"The sooner they're overboard the better," I exclaimed, and returned
to the cabin.

I went to the captain, and found the steward rubbing him.  The
disease appeared to be doing its work with horrible rapidity; the
eyes were deeply sunk and red; every feature had grown sharp and
pinched as after a long wasting disease; the complexion was thick and
muddy.  Those who have watched beside cholera know that terrific
changes may take place in a few minutes.  I cast my eyes about for
the parcel of books, and, spying it, took a stick from a corner of
the berth, hooked up the parcel, and, passing it through the open
porthole, shook it overboard.

The captain followed my movements with a languid rolling of his eyes
but spoke not, though he groaned often, and frequently cried out.  I
could not in the least imagine what was proper to be done.  His was
the most important life on board the ship, and yet I could only look
on and helplessly watch him expire.

He lived till the evening, and seldom spoke save to call upon God to
release him.  I had found an opportunity to tell him that he was ill
of the cholera, and explained how it happened that the horrible
distemper was on board, for I was absolutely sure we had brought it
with us in that parcel of books; but his anguish was so keen, his
death so close then, that I cannot be sure he understood me.  He died
shortly after seven o'clock, and I have since learned that that time
is one of the critical hours in cholera.

When the captain was dead I went to the mate, and advised him to cast
the body overboard at once.  He called to some of the hands.  They
brought the body out just as the poor fellow had died, and, securing
a weight to the feet, they lifted the corpse over the rail, and
dropped it.  No burial was read.  We were all too panic-stricken for
reverence.  We got rid of the body quickly, the men handling the
thing as though they felt the death in it stealing into them through
their fingers--hoping and praying that with it the cholera would go.
It was almost dark when this hurried funeral was ended.  I stood
beside the mate, looking around the sea for a shadow of wind in any
quarter.  The boatswain, who had been one of the men that handled the
body, came up to us.

"Ain't there nothing to be done with that corpus out there?" he
exclaimed, pointing with a square hand to the raft.  "The men are
agreed that there'll come no wind whilst that there dead blackie
keeps afloat.  And ain't he enough to make a disease of the
hatmosphere itself, from horizon to horizon?"

I waited for the mate to answer.  He said gloomily, "I'm of the poor
captain's mind.  You'll need to make something fast to the body to
sink it.  Who's to handle it?  I'll ask no man to do what I wouldn't
do myself, and rat me if I'd do that!"

"We brought the poison aboard by visiting the raft, bo'sw'n," said I.
"Best leave the thing alone.  The corpse is too far off to corrupt
the air, as you suppose; though the imagination's nigh as bad as the
reality," said I, spitting.

"If there's any of them game to sink the thing, may they do it?" said
the boatswain.  "For if ther's ne'er a breeze of wind to come while
it's there--"

"Chaw!" said the mate.  "But try 'em, if you will.  They may take the
boat when the moon's up, should there come no wind first."

An hour later the steward told me that two of the sailors were seized
with cramps and convulsions.  After this no more was said about
taking the boat and sinking the body.  The mate went into the
forecastle.  On his return, he begged me to go and look at the men.

"Better make sure that it's cholera with them too, sir," said he.
"You know the signs;" and, folding his arms, he leaned against the
bulwarks in a posture of profound dejection.

I went forward and descended the forescuttle, and found myself in a
small cave.  The heat was over-powering; there was no air to pass
through the little hatch; the place was dimly lighted by an
evil-smelling lamp hanging under a beam but, poor as the illumination
was, I could see by it, and when I looked at the men and spoke to
them, I saw how it was, and came away sick at heart, and half dead
with the hot foul air of the forecastle, and in deepest distress of
mind, moreover, through perceiving that the two men had formed a part
of the crew of the boat when we visited the raft.

One died at six o'clock next morning, and the other at noon; but
before this second man was dead three others had been attacked, and
one of them was the mate.  And still never a breath of air stirred
the silver surface of the sea.

The mate was a strong man, and his fear of death made the conflict
dreadful to behold.  I was paralyzed at first by the suddenness of
the thing and the tremendous character of our calamity, and, never
doubting that I must speedily prove a victim as being one who had
gone in the boat, I cast myself down upon a sofa in the cabin and
there sat, waiting for the first signal of pain, sometimes praying,
or striving to pray, and seeking hard to accustom my mind to the fate
I regarded as inevitable.  But a keen and biting sense of my
cowardice came to my rescue.  I sprang to my feet and went to the
mate's berth, and nursed him till he died, which was shortly before
midnight of the day of his seizure--so swift and sure was the poison
we had brought from the raft.  He was dropped over the side, and a
few hours later he was followed by three others.  I cannot be sure of
my figures: it was a time of delirium, and I recall some details of
it with difficulty, but I am pretty sure that by the morning of the
fourth day of our falling in with the accursed raft the ship's
company had been reduced to the boatswain and five men, making, with
myself, seven survivors of fifteen souls who had sailed from Calcutta.

It was some time about the middle of the fifth day--two men were
lying stricken in the forecastle--the boatswain and a couple of
seamen came aft to the quarter-deck where I was standing.  The wheel
was deserted: no man had grasped it since the captain's death;
indeed, there was nothing to be done at the helm.  The ocean floated
in liquid glass; the smell of frying paint, bubbled into cinders by
the roasting rays, rose like the stench of a second plague to the
nostrils.  The boatswain and his companions had been drinking; no
doubt they had broached the rum casks below.  They had never entered
the cabin to my knowledge nor do I believe they got their liquor from
there.  The boatswain carried a heavy weight of some sort, bound in
canvas, with a long lanyard attached to it.  He flung the parcel into
the quarter-boat, and roared out--

"If that don't drag the blistered cuss out of sight I'll show the
fired carcass the road myself.  Cholera or no cholera, here goes!"

"What are you going to do?" said I.

"Do?" he cried; "why sink that there plague out of it, so as to give
us a chance of a breeze.  Ain't this hell's delight?  What's a-going
to blow us clear whilst _he_ keeps watch?"  And he nodded with a
fierce drunken gesture toward the raft.

"You'll have to handle the body to sink it," said I.  "You're well
men, now; keep well, won't you?  The two who are going may be next
taken."

The three of them roared out drunkenly together, so muddling their
speech with oaths that I did not understand them.  I walked aft, not
liking their savage looks.  Shouting and cursing plentifully, they
lowered the boat, got into her by descending the falls, and shoved
off for the raft.  They drew alongside the bamboo contrivance, and I
looked to see the boat capsize, so wildly did they sway her in their
wrath and drink as they fastened the weight to the foot of the body.
They then sank the corpse and with the loom of their oars, hammered
at the raft till the bamboos were scattered like a sheaf of
walking-sticks cut adrift.  They now returned to the barque,
clambered aboard, and hoisted the boat.

The two sick men in the forecastle were at this time looked after by
a seaman named Archer.  I have said it was the fifth day of the calm;
of the ship's company the boatswain and five men were living, but two
were dying and that, not counting me, left three as yet well and able
to get about.

This man Archer, when the boatswain and his companions went forward,
came out of the forecastle, and drank at the scuttle-butt in the
waist.  He walked unsteadily, with that effort after stateliness
which is peculiar to tipsy sailors; his eyes wandered, and he found
some difficulty in hitting the bunghole with the dipper.  Yet he was
a civil sort of man when sober; I had occasionally chatted with him
during his tricks at the wheel; and, feeling the need of some one to
talk to about our frightful situation, I walked up to him, and asked
him how the sick men did.

"Dying fast," he answered, steadying himself by leaning against the
scuttle-butt, "and a-ravin' like screetch owls."

"What's to be done, Archer?"

"Oh, God alone He knows!" answered the man, and here he put his
knuckles into his eyes, and began to cry and sob.

"Is it possible that this calm can last much longer?"

"It may last six weeks," he answered, whimpering.  "Down here, when
the wind's drawed away by the sun, it may take six weeks afore it
comes on to a blow.  Six weeks of calm down here ain't thought nothen
of," and here he burst out blubbering again.

"Where do you get your liquor from?" said I.

"Oh, don't talk of it!" he replied, with a maudlin shake of the head.

"Drinking'll not help you," said I; "you'll be all the likelier to
catch the malady for drinking.  This is a sort of time, I should
think, when a man most wants his senses.  A breeze may come, and we
ought to decide where to steer the barque to.  The vessel's under all
plain sail, too, and here we are, four men and a useless passenger,
should it come on to blow suddenly--

"We didn't sign on under you," he interrupted, with a tipsy scowl,
"and as ye ain't no good either as a sailor or doctor, you can keep
your blooming sarmons to yourself till they're asked for."

I had now not only to fear the cholera but to dread the men.  My
mental distress was beyond all power of words to convey: I wonder it
did not quickly drive me crazy and hurry me overboard.  I lurked in
the cabin to be out of sight of the fellows, and all the while my
imagination was tormenting me with first pangs of the cholera, and
every minute I was believing I had the mortal malady.  Sometimes I
would creep up the companion steps and cautiously peer around, and
always I beheld the same dead, faint blue surface of the sea
stretching like an ocean in a dream into the faint indefinable
distances.  But shocking as that calm was to me, I very well knew
there was nothing wonderful or preternatural in it.  Our forefoot
five days before had struck the equatorial zone called the Doldrums,
and at a period of the year when a fortnight or even a month of
atmospheric lifelessness might be as confidently looked for as the
rising and setting of the sun.

At nine o'clock that night I was sitting at the cabin table with
biscuit and a little weak brandy and water before me, when I was
hailed by some one at the open skylight above.  It was black night,
though the sky was glorious with stars: the moon did not rise till
after eleven.  I had lighted the cabin lamp, and the sheen of it was
upon the face of Archer.

"The two men are dead and gone," said he, "and now the bo'sun and
Bill are down.  There's Jim dead drunk in his hammock.  I can't stand
the cries of sick men.  What with liquor and pain, the air below
suffocates me.  Let me come aft, sir, and keep along with you.  I'm
sober now.  Oh, Christ, have mercy upon me!  It's my turn next, ain't
it?"

I passed a glass of brandy to him through the skylight, then joined
him on deck, and told him that the two dead bodies must be thrown
overboard, and the sick men looked to.  For some time he refused to
go forward with me, saying that he was already poisoned and deadly
sick, and a dying man, and that I had no right to expect that one
dying man should wait upon another.  However, I was determined to
turn the dead out of the ship in any case, for in freeing the vessel
of the remains of the victims might lie my salvation.  He consented
to help me at last, and we went into the forecastle and between us
got the bodies out of their bunks, and dropped them, weighted, over
the rail.  The boatswain and the other men lay groaning and writhing
and crying for water; cursing at intervals.  A coil of black smoke
went up from the lamp flame to the blackened beam under which the
light was burning.  The atmosphere was horrible.  I bade Archer help
me to carry a couple of mattresses on to the forecastle, and we got
the sick men through the hatch, and they lay there in the coolness
with plenty of cold water beside them and a heaven of stars above,
instead of a low-pitched ceiling of grimy beam and plank dark with
processions of cockroaches, and dim with the smoke of the stinking
slush lamp.

All this occupied us till about half-past ten.  When I went aft I was
seized with nausea, and, sinking upon the skylight, dabbled my brow
in the dew betwixt the lifted lids for the refreshment of the
moisture.  I believed that my time had come, and that this sickness
was the cholera.  Archer followed me, and seeing me in a posture of
torment, as he supposed, concluded that I was a dead man.  He flung
himself upon the deck with a groan, and lay motionless, crying out at
intervals, "God, have mercy!  God, have mercy!" and that was all.

In about half an hour's time the sensation of sickness passed.  I
went below for some brandy, swallowed half a glass, and returned with
a dram for Archer, but the man had either swooned or fallen asleep,
and I let him lie.  I had my senses perfectly, but felt shockingly
weak in body, and I could think of nothing consolatory to diminish my
exquisite distress of mind.  Indeed, the capacity of realization grew
unendurably poignant.  I imagined too well, I figured too clearly.  I
pictured myself as lying dead upon the deck of the barque, found a
corpse by some passing vessel after many days; and so I dreamt, often
breaking away from my horrible imaginations with moans and starts,
then pacing the deck to rid me of the nightmare hag of thought till I
was in a fever, then cooling my head by laying my cheek upon the
dew-covered skylight.

By-and-by the moon rose, and I sat watching it.  In half an hour she
was a bright light in the east, and the shaft of silver that slept
under her stretched to the barque's side.  It was just then that one
of the two sick men on the forecastle sent up a yell.  The dreadful
note rang through the vessel, and dropped back to the deck in an echo
from the canvas.  A moment after I saw a figure get on to the
forecastle-rail and spring overboard.  I heard the splash of his
body, and, bounding over to Archer, who lay on the deck, I pulled and
hauled at him, roaring out that one of the sick men had jumped
overboard, and then rushed forward and looked over into the water in
the place where the man had leapt, but saw nothing, not even a ripple.

I turned and peered close at the man who lay on the forecastle, and
discovered that the fellow who had jumped was the boatswain.  I went
again to the rail to look, and lifted a coil of rope from a pin,
ready to fling the fakes to the man, should he rise.  The moonlight
was streaming along the ocean on this side of the ship, and now, when
I leaned over the rail for the second time, I saw a figure close
under the bows.  I stared a minute or two, the colour of the body
blended with the gloom, yet the moonlight was upon him too, and then
it was that after looking awhile, and observing the thing to lie
motionless, I perceived that it was the body that had been upon the
raft!  No doubt the extreme horror raised in me by the sight of the
poisonous thing beheld in that light and under such conditions crazed
me.  I have recollection of laughing wildly, and defying the dark
floating shape in insane language.  I remember that I shook my fist
and spat at it, and that I turned to seek for something to hurl at
the body, and it may have been that in the instant of turning, my
senses left me, for after this I can recall no more.


The sequel to this tragic and extraordinary experience will be found
in the following statement, made by the people of the ship
_Forfarshire_, from Calcutta to Liverpool:--"August 29, 1857.  When
in latitude 2° 15' N. and longitude 79° 40' E. we sighted a barque
under all plain sail, apparently abandoned.  The breeze was very
scanty, and though we immediately shifted our helm for her on judging
that she was in distress, it took us all the morning to approach her
within hailing distance.  Everything was deserted, and there were no
signs of anything living in her.  We sent a boat in charge of the
second officer, who returned and informed us that the barque was the
_Justitia_, of London.  We knew that she was from Calcutta, for we
had seen her lying in the river.  The second officer stated that
there were three dead bodies aboard, one in a hammock in the
forecastle, a second on a mattress on the forecastle, and a third
against the coamings of the main-hatch; there was also a fourth man
lying at the heel of the port cathead--he did not seem to be dead.
On this Dr. Davison was requested to visit the barque, and he was put
aboard by the second officer.  He returned quickly with one of the
men, whom he instantly ordered to be stripped and put into a warm
bath, and his clothes thrown overboard.  He said that the dead showed
unmistakable signs of having died from cholera.  We proceeded, not
deeming it prudent to have anything further to do with the ill-fated
craft.  The person we had rescued remained insensible for two days;
his recovery was then slow, but sure, thanks to the skilful treatment
of Dr. Davison.  He informed us that his name was Thomas Barron, and
that he was a passenger on board the _Justitia_ for Capetown.  He was
the travelling representative of a large Birmingham firm.  The barque
had on the preceding Friday fallen in with a raft bearing a dead
body.  A boat was sent to bring away a parcel from the raft's mast,
and it is supposed that the contents of the parcel communicated the
cholera.  There were fifteen souls when the vessel left Calcutta, and
all perished except the passenger, Thomas Barron."




III

THE KITE*

MAJOR-GENERAL E. D. SWINTON, D. S. O.


*This story, which was first printed in June, 1906, is here
reproduced by permission of the author.


"Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the
desire."--(Ecclesiastes.)


I

Three dirty and breathless soldiers scrambled painfully through a gap
in the hedge on the brow of the rounded slope of the hill and, taking
out their maps and field-glasses, lay down prone on their stomachs.
So dirty were they that it was hard to realize that they were
officers.  Placing both elbows squarely on the ground, to counteract
the unsteadiness of hand caused by their heaving bodies, their thumbs
were soon busily twisting the focussing-screws as they directed their
glasses on to a large patch of scrub away below, some three miles to
the west.  On a rise in this rough country a long line of
intermittent flashes could be seen with the naked eye.

The hedge stretched for some distance along the brow of the hill.
About one hundred yards behind, and parallel to it, between hazel
hedges, ran a country road.  This--hardly more than a lane--was, to
the south of this point, sunken, but just here was flush with the
ground.  On the near side of it, immediately behind where the
officers were lying, was an open gate, and close to this gate a young
poplar tree, against which was propped a motor-bicycle.  In the lane
itself were a motor-cyclist and a couple of orderlies, the latter
dismounted and holding the horses of the party.  Down below, in the
direction in which the three were gazing, stretched a peaceful
panorama of undulating country, fading into bluish heat-haze in the
distance.  The different crops gave a many-hued appearance to the
landscape, the richer colour of the uncut hay alternating with the
still crude green of the young grain and the reddish purple of the
beetroot fields.  The few fleecy clouds floating lazily in the sky
here and there cast vague shadows, which slowly moved over hill and
dale.  The white walls and shining roofs of the homesteads dotted
about stood out gleaming in the sunlight, and these, with the patches
of woodland, caught the eye and assisted in some estimation of
distance, otherwise impossible upon the variegated background with
its network of hedges.

It was an almost perfect day in early June.  Yet, in spite of the
brilliant sunshine, there was an oppressive sultriness in the air
which gave more than a hint of a coming storm.

Far off, in the same positions they had occupied all day, hung three
war-balloons, motionless in the still air.  They were of a curious
shape, and as the sun glistened on their distended skins they had the
appearance of three monstrous and bloated yellow caterpillars.  Upon
the youngest of the three men under the hedge they had a disquieting
effect of oppression.  He felt that they were the eyes of the
enemy--as indeed they were--and was uneasy under their silent gaze;
at times he even imagined that those menacing eyes could read not
only his actions, but his very thoughts and desires.

Though the elements seemed at peace, there was clear evidence that
man was not, for here and there could be seen the angry glow of a
conflagration with its pall of black smoke.  In places the
dirty-white dust-clouds betrayed the movement of masses, though the
masses were not visible, while over certain spots thick clusters of
smoke-puffs, suddenly breaking out like signal flags from the
halliards of a ship, showed where shrapnel shell were raining down
destruction.  These puffs were of different colours--the majority
pure white, but others were of a purple and magenta hue as violet as
aniline dyes.  An occasional bright flash, followed by a dull
detonation and an upshooting trefoil of black smoke, marked the fall
of high-explosive shell.  From the clamour that filled the air, one
might have imagined that the whole countryside formed one large
shipyard or boilermaker's shop, so metallic was the sound of musketry
close at hand.  Every moment this body of sound was stabbed by the
nearer rifle-shots which rang out separately, and broken by the
occasional throb of machine-guns, the mechanical beat of pom-poms,
and the booming of artillery.  But to an ear used to the noise of
battles, there was one fresh sound--that of the quick-firing
field-guns; for as they seized some fleeting occasion to pour out
their squalls of shell, individual shots could not be distinguished
in the continuous roar.

Notwithstanding this din in the air, it was difficult to see any
signs of life.  Of the work of man there was ample evidence; but of
man himself--save those on the hill--there was no trace.  Had a
curious observer, however, walked some way down the bellying slope of
the hill, he would have seen the backs of a long line of infantry
digging for dear life near the bottom.

From all this turmoil down below, the little group at the top of the
hill seemed strangely detached.  No shell flew screeching over their
heads, no bullet sang near them--they gazed on undisturbed.  At last
one put down his glasses and sat up with a grunt.

"We've been looking at the wrong place all along.  We've been
watching their flashes and bluff trenches on that rise.  The guns are
using flameless powder, and are a good deal closer--more to the left
of the rough.  I can just make them out, but cannot see how many
there are."

"I can't see anything except the flashes which appear just where the
trenches are," replied a second.

"Yes, of course, that's their game!  D'you see that red and white
farm?"

"Yes."

"Above that there's some water."

"Yes."

"Above that, still more to the left, on that hump covered with--"

"Yes, yes, I have them now; I should say there was more than one
battery.  They don't seem to be entrenched, either; but it is hard to
tell on that background."

"There are more like twenty guns there," continued the first.  "You
may be certain they're entrenched--they're no fools.  They have shown
the dummies and hidden the real emplacements, which would not require
much work on such a place as that--an ideal spot for guns."

"And so is this," added the third, the youngest of the three.  "If it
were not for their balloons, we could get a whole brigade up here
unseen all the way, and suddenly open fire from behind this hedge.
Even if they are entrenched, we could enfilade them and give them a
bad time--enough to keep them quiet.  If they're not, Lord help them,
once we start!"  He chuckled softly, and muttered fervently to
himself, "Yes, Lord help them!"  He was a Gunner.

He stared for a minute at the nearest balloon, silently and in deep
thought, then taking off his hat, began absently to mop his head.
Suddenly he stopped quite still, his head turned to one side as if
listening.

"My God! it is rising!"

The two gazed at him in blank amaze, and, startled, at once seized
their repeating-pistols.

"The wind, I mean--the wind.  I feel it on my damp head!"

They still looked blank.

"Don't you see?  If the wind only rises, down go those cursed
balloons, and then--"  There was no need to finish the sentence.  The
others jumped to their feet; one sucked his finger and held it up;
the other picked a puff-ball and threw it in the air; all watched it
gently wafted up the hill.

"Yes, look over there; that's more than haze--it's cloud!"

Toward the west there was now a low bank of gray cloud stretched
across the horizon, against which the intermittent flashes showed
bright.

"Whistle up the cyclist!" snapped out the eldest of the three,
sitting down with notebook and pencil.

As the cyclist came up, he said, "Take this as quick as possible to
the General of the 10th Division: he must be found; but if on the way
you get near the officer commanding the Corps Artillery, show it to
him and say I want him to read it."

After a minute they heard, as they got up, the snort of the motor
breasting a rise on their left, and after three minutes there was
nothing but the reek of petrol to show that any one had been on that
hilltop.

They had gone and no one had noticed two small scoops in the
ground--one under the hedge and the other farther along near the
road--where ranging shell had fallen.



II

The wind has risen with the coming storm, and, above, the white
clouds begin to chase each other across the blue sky.  Out in the
open and on the hilltops the trees are stricken by gusts of wind
which rob the hawthorns of the last of their bloom.  In the sheltered
valleys there is peace and quiet, and under the lee of the hill the
sultriness of the whole morning seems to have been concentrated.

The artillery brigade has now been waiting some time in that hollow
lane between the high banks covered with wildflowers.  Long enough to
breathe the panting gun-teams, and for some of the gunners to
dismount and pluck dog-roses, which they have stuck in their hats.

The still air in this little heat-trap, heavy with the smell of
horses and the overpowering scent of May-blossom strewn on the
ground, combined with the drowsy buzzing of the bumblebees--the
gentle murmur of a hot summer's day--has a somnolent effect on all
except the animals, as they stand there zigzagged across the lane,
the guns and limbers slewed to ease the strain.  They present a
succession of shiny quivering skins, and tails switching in a vain
endeavour to drive off the hovering swarms of flies who divided their
attention between the backs of the men and the horses.  Though there
is no conversation, for the men--here and there chewing a biscuit or
taking a sparing drink from their water-bottles--are all tired, yet
there is a general air of pleasurable expectancy, for the nature of
their present errand is now known to all.  It is their first
experience of active service, and the event now awaited is to be
their baptism of fire.  In the minds of the more serious, a slight
though vague feeling of apprehension--running like the coloured
thread through the lay of a rope--adds zest to their suppressed
excitement, for many and wonderful have been the yarns going the
round of the barrack-rooms as to the powers of the enemy's
quick-firing artillery.  Here a more phlegmatic man has lit his pipe
and wastefully thrown the match away, to burn to the end among the
nettles on the bank--a thing which alone is sufficient to show that
these are the early days of operations.

How the sun's rays pour down between the trees!  How mercilessly they
betray, even through the cloud of dust still hanging in the air, a
hint of the more unpleasant side of war!  The weary and lathered
horses, the red and strained faces of the men, their peeled noses,
the little runnels made in the grime on their cheeks by the
perspiration as it streams down, the purple sweat-patches in the
greenish-yellow uniform.  Now and again, as if maliciously to
accentuate the contrast between its dainty self and the crowd of men
and animals sweating below, a pale butterfly flits aimlessly in and
out of the shadows--sometimes nearly, but never quite, settling on a
horse or gun.

The windings of the lane only permit a view of some hundred yards of
its length at one time; but even this short distance offers an
impressive sight.  It is apparent, in spite of the dust and dirt,
that the greater number of these men--some still on their horses,
some standing, and some stretched out on the shady side of the
road--are seasoned and in the prime of life; no mere boys, but men in
the best sense of the word, sturdy and full-set.  Even for gunners
they are a fine lot; and during this lull preceding the coming storm,
the sight of this little collection of splendid men and horses raises
thoughts as to whether any other army in the world can produce their
equal.  Both men and animals are the last word in continuous training
and scientific preparation applied to picked material.  Not only are
they good to look upon, but good to act.  From the showy prettiness
of a tournament driving competition to the serious business of
getting on to the target, they excel; for here at this moment is
collected the smartest brigade of field-artillery in the army--and
that means, as they think, the smartest brigade in the world: they
are armed also with the best guns in the world.  There stand the guns
one after another slewed across the narrow road, almost blocking it
with their length.  Wicked they look in their dusty greenish paint,
with an occasional glint of steel where it has been scraped off.
Even to the uninitiated these quick-firers have a more venomous
appearance than the simple old guns; for, with their long, low-hung
bodies peering mysteriously from behind their shields, they look like
monstrous grasshoppers crouching on a hill.  Ugly and venomous
looking, they are the pride of their owners.  Though he may not talk
much about it, never has there been a true gunner who did not love
his weapon and thrill with the idea of using it.

To those, now a little thoughtful on account of the legends
concerning the enemy's wonderful quick-firing artillery, the sight of
their own, whose powers they have so often tested on the
practice-ground, is reassuring.  They have the best gun ever
invented, and at speed of ranging and accuracy of fire they are
unequalled.  What more?  Are they not going to catch the enemy
unawares?  And to be caught unawares by a squall of shrapnel from
modern quick-firers means extinction.

To the officers, the exact nature of the present task is known, and
the possibilities of the occasion better appreciated--for though as
yet without personal experience in war, they know to what a pitch all
the nations have brought their quick-firing artillery, and what is
expected from its "_rafales_," "_tir rapide_," "_schnell
feuer_"--call it what you will--upon an exposed and unsuspecting
enemy.  They are standing alongside the horses, one feeling his
animal's legs, another loosening a girth, but the majority cheerfully
talking in little groups.

At last the dreary wait is over, a flag flickers from one hill to the
other.  "The enemy's balloons are down."  With a sigh of relief the
order is passed, and the brigade moves on, slowly at first, then
breaking into a trot, for its destination is still some way off, and
time, tide, and the chances for quick-firing artillery wait for no
man.

The message has come down from the youngest of the three officers who
were making the reconnaissance under the hedge two hours ago.  For
the past hour he has been watching those malignant balloons from that
same spot, and whistling for the wind.  As the wind has risen, so
have his spirits.  It is a difficult thing to gauge the height of an
object in the air, and several times he has thought that the balloon
nearest the enemy's guns seems lower than it was, only to find out he
is wrong.

The cloud-bank to the west grows larger, and as its ragged edge
creeps up over the blue sky, the dark background shows up the
glistening balloons the more brilliantly.  The two farthest off are
coming down--there is no doubt about it--and at last the nearer one
seems lower.  Yes--it is!  Down, down it sinks.  When it is quite
close to the ground he waves to a signaller behind the road, who
passes on the message, and so back it goes to the waiting brigade.

He crawls behind the hedge for a moment to watch the range-takers,
who have been up here for the past half-hour and have taken and
checked and rechecked the distance to the enemy's guns.  Some men
with tools also, who have uprooted the gate-posts, and widened some
openings from the lane on to the hilltop, are now cutting little
windows through the hedge on the brow.  A few officers arrive ahead
of the batteries, and to these he points out their positions and the
target and range.

All is ready, and the head of the column is even now jangling up the
hill.



III

The same landscape as watched by the three under the hedge, but
viewed from the other side.  In the foreground, half hidden among the
patches of gorse on a gentle slope, is a long irregular line of
perhaps twenty guns.  It is difficult even at this short distance to
count their number, for they are dotted about here and there amongst
the clumps of cover.  Though of a grayer hue, they have a strong
family resemblance to those others resting in the little lane on the
hillside.  By each is a water-bucket, the purpose of which is shown
by the damp earth round the gun, and the absence of dust.  Alongside
also are little shelter-pits dug for the gun detachments, the bright
yellow of the freshly turned earth artfully concealed with pieces of
bush.  The guns, the limbers, and the very horses themselves--over
there in the rear--are embowered in greenery.  The incongruous
Jack-in-the-Green appearance thus given to these engines of
destruction seems at first ill-timed foolery.  It strikes a jarring
note, as does laughter in the presence of death.  Overhead, to one
side of the line of guns, a huge yellow balloon sways in the rising
wind and strains at the cable which slants away down to a small
collection of wagons in a convenient hollow.

To the general din of battle all round is periodically added the roar
of some of the guns in the line as a target worthy of a "_rafale_" of
shell is found.  The paroxysms of noise indulged in at intervals by
these quick-firers are the only sign they give of their action, for
they neither belch out flame nor kick up dust.  Each fresh outburst
seems to call up an echo from the direction of some absurdly
ill-concealed earthworks about half a mile to the rear.  The enemy
are shooting badly.  Few shells fall near the guns, though many pass
over with a shriek to burst in the neighbourhood of those conspicuous
earthworks, whose parapet must be a very shell trap, so continuous
are the explosions on it.  An occasional heavy shell rumbles up from
the South, and, passing over with the noise of an electric tram,
detonates in a fountain of yellow earth near the same target.

Near the focus of these explosions are a number of men sitting at the
bottom of deep holes, and from their occupation it appears that not
all the explosions so close to them are caused by hostile shell.
They are busily employed in setting off flash bombs just outside
their yellow parapet whenever their own artillery fires.  And as two
more shrapnel from different directions whistle high above the
much-decorated guns, and burst over the pits, it is clear that the
latter are the targets aimed at.

This is the method in the madness of these troglodytes in their pits
and of the other stage effects.

Some little way from his guns is a dried-up saturnine sort of man,
dirty and anything but smart--the commander of the artillery.  He is
talking to a staff-officer, with occasional pauses as he stoops to
gaze through a telescope mounted on a tripod, not to the southeast,
in which direction his guns are firing, but toward the hills to the
east.  Close by sits another officer at a field telephone in a hole
in the ground; such work is at the present moment too important for
an orderly.  From the instrument a cable, sagging from one bush to
another in loops, leads toward the wagons near the balloon anchorage:
this cable is the nerve leading from the eye up aloft to the nerve
centre below.  A few soldiers are sitting about.  Not only do these
men wear a different uniform from those other gunners now perspiring
on that hillside, but they are unmistakably of a different race.

The Commander again takes a long look toward the hills where
something seems to excite his apprehension, for he converses
earnestly with the staff-officer, and the two look more than once
toward a poplar tree the top half of which is visible above that hill
on the East.  The wind increases.

The distant balloons are already gradually descending, and a message
shortly comes down from the observer above that it is too windy to
remain up.  The word is given, and slowly the great mass is hauled
down to the depression near the wagons, where it is practically
hidden, its approach to the ground being the occasion of special
attentions from the enemy.  Here, like Gulliver among the
Lilliputians, it is seized by many hands and bound.  Hardly has it
nestled, with much heaving of billowy sides, into its hollow, when
the eye is attracted by something dancing up and down among the
brushwood close to it.  It is an oblong framework, partially covered
with dirty gray canvas, which has commenced to make sundry abortive
little swoops up into the air, ending in abrupt dives down again to
earth.  Finally this weird kite--for kite it is--makes up its mind
and sails steadily upward to the tune of its whining cable-drum.  Up,
up it goes, holding well in the strong breeze till it becomes a mere
speck in the sky.  Another kite follows, then another, and again one
more, threaded on the same cable, till with the combined pull it is
stretched as taut as a piano wire, and hums in the breeze like the
weather mainstay of a racing yacht.

The Commander walks over to the starting-point of the kites, where,
sitting near an exaggerated clothes-basket, is a young officer.  He
is unshaven, his face is pale and drawn, and he appears worn out as
he sips slowly from the cup of his flask, but as his senior
approaches, he rises, salutes, and listens attentively to his
somewhat lengthy instructions.  He is an exceptionally slight man,
and his general air of fatigue is explained by the fact that he has
been observing from the balloon for the past three hours; the dark
rings under his eyes show where the constant strain has most told.
In spite of this he is again to go up in the kite, not because there
is none other capable, but because the advantage of having up aloft a
pair of eyes that already know the lie of the country is at the
present juncture of greater importance than the fatigue of any man.

As the Commander concludes his harangue, a shell bursts on the ground
close to him, covering him with sand.  He does not pause to shake the
sand off, but finishes his sentence: "Of course it is a chance, but
they may not notice you go up against this cloudy background, and may
be tempted to take up that position by seeing the balloon go down.
If they do, well--" and he looks toward his guns and smiles
thoughtfully.

The younger man nods, takes one more pull at his flask, feels if both
pairs of field-glasses are hanging round his neck--he carries
two--straps a telephone receiver and mouthpiece round his head, and
climbs into the clothes-basket which is held by the men.  The basket
is attached to the rigid kite cable by runners.  After the gear is
tried, another large kite, which is harnessed to his prosaic-looking
chariot, is thrown into the air.  Making one or two ineffectual
dives, it catches the wind and begins to pull.  Slowly at first the
observer rises, then faster as the great wings above him catch more
of the breeze.  Now they feel it, and up he sails like a pantomime
stormfiend, to the accompanying moan of the wire vibrating in the
wind.  In a few moments he is a stationary spot far up on the
slanting wire.

How insignificant in contrast to the great bulk of the balloon does
the whole collection of kites appear--yet--the eye is there.



IV

The commanding officer goes back to his station by the telephone, and
waits.  Prrrrrt, grumbles the instrument, and this time it is he
himself who takes the receiver.  He listens attentively, for it is
difficult to hear along an aerial line, and there is much repetition
before he finally replies "All right!" to his subordinate up above.
A word to a staff-officer, who at once waves to some one near the
guns.  Then ensues much activity.  Within three minutes every muzzle
has been switched round by hand so as to face the hills on the East,
at half a right angle from its former direction.  The gun-layers at
once start laying at the range obtained by those few shots fired some
hours back, and buckets are emptied on the ground, but no effort is
made to dig shelters, for they will be unnecessary.  The exposure of
and loss to be caused by the new position is ignored.  When all are
at their stations ready to open fire, a whistle sounds.

The suppressed excitement is catching.  That the Commander himself is
not unaffected is shown from the manner in which he ostentatiously,
and with almost too great deliberation, selects a cigar from his case
and begins chewing the end of it....

"Prrrrrt," rattles the telephone: the Commander drops the chewed
cigar and listens.

"Are you ready?" gurgles down the wire.

"Yes."

"The head of their column is not far off the poplar tree."

A pause.

* * * * * * *

Meanwhile, on the hilltop, the watcher has again sat down.  Now there
is nothing to watch in the sky, he sets himself to study the enemy's
guns, amongst which he seems vaguely to discover some movement.  Can
they have suspected anything?  As he sweeps his glass carelessly
across the gray cloud toward its terrestrial object, something--a
midge probably--in the upper corner of the object-glass catches his
eye.  He puts down the glass and rubs the lens with his handkerchief.
He looks again.  The midge is still there.  He looks directly at
it--it is a collection of midges.  Good God!  These are no
midges--they are a covey of war kites high up in the sky!  Yes, and
there is the observer hanging some distance below, who must have seen
all!

By this time two or three guns have turned out of the lane and are
unlimbering.

He rises and tries to shout--it is too late.

* * * * * * *

"Now they're turning out of the road, through three or four gaps, to
come into action--now two guns have left the road--hullo!--are you
there?" continues the thin metallic voice down the wire.

"Yes."

"Let them have it."

The Commander, from his lowly position, looks up and nods to a
signaller standing up on a mound; the latter drops his flag.

The air is split by the noise of the whole line of guns as they open
rapid fire.  It is like the report of one piece prolonged into a
continuous long note.

Upon the brow of that hill of doom, hiding the sky-line for perhaps
400 yards to the right of the now obscured poplar, appears a crown of
magenta-coloured smoke, out of which a succession of light flashes
sparkle.

* * * * * * *

By those up on that hill is heard a faint roar in the distance,
followed by a whistling sound, and the air above--all round--is full
of crackling reports, shouts, oaths, and groans.  Bullets tear the
earth on all sides, and the steel gun-shields ring out like gongs
under their blows.  Everything except the dreadful sounds becomes
blurred in the puffs of acrid, tinted smoke which the wind drives
across the hilltop.

* * * * * * *

In a minute, automatically, the fire ceases--a long period for
quick-firing guns which pour out fifteen shells a minute, and much
ammunition, but this is an opportunity given by the gods.

The Commander puts the telephone to his lips:

"Hullo!--is that enough?"

"Wait a minute.  My God!  It is."



V

Not one return shot has been fired.

The smoke is dissipated by the wind as soon as the squall of shell
ceases, and the scene of the butchery stands revealed.

Behind the hedge are three guns unharmed except for splintered wood.
Their green tint is all mottled with oval patches of shining silver,
plated by the metal of the glancing bullets.  Men are lying about
singly, nearly all wounded in the head, and nearly all dead.  A few
who still crouch paralyzed behind the shields seem unhurt.  Horses
lie tied together by their harness in kicking, screaming bunches.  At
the gateway is a tangle of capsized gun, limber, man, and beast,
which entirely blocks that part of the lane.

This is an _abattoir_ better undescribed in detail--a medley of dead
and dying men and animals, and of vehicles jammed into a solid mass.
At intervals guns lie upturned or wedged across.  The mass still
struggles and heaves.  Here and there drivers have half succeeded in
driving their guns up the bank, in a gallant attempt to get out of
the shambles, with the result that the horses lie dead on the top,
and the guns lie overturned in the hollow.  A few unharmed and dazed
officers and men still shout orders and shove and push at the guns.
There, where an ammunition wagon, hit direct by a shell, has
exploded, is a cleared space.  Branches and twigs are splintered in
all directions, and the shrapnel balls have stripped the leaves from
the trees and scattered a sparse shower of green over their handiwork.

Though at least one of the shells has not burst exactly, for on its
back, under the hedge on the brow of the hill, lies the headless body
of the young gunner officer--the glasses still in his left hand, a
handkerchief in the right--yet, as the small voice had squeaked down
the telephone wire 5000 yards away--it _is_ enough!




IV

SUPERDIRIGIBLE "GAMMA-I"*

BY DONN BYRNE


*Reprinted by permission of the author and of Charles Scribner's Sons.


The lights of Dunkirk slipped rearward, vibrating like a lantern at a
ship's stern.  They became a vague yellow splotch, like a hazy
harvest moon; they became a dim halo, and narrowed down to an orange
pin-point, like a smoker's match in a fog.  Ypres showed southward in
a pale aureole.  Afar off the guns of Flanders thundered like drums.

Meriwell, as he leaned over the middle car of the dirigible, lowering
his masked head to the wind, watched the black country skim by as if
it were being pulled along by a rope.  A spring wind cut past like a
hurricane, and in it Meriwell could taste the sharp tang of gunpowder
mingled with the scent of April flowers.  Ypres flashed by beneath
them and Cambrai rose like a star.  The noise of the artillery
discharges came nearer.  It took on the heavy, booming tones of a
March sea beating hollowly on cliffs.

"We're coming near the firing-line," Meriwell said to himself.  "We
ought to be rising now."

He glanced across to where the steersman stood cowled and rigid at
his wheel, his slim, tall form suggested more than defined by the
hooded electric lights.  Beside him poring over compass and map, his
pale lawyer's face showing up like that of a hunting-bird, was the
navigating lieutenant.  In the shadows, leaning over the edge of the
car, as a captain leans over his flying bridge, was the flight
commander, old Colonel Sanderson.  Meriwell glanced surreptitiously
at his square-cut, tow-like beard and bowed engineer's shoulders.
They seemed to droop more than ever to-night.

"Poor old skipper!" Meriwell muttered sympathetically.

The guns of the firing-line crashed into the air with heavy,
shattering blasts.  In the distance there showed the faint shadows of
lights.  Green shadows, that were lyddite; and infinitesimal
pin-points of yellow, that were the flashes of rifles; and the pretty
orange of shrapnel; and the blinding white of magnesium flares.

"Eighteen degrees up," the navigating lieutenant ordered.  He watched
his plumb-line while the steersman heaved on his switch.  "Easy!
Steady!  Right-o!"

The floor of the car tilted like the deck of a steamer rising to the
swell.  The huge dirigible nosed her way upward like a mounting
dragon-fly.  They passed through a fleece of cloud that touched them
caressingly like soft fingers.  The noise of battle beneath them
faded into a vibrating bass chord.  The propellers purred like giant
cats.

"She answered like a blood mare," said the navigator, pride ringing
in his voice.

"If only my guns and bombs go as well as your planes," Meriwell told
him, "I'll be satisfied."

"They will, never fear," the navigator laughed.

They were all proud of her, navigator, gunnery lieutenant, engineers,
and crew.  Full-fledged, like Minerva from the head of Jove, she had
appeared from the tousled brain of the queer, misshapen Scotch
engineer of the Clyde, who had come knocking at the door of the
war-office when the slug-shaped Zeppelins were pouring fire on the
heart of London and the British airmen were relying on frail,
insufficient biplanes--sparrow-hawks competing with eagles.  They
had, thank God! trusted that little man with the Scots accent and the
brier pipe, and here they had her now in the air, three hundred feet
of her, a miracle of aluminum and gas and oiled silk, rigid,
dependable, fleet as a bullet from a sharpshooter's piece.  Meriwell
studied her lines through the darkness with a throb of pride: her
graceful length, like some wonderful night insect; the wide sweep of
her planes, like a jinn's wings, the shelf-like horizontal ones to
send her nosing upward like a hawk or to let her down in a gliding
sea-gull's swoop, the vertical one like the rudder of a gigantic
vessel; the three great baskets, attached to the keel with the
trellised runway between them; the four propellers, humming like a
nest of bees, two to the forward car, two to the aft; the platform
above the many-jointed aluminum-covered balloons, with its emergency
bridge and rapid-fire gun.

"We're up seven thousand feet," the navigating lieutenant grinned.
"How do you like it?"

"Don't like it at all," Meriwell answered.  His teeth were chattering.

"You'll like it less in a minute.  I'm going up to ten."

The din of fighting below had vanished into a faint murmur and the
flashing guns and flaming artillery had become small, flickering
lights, like fireflies on an August night.  Occasionally a cloud
flicked past below them and shut off even the pinpoints of light.
Here and there a group of stars showed, coldly lustrous, while
southward toward Reims one fell sheer, like a bomb.

"I'd rather be shot than as cold as this," Meriwell grumbled.
Beneath his leather suit and woolen mask his skin had become rough as
sandpaper.

He looked about the car.  The navigator stamped his feet and swung
his arms with the cold.  The steersman crouched low behind the wheel.
Four of the crew huddled in blankets against the walls of the basket.
Only the commander stood imperturbable and grim, looking into the
night.  The shaded electric bulbs threw a sickly yellow light over
the mechanism of the dirigible; over the black signal-board, on which
green, red, and white circles and triangles showed, messages to and
from the engineers fore and aft; over the row of switches, like those
in a railroad tower, that opened the cages beneath the cars to
release the pear-shaped bombs; over the navigator's map and compass.
They outlined dimly the machine gun that peered over each side
swathed in their oilskin coverings.  They drew strange, green glints
from barometer and spirit-level, and made silver sparkles on the
frost crystals that were forming, parallelogram on parallelogram and
triangle on triangle, among the twisted riggings of the car.

"What time is it?" Meriwell asked.

"It's ten-thirty," the navigator jerked.  "We'll make Mainz by two
and be back about dawn."

The cold became more dry and piercing.  It seemed to ooze in at the
pores and mingle with the blood and compose itself into a mixture
that chilled flesh and bone.  Meriwell felt his limbs going numb.
The countryside beneath was becoming darker.  There were no longer
great chandeliers of light to show towns and small clusters that were
villages.  To the left a faint geometrical array of arc lamps rose
dimly.  The navigator crossed to the side of the car and looked at it
for a moment.  He shook his head grimly.  Meriwell knew it was
Brussels.  A cloud enveloped them and dashed them with particles of
dew that were like a shower of frost.  Through the thick spray the
figures of the steersman and commander loomed up gigantically, like
visitors from another world showing vaguely through a misty dawn.

There was something eerie, Meriwell thought, in the immobility of the
commander.  He should have shown more eagerness, more of a sense of
satisfied ambition.  For years the old engineer officer had lived in
the hope of seeing England recapture her lead in the aviation of the
world.  He had worked night and day in his laboratory, testing gases,
testing metals, working out models for a battleship of the air that
would thrust aside the Zeppelin and the Schutte-Laenze as the steamer
put aside the barkentine.  And now to-night he was commanding his
dream for the first time in action.  He was to raid the great railway
network of Mainz, over which German corps were entraining night and
day for the last supreme effort to gain the coast towns.  In two
hours he would be tearing the mighty terminal to shreds of twisted
rails and charred wood, and distorted lumps of iron that had once
been panting locomotives.  Meriwell was proud to be with him, and the
commander should be proudest of all.  The gunner remembered how the
old man had pleaded for the detail.  The chief of staff had argued he
was too old; he was too valuable.  The chief had had in mind a thing
Meriwell had forgotten and which suddenly came back to him with
stunning force.  But the old aviator had won.

"The old sportsman!" Meriwell said to himself, and his throat choked
with pride; "the great old sportsman!"

He remembered how, on the first raid of the leprous-white Zeppelins
from over the channel, the first house to be struck was the house of
the old commander, a square, uncompromising, soldier-like house on
Notting Hill, where his wife--the gray-haired, motherly lady with the
dignified eyes--dwelt, and his widow daughter, mourning her husband
dead somewhere in France.  His soldier son, of the Sherwood
Foresters, home on leave, was sleeping at the time.  There were heard
the high whir of propellers and the desultory crashing of
anti-aircraft guns.  Then, accurate as a thunderbolt, the great
pear-shaped bomb had dropped, with the crash of lightning striking a
tree.  A colleague of the Royal Artillery, a blunt old fighter, with
a cropped gray moustache, had told him about it, tactfully,
laconically, with a fighter's sympathy.  He told him how the
gray-haired lady had died--very dignified, as she had been in life;
very peaceful, as befitted an upright gentlewoman, her calm features
mercifully unmarked.  He stumbled as he spoke of the young captain,
for a soldier should die on the battlefield, with guns roaring and
his men about him, instead of being potted like a rat in a
corn-stack.  When he came to the daughter his face diffused to purple
and his gray eyes flashed.

"Curse them!" he swore viciously, "curse them night, noon, and
morning! living and dead! the rotten gallows-birds!"

"That's all right, Carter," the aviator had said.  "Thank you for
telling me."  And he had walked off, fumbling pitifully at his
sword-belt.  What black hairs he had left had turned white since
then, and his gray eyes were more sunken, but his beard jutted
savagely since, and his voice snapped commands to his airmen with a
ring like that of steel.

"I wish we were over that railway station," said Meriwell to himself,
grimly.  He squinted across at the switches of the bomb-cages and at
the silent machine guns in their oilskin swathings.  "He's going to
get some good work in to-night, if I can help."

The officer at the compass straightened suddenly.  He punched at the
indicator buttons in a quick burst of energy.

"Up planes," he shouted.  "Nine degrees down."

"Nine down!" the steersman repeated.  He heaved on his switch with a
long, graceful pull.  The notches clicked successively like a clock
in winding.  The car tilted forward gradually.  Meriwell grasped at a
support to keep himself from sliding.  Wind flew against them in a
strong upward sweep.  The steersman braced to his wheel like a
wrestler.  The propellers purred less loudly.  Meriwell had the
sensation of being gently pulled downward.  He looked over the side
of the car fearfully.  A few desultory lights showed dimly, like the
lamps of a train in the distance.  An engineer officer dropped into
the car from the passage, electric torch in one hand and oil-can in
the other.  He reeked pungently of gasolene.

"Time you were going down," he remarked peevishly to the navigating
lieutenant in strong Scots.  "Do you want all my engines to freeze?"

"It'll be hot enough pretty soon," the navigator jeered at him.

"Where are we?" Meriwell asked.

"South of Maastricht," the lieutenant answered.  He was as excited as
a schoolboy.  "We'll be over the border in a minute."  He leaned
toward the wind-gauge.  "Doing seventy-two miles an hour," he shouted
after the engineer.

It was warmer now.  Meriwell glanced at the scale beside the
barometer and saw it registered two thousand five hundred feet.
Vague, clean scents stole through the wind--the white odour of
hawthorn and the freshness of spring grass and early flowers, and the
transparent odour of the wind, like the transparent taste of water.
Sounds rose vaguely into the air--the shadows of sounds, it
seemed--the baying of an uneasy dog and the twitter of startled
birds.  An automobile-horn screamed raucously and somewhere there was
the cutting whistle of a train.  As he leaned over the side of the
car, the gunnery lieutenant saw the sparsely lighted land slip away
beneath them as a pier slips away from a liner.  Occasionally there
was a brightly lighted municipal building; occasionally a microscopic
point that Meriwell felt was a man with a lantern.  Here and there a
forge licked like flames on a volcano--a mute suggestion of war in
which labour ceased neither night nor day.  Afar off a flashing line
of lights, like the lighted fuse of a crude mine, showed a train
speeding.  Meriwell felt himself looking at these things as a
disembodied spirit might--the last odour and sound and sight of an
earth that years of dwelling in had invested with a great affection.
He felt himself shiver.

He moved slightly against the edge of the car, and as he did he
discovered, with a sense of shock, that his hand had grasped the rail
so tightly that he could hardly move it.  The horrible intent
nervousness that airmen know was lapping itself about him.  He felt a
wild desire to find himself on earth again, so wild that he had to
clinch his teeth to prevent himself from jumping over the side of the
car.  He was suddenly conscious of his nerves--they seemed to spread
all over his body like the veins of an ivy leaf, to be writhing, to
be crying at his finger-tips.  A great fear came on him, as it might
come on a man swimming in the ocean far from sight of land or sail.
They had no right to be there, he said to himself fiercely, no right
to be high among the winds.  They were intruders, impertinently
encroaching on the domain of some Power whose inalienable domain the
air was.  They might irritate It, who had placed them on the earth to
walk with feet on it and not above it to fly with wings.  At any
moment It might arise and smite their meagre human device of gas and
steel as a man might smash a fly on the wall.  He cowered suddenly,
as if expecting a blow.

A faint exhalation of pale light showed to the northeast like a
phosphorescent cloud--Aix-la-Chapelle!  So they were over the border
at last!  Meriwell's teeth set and his eyes glinted.  A sense of
danger seized him, and suddenly there began running in his head the
full sonorous rhythm of the "Watch upon the Rhine."  They were over
the iron wall at last, over the impregnable ring of steel.  In spite
of singing, in spite of all boasting--and as he felt his blood pulse
proudly another chilling terror came over him.  He felt as if the
souls of all the dead fighters of the empire were rising up against
them in a vast current of wings, Saxon men and Prussian and Hessian,
soldiers of Bavaria and of Würtemberg, levies of the Hansa
towns--striking at the steel bird with ineffectual, spiritual
fingers, clinging pathetically to rigging and nacelle and plane,
gazing hatefully at the invaders with horrible bloodshot, unbodily
eyes....

The navigator turned suddenly to the man at the wheel.

"What the deuce is wrong with you?" he raged.  "Starboard, I said.
Starboard!"

The steersman bent to the wheel.  He tugged and pushed until the
veins stood out on his forehead like ropes.

"Can't do anything, sir," he stammered, "I'm jammed."

The navigator jumped to the signal-board.  He snapped switches like
fingers cracking.  He leaned into the shelter-box of the
speaking-tube.

"Cut off," he shouted, "the rudder's jammed.  Engineer-lieutenant
amidships!"

The hum of the propellers died away musically.  The dirigible glided
easily like a bird volplaning.  There was the shuffle of feet along
the metal-latticed passage.  The dour Scots lieutenant dropped into
the car, cotton waste in one hand and oil-can in the other.  His
second, a bright-cheeked Suffolk lad, leaped agilely after him.

"Oil on the hinges all evaporated--with your seventy-two miles an
hour," the lieutenant snapped at the navigator.  "I'll go aft and oil
up."

"I'll do that," the second urged.  He caught at the oil-can and
plucked his torch from its scabbard.  They heard him patter aft in
the rear car.  They saw his light flicker for an instant as he swung
into the rigging.  The Scotsman looked after him with an affectionate
eye.

"A fine lad!" he murmured, "and a fine nerve he has!"

As he looked over the rail of the nacelle Meriwell saw the earth
swing beneath him gently like a cradle rocking.  The swaying lights
gave him a sense of dizziness.  He felt suddenly that the earth was a
small thing, bowling through space like a tossed ball.

"Right!" he heard the engineer's second hail faintly.

"Right-o!" came the cheery call of the navigator.  He watched the
light of the boy's torch as he crept along the rigging to the main
car.  He heard him bandy a hearty word with somebody.  He heard a
gruff word of caution, a laugh, and a choked scream.  Meriwell sprang
to his full height and grasped the rail with both hands.  He saw the
flicker of the shadow as it plunged downward.

"My God!" he blurted.  "He's gone!"

The navigator rushed to the side of the car like a maniac.  The
steersman half-turned from the wheel.  The engineer officer stiffened
like a pointing dog.

"He's gone!" the navigator said stupidly.  "Poor Conroy's gone!"

They stood a moment silent, looking at each other in white horror.
The commander came out of the shadows.  He took his peaked cap off.

"God be good to a gallant officer!" he said.

"Amen!" Meriwell answered.

The engineer strode forward silently through the passage.  The
commander touched the navigating officer on the arm.

"Ahead, Mr. Brennan," he said simply.

The navigator caught up his tube.

"Full ahead," he ordered.  He turned to the steersman.  "Southeast by
east," he directed.

"Southeast by east," the steersman repeated mechanically.  The
propellers throbbed, whirred, hummed.  The night air cut against them
like a whip.  A lone star showed up for a moment in a break of cloud,
and then disappeared again, as a stage disappears between closing
curtains.

Meriwell felt dazed.  War--this wasn't war!  This was a puny fooling
with the engines of destiny, children pulling the triggers of
firearms.  He remembered how a great-uncle of his had died at
Balaklava: a bright morning with the battle-drums beating; guns
pealing, soldiers cheering; Cardigan riding gallantly at the head of
the Light Brigade.  _Pro patria mori_!  Yes--but to fall two thousand
feet in the night-time and to strike an alien ground with a sickening
thud--that was not war.  That was horror.  He remembered
inconsequently how he had heard that a man would be dead before he
struck the ground and the thought consoled him somewhat.

Stollberg slipped past dreamily in a murk, Lamersdorf, Blankenheim,
Adenau and Honnigen.  Carts rattled as they flashed over Dumpelfeld.
At Naub an alert sentry fired his Mauser, a whip's crack and a
bullet's futile ping.  Coblenz flitted past and they were over the
Rhine, black, undulating, reflecting mistily the lamps of unsleeping
barges.  They swung over Wiesbaden, and Mainz came toward them,
ambling like a man into ambush.  The dirigible tilted upward at an
angle of thirty.  Meriwell sprang to the centre of the car.  The
commander climbed forward.

"Remember," he warned.  "Not a second to waste!"

Doubt and nervousness dropped from Meriwell like a cloak.  His brain
sprang into action like a boxer's muscles at the call of the gong.
He clambered forward along the passage toward the first arc.  Already
the gun crew had stripped the covers from the machine guns.  Men
stood alongside the rails with queer umbrella-like things in their
hands--the asbestos parachutes, with their naphtha-soaked torch in
the handle, flares that would light up every cranny in the ground
beneath and protect the dirigible from the light of the flares
themselves.

"Ready, gunner?" asked the navigating lieutenant.

"Ready," Meriwell sang back.

They swung toward the town easily as a ship comes to its pier.
Beneath them they could see the lights of the railroad station, big
violet globes that radiated like stars.  Men hurried to and fro along
the concrete platforms--queer, squat, huddled figures.  Two engines
fussed in and out like busy housewives.  In one corner was a massed
city of railroad-cars.  Rails shone in a bewildering intricacy like a
metal puzzle.  Long, lank sheds showed like barns.

"Ease up," the commander ordered.  He stood square in the centre of
the car, his beard jutting, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.  It
was as if some main nerve had suddenly come into play, electrifying
the great steel vessel.  The navigator sprang to the speaking-tube.

"Cut off," he shouted.  He thrust the steersman away from the wheel
and caught at the spokes.  "Figure of eight," he muttered.  The
dirigible swung gracefully in a curve leftward.  Meriwell looked over
the side again and raised his night-glasses.  On the platforms
beneath men were running to and fro excitedly.  As they looked upward
they had the appearance of a child's tin soldiers gazing fearsomely
at a human being.  A whistle cut metallically into the air.  A
carbine cracked.  A searchlight shot skyward in a broad ribbon of
white and began casting about like a fisherman's line.  Somewhere
there was a thudding boom, a whining scream, and a white star opened
like a flower three hundred yards away with a crash like wood
breaking.

"Go ahead, Mr. Meriwell," the commander directed.

Meriwell raised his megaphone to his lips.

"Overboard, the parachutes," he thundered.

There was a burst of murky, yellow flame fore and aft.  Six flaming
torches floated downward like snowflakes falling.  The town cowered
darkly to the rear of them.  Beneath, to the right, the station
showed as if lit up by some great conflagration.  Above, everything
seemed to have gone grotesquely black.  Meriwell could hardly see
across the car.  Another searchlight leaped in to the air and crossed
the first one.  They stabbed about like the tentacles of an octopus.
The anti-aircraft guns shot six white stars to port in rapid
succession like revolver shots.  Along the concrete platforms a brace
of sharpshooters dropped to their knees and cuddled their pieces to
their cheeks.  The dirigible moved with easy dignity toward the
station.  Meriwell calculated a moment.  The bombs in the fall would
carry forward in the direction the dirigible was headed for.  He
would have to wait a moment.  Weights, distance, heights, flashed
through his head like the dots and dashes of a Morse code.

"Sections A and B, lanyards 3 and 4, fore and aft," he bellowed.
"Heave on!"

The dirigible shivered and jumped like a restive horse as the gunners
heaved on their switches and the weighted bombs dropped from their
cages.  A searchlight caught the great hawk for a moment and showed
it gray and lustrous like a battleship at sea.  The navigator swung
his wheel about with a jerk.  The dirigible turned like a hare.  The
propellers burst into a wild, spasmodic hum.  They oscillated
dangerously.  Meriwell clung onto the side and looked over.

Eight great splotches of red flame burst suddenly on the ground,
sideways, like water splashing.  They showed red and angry like a
man's wound.  There were dark streaks among them--earth thrown up,
men, metal, concrete.  A puff of hot wind struck the car, and a vast
unspeakable noise, a maddened, crashing roar, like the earth
protesting at being attacked--a shuddering, horrible thing that
drowned the feeble crackling of the guns and seemed to blot out life
itself for a moment.  The dirigible shivered like a feather in a
gully of wind.

"Ease up," he called to the navigator.  "A and B, lanyards 2 and 5,
fore and aft," he roared again.  Again the jump and curvet of the
car; the red cup-like explosions, the terror of sound.  A gun boomed
southward, and something passed them with a high shriek.  The
searchlight caught them again and hung on with the tenacity of a
bulldog.  Something like a fly appeared in the west.

"Look out," the commander warned the lieutenant at the wheel.  "Get
ready to rise."

Meriwell looked downward again with his glasses.  The naphtha planes
were approaching the junction on their drop and were lighting up the
scene with a lurid Satanic glow.  The glasses nearly slipped from his
hands.  Beneath him was chaos.  The glittering rails, the compact
platforms, the lank sheds, the massed cars, the violet lights were no
longer there.  The terminal showed like a ploughed field--a
wilderness of stone and earth, of twisted metal and shattered wood.
Great chasms showed where the bombs had struck; little hillocks of
thrown-up earth; great iron pillars broken in two like match-wood;
huddled figures that had been soldiers on the platform; while from
the massed cars and the long sheds great waves of red and blackish
flame showed with foam tops of rolling brown smoke, rolling, licking,
crackling, roaring, like a mediæval dream of hell.

"I don't need section C," he laughed.  All the havoc had been wrought
by the light bombs.  There were still eight mammoth pears in their
cages, unused.  He could save those.

"Get the bridge now, Mr. Meriwell," the commander instructed, "and
swing around to the forts."

"Empty ballast," roared the navigator.

There was a gurgle as the stop-cocks on the water-tanks of the keel
were opened--a hollow rushing that should have ended in a splash.  In
the glaring light the water poured downward in two great streams fore
and aft like silver cables falling.  The dirigible rose as if drawn
upward.  Bombs burst like firecrackers.  Beneath, the fire rustled
like crushed paper and exploded now and then, in queer, hollow,
inadequate sounds.  The navigator swung over the river.  Four
thousand feet below, the bridge showed over the black ribbon of the
Rhine like a plank over a rivulet.  Meriwell watched it with the eye
of a cat ready to spring on a mouse.

"Ready on section C," he warned, "lanyards 2 and 3, fore and aft."

They floated along hazily, like a stick along a river.  The
anti-aircraft guns broke into a passion of whipping reports.  The
searchlights cut into the air like thrusting bayonets.

"Heave on!" he yelled suddenly.

The dirigible lifted violently like a canoe struck by a great wave.
There was a loud whirring in the air as the bombs dropped downward.
Meriwell felt his heart jump to his mouth.  He peered over the edge
breathlessly, his hands gripping the rail with sudden fear.
Mechanically he opened his mouth to protect his ear-drums from the
report, and as he did a vast wave of orange flame, like discoloured
sheet lightning, seemed to flick along the river.  For a moment,
soundless, the river rose in its bed as if struck by a mighty hand.
The great stone bridge disappeared as if kicked away.

"My God!" said Meriwell hoarsely, "my God!"

Then suddenly noise struck him between the shoulder-blades, noise
such as he could hardly believe possible--an infinitude of sound that
rocked him like a crashing blow, a sound as of two planets meeting in
mid-course, a gigantic forbidden thing, that only gods should make.

"The bridge is gone," said Meriwell stupidly.

A great hush swung over the town.  The anti-aircraft guns stuttered
and died.  The futile rifle fire stopped.  The thunder of the forts
was cut off in mid-air.  Only the blaze at the junction roared a
little like a forced draft.  Over the river all was black.  The water
had shut off the flare of the explosion.  The searchlight struck the
ballonet of the dirigible as a spear strikes a fish.  There was the
throb of propellers.

"Triplane to starboard," the navigator warned.

"Send him down, Mr. Meriwell," the commander ordered calmly.
"Navigator, put the men by the engines ready to start on the word."

The triplane rose jerkily in the air like a toy at the end of a
string.  Its three shelf-like planes showed dimly and vaguely like a
great kite.  Meriwell felt sorry for it--it was a game, chivalrous
thing, to rise in the air to give battle to the leviathan.  He felt a
great throb of sympathy and sorrow for it.  It looked such a puny
thing--but he mustn't let it get above him, or alongside him----

"Searchlight on starboard gun," he snapped.

A sergeant and corporal sprang to the Maxim.  They clamped a thing
like an automobile-lamp to the barrel.  They snapped a switch, and a
line of light shot out like a harpoon.  It whipped about like a
fencer's blade, parrying, thrusting, lifting, dropping.  The corporal
threw his leg over the saddle and caught the trigger.

"When you see her, fire!" Meriwell ordered.

She showed up for a moment, black and fragile, and motionless it
seemed.  The gun broke into an infuriated chatter.  The
cartridge-tape leaped like a hooked eel.  Suddenly they saw the great
kite twist like a wounded bird.  It dropped in a wavering zigzag
while two black pin-points dropped in plumb-lines.

"God help them!" Meriwell breathed.

The propellers of the dirigible plunged into their loud whir like the
first peal of an organ.  Meriwell staggered and lurched.  The
dirigible shot forward like a stone from a sling.  The commander fell
to pacing the car nervously.  His fingers cracked like castanets.
His beard twitched.  He turned on the gunner.

"Never mind the forts," he shouted.  "We've done enough.  What have
you left?"

"Sixteen small and four large bombs," Meriwell answered.

"Get ready," he warned.  He turned to the navigator.  "Back and over
the town."

"Back and over the town?" the navigator queried stupidly.  "Over the
town?"

"Yes," the commander barked.  His face seemed queerly white and
strained.  "Let them have all you've got, Mr. Meriwell."

"You don't mean--?"  Meriwell nearly laughed in amazement.  "Bombard
the town?"

"Yes.  Quick.  Circle around and let go."

A great, tawny lake of flame poured over the acreage of cars in the
junction.  It lighted the town dully and they could see it hazily,
through a smoke screen, as it were.  The narrow Gothic buildings
showed up as in a painting; the peaceful cathedral; the great, squat
municipal hall; the queer dolls' houses--it all seemed like a
theatrical spectacle.  Southward the gunners still threw their white
stars and the artillery of the forts stabbed red and blindly into the
murky fog.

"Take the wheel," the navigator told the steersman.  "Planes up
eighteen and swing in a circle." He looked at the commander with
grave, disquieted eyes.

Meriwell caught at the commander's sleeve.

"My God, sir!  You can't do that!" he shouted in horror.  "You can't
fire on civilians."

"I can," said the old man doggedly.  "I can and I will."

"You're mad, sir!  You're mad!" he babbled.

A stray shot cut screaming past them.  They rocked from the current.
The crew moved about the car uneasily.

"Bring her around," the commander ordered.  The navigator never moved.

A vast desire to throw himself on the old commander came on Meriwell,
to bind him hand and foot.  He must have gone crazy, he judged.  That
last terrific explosion had injured his brain.  Then suddenly he
remembered the house on Notting Hill, the white-haired lady who had
died on the night raid, the screaming, distraught daughter, the
gallant captain of Sherwood Foresters killed like a rat in a trap.
He understood.

"I can't do it, sir," the navigator replied.  Meriwell took a step
toward him.  His hands went out pleadingly.

"I know, sir.  I understand.  But we can't do it.  I won't give the
order and the men wouldn't pull the lanyards," his voice stumbled.
"We're soldiers," he continued, "and we're fighting soldiers--not
unarmed men, not sleeping children, not women."

There was a moment's silence.  The wind blew about them as from a
great blast-pipe.  The reports of the air-guns ceased for a moment
and began intermittently.  The navigator turned his head away.
Meriwell looked at the commander's white face.

"Soldiers!" he repeated.  "Clean fighters.  Soldiers and gentlemen.
Officers and gentlemen, as your son was.  And your wife was a
soldier's wife and your daughter was a soldier's daughter."

He waved his hand toward the town.

"We've smashed the junction and smashed the bridge.  No train will
pass that way again and no ship will come up the Rhine.  We've done
our work--and not a building outside injured and not a civilian
attacked.  They'd be proud of that, your people, sir.  You can't do
this other thing, sir.  It isn't the game.  It isn't cricket."

He watched the commander's face keenly.  He waited until he saw the
bitter twist pass from the mouth and the frown go out of his eyes.

"They wouldn't want that," he urged.  "They'd be ashamed, those
people of yours."  He waited a moment.  "The old code, sir, an
officer and a gentleman."

The commander's head drooped a little.  The stiff poise of his grey
beard softened.  His shoulders lost their tenseness suddenly.

"I--I--" he wavered.  He turned to the navigator.  "Right about and
back," he said weakly.  He slipped into the rear among the shadows.

The navigator sprang to his compass.

"Nor'west by west," he ordered.

"Nor'west by west," the steersman repeated mechanically.

And as Meriwell leaned over the car he saw the town race flatly away
from them, while the guns still chattered viciously, like disturbed
magpies, and their charges burst high in the air into pretty,
artificial stars.




V

THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER OF ASPINWALL*

HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ


*Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company


I

On a time it happened that the lighthouse keeper in Aspinwall, not
far from Panama, disappeared without a trace.  Since he disappeared
during a storm, it was supposed that the ill-fated man went to the
very edge of the small, rocky island on which the lighthouse stood,
and was swept out by a wave.  This supposition seemed the more likely
as his boat was not found next day in its rocky niche.  The place of
lighthouse keeper had become vacant.  It was necessary to fill this
place at the earliest moment possible, since the lighthouse had no
small significance for the local movement as well as for vessels
going from New York to Panama.  Mosquito Bay abounds in sandbars and
banks.  Among these navigation, even in the daytime, is difficult;
but at night, especially with the fogs which are so frequent on those
waters warmed by the sun of the tropics, it is nearly impossible.
The only guide at that time for the numerous vessels is the
lighthouse.

The task of finding a new keeper fell to the United States consul
living in Panama, and this task was no small one: first, because it
was absolutely necessary to find the man within twelve hours; second,
the man must be unusually conscientious,--it was not possible, of
course, to take the first comer at random; finally, there was an
utter lack of candidates.  Life on a tower is uncommonly difficult,
and by no means enticing to people of the South, who love idleness
and the freedom of a vagrant life.  That lighthouse keeper is almost
a prisoner.  He cannot leave his rocky island except on Sundays.  A
boat from Aspinwall brings him provisions and water once a day, and
returns immediately; on the whole island, one acre in area, there is
no inhabitant.  The keeper lives in the lighthouse; he keeps it in
order.  During the day he gives signals by displaying flags of
various colours to indicate changes of the barometer; in the evening
he lights the lantern.  This would be no great labour were it not
that to reach the lantern at the summit of the tower he must pass
over more than four hundred steep and very high steps; sometimes he
must make this journey repeatedly during the day.  In general, it is
the life of monk, and indeed more than that,--the life of a hermit.
It was not wonderful, therefore, that Mr. Isaac Falconbridge was in
no small anxiety as to where he should find a permanent successor to
the recent keeper; and it is easy to understand his joy when a
successor announced himself most unexpectedly on that very day.  He
was a man already old, seventy years or more, but fresh, erect, with
the movements and bearing of a soldier.  His hair was perfectly
white, his face as dark as that of a Creole; but, judging from his
blue eyes, he did not belong to a people of the South.  His face was
somewhat downcast and sad, but honest.  At the first glance he
pleased Falconbridge.  It remained only to examine him.  Therefore
the following conversation began:

"Where are you from?"

"I am a Pole."

"Where have you worked up to this time?"

"In one place and another."

"A lighthouse keeper should like to stay in one place."

"I need rest."

"Have you served?  Have you testimonials of honourable government
service?"

The old man drew from his bosom a piece of faded silk resembling a
strip of an old flag, unwound it, and said:

"Here are the testimonials.  I received this cross in 1830.  This
second one is Spanish from the Carlist War; the third is the French
legion; the fourth I received in Hungary.  Afterward I fought in the
States against the South; there they do not give crosses."

Falconbridge took the paper and began to read.

"H'm!  Skavinski?  Is that your name?  H'm!  Two flags captured in a
bayonet attack.  You were a gallant soldier."

"I am able to be a conscientious lighthouse keeper."

"It is necessary to ascend the tower a number of times daily.  Have
you sound legs?"

"I crossed the plains on foot."  (The immense steppes between the
East and California are called "the plains.")

"Do you know sea service?"

"I served three years on a whaler."

"You have tried various occupations."

"The only one I have not known is quiet."

"Why is that?"

The old man shrugged his shoulders.  "Such is my fate."

"Still you seem to me too old for a lighthouse keeper."

"Sir," exclaimed the candidate suddenly in a voice of emotion, "I am
greatly wearied, knocked about.  I have passed through much as you
see.  This place is one of those which I have wished for most
ardently.  I am old, I need rest.  I need to say to myself, 'Here you
will remain; this is your port.'  Ah, sir, this depends now on you
alone.  Another time perhaps such a place will not offer itself.
What luck that I was in Panama!  I entreat you--as God is dear to me,
I am like a ship which if it misses the harbour will be lost.  If you
wish to make an old man happy--I swear to you that I am honest,
but--I have enough of wandering."

The blue eyes of the old man expressed such earnest entreaty that
Falconbridge, who had a good, simple heart, was touched.

"Well," said he, "I'll take you.  You are a lighthouse keeper."

The old man's face gleamed with inexpressible joy.

"I thank you."

"Can you go to the tower to-day?"

"I can."

"Then good-bye.  Another word,--for any failure in service you will
be dismissed."

"All right."

That same evening, when the sun had descended on the other side of
the isthmus, and a day of sunshine was followed by a night without
twilight, the new keeper was in his place evidently, for the
lighthouse was casting its bright rays on the water as usual.  The
night was perfectly calm, silent, genuinely tropical, filled with a
transparent haze, forming around the moon a great coloured rainbow
with soft, unbroken edges; the sea was moving only because the tide
raised it.  Skavinski on the balcony seemed from below like a small
black point.  He tried to collect his thoughts and take in his new
position; but his mind was too much under pressure to move with
regularity.  He felt somewhat as a hunted beast feels when at last it
has found refuge from pursuit on some inaccessible rock or in a cave.
There had come to him, finally, an hour of quiet; the feeling of
safety filled his soul with a certain unspeakable bliss.  Now on that
rock he can simply laugh at his previous wanderings, his misfortunes,
and failures.  He was in truth like a ship whose masts, ropes, and
sails had been broken and rent by a tempest, and cast from the clouds
to the bottom of the sea,--a ship on which the tempest had hurled
waves and spat foam, but which still wound its way to the harbour.
The pictures of that storm passed quickly through his mind as he
compared it with the calm future now beginning.  A part of his
wonderful adventures he had related to Falconbridge; he had not
mentioned, however, thousands of other incidents.  It had been his
misfortune that as often as he pitched his tent and fixed his
fireplace to settle down permanently, some wind tore out the stakes
of his tent, whirled away the fire, and bore him on toward
destruction.  Looking now from the balcony of the tower at the
illuminated waves, he remembered everything through which he had
passed.  He had campaigned in the four parts of the world, and in
wandering had tried almost every occupation.  Labour-loving and
honest, more than once had he earned money, and had always lost it in
spite of every prevision and the utmost caution.  He had been a
gold-miner in Australia, a diamond-digger in Africa, a rifleman in
public service in the East Indies.  He established a ranch in
California,--the drought ruined him; he tried trading with wild
tribes in the interior of Brazil,--his raft was wrecked on the
Amazon; he himself alone, weaponless, and nearly naked, wandered in
the forest for many weeks living on wild fruits, exposed every moment
to death from the jaws of wild beasts.  He established a forge in
Helena, Arkansas, and that was burned in a great fire which consumed
the whole town.  Next he fell into the hands of the Indians in the
Rocky Mountains, and only through a miracle was he saved by Canadian
trappers.  Then he served as a sailor on a vessel running between
Bahia and Bordeaux, and as a harpooner on a whaling-ship; both
vessels were wrecked.  He had a cigar factory in Havana, and was
robbed by his partner while he himself was lying sick with the
vomito.  At last he came to Aspinwall, and there was to be the end of
his failures,--for what could reach him on that rocky island?
Neither water nor fire nor men.  But from men Skavinski had not
suffered much; he had met good men oftener than bad ones.

But it seemed to him that all the four elements were persecuting him.
Those who knew him said that he had no luck, and with that they
explained everything.  He himself became somewhat of a monomaniac.
He believed that some mighty and vengeful hand was pursuing him
everywhere, on all lands and waters.  He did not like, however, to
speak of this; only at times, when someone asked him whose hand that
could be, he pointed mysteriously to the Polar Star, and said, "It
comes from that place."  In reality his failures were so continuous
that they were wonderful, and might easily drive a nail into the
head, especially of the man who had experienced them.  But Skavinski
had the patience of an Indian, and that great calm power of
resistance which comes from the truth of heart.  In his time he had
received in Hungary a number of bayonet-thrusts because he would not
grasp at a stirrup which was shown as means of salvation to him, and
cry for quarter.  In like manner he did not bend to misfortune.  He
crept up against the mountain as industriously as an ant.  Pushed
down a hundred times, he began his journey calmly for the hundred and
first time.  He was in his way a most peculiar original.  This old
soldier, tempered, God knows in how many fires, hardened in
suffering, hammered and forged, had the heart of a child.  In the
time of the epidemic in Cuba, the vomito attacked him because he had
given to the sick all his quinine, of which he had a considerable
supply, and left not a grain to himself.

There had been in him also this wonderful quality,--that after so
many disappointments he was ever full of confidence, and did not lose
hope that all would be well yet.  In winter he grew lively, and
predicted great events.  He waited for these events with impatience,
and lived with the thought of them whole summers.  But the winters
passed one after another, and Skavinski lived only to this,--that
they whitened his head.  At last he grew old, began to lose energy;
his endurance was becoming more and more like resignation, his former
calmness was tending toward supersensitiveness, and that tempered
soldier was degenerating into a man ready to shed tears for any
cause.  Besides this, from time to time he was weighed down by a
terrible homesickness which was roused by any circumstance,--the
sight of swallows, gray birds like sparrows, snow on the mountains or
melancholy music like that heard on a time.  Finally there was one
idea which mastered him,--the idea of rest.  It mastered the old man
thoroughly and swallowed all other desires and hopes.  This ceaseless
wanderer could not imagine anything more to be longed for, anything
more precious than a quiet corner in which to rest and wait in
silence for the end.  Perhaps specially because some whim of fate had
so hurried him over all seas and lands that he could hardly catch his
breath did he imagine that the highest human happiness was simply not
to wander.  It is true that such modest happiness was his due; but he
was so accustomed to disappointments that he thought of rest as
people in general think of something which is beyond reach.  He did
not dare to hope for it.  Meanwhile unexpectedly in the course of
twelve hours he had gained a position which was as if chosen for him
out of all the world.  We are not to wonder, then, that when he
lighted his lantern in the evening he became as it were dazed,--that
he asked himself if that was reality, and he did not dare to answer
that it was.  But at the same time reality convinced him with
incontrovertible proofs; hence, hours one after another passed while
he was on the balcony.  He gazed, and convinced himself.  It might
seem that he was looking at the sea for the first time in his life.
The lens of the lantern cast into the darkness an enormous triangle
of light, beyond which the eye of the old man was lost in the black
distance completely, in the distance mysterious and awful.  But that
distance seemed to run toward the light.  The long waves following
one another rolled out from the darkness, and went bellowing toward
the base of the island; and then their foaming backs were visible,
shining rose-coloured in the light of the lantern.  The incoming tide
swelled more and more and covered the sandy bars.  The mysterious
speech of the ocean came with a fulness more powerful and louder, at
one time like the thunder of cannon, at another like the roar of
great forests, at another like the distant dull sound of the voices
of people.  At the moments it was quiet; then to the ears of the old
man came some great sigh, then a kind of sobbing and again
threatening outbursts.  At last the wind bore away the haze, but
brought black broken clouds, which hid the moon.  From the west it
began to blow more and more; the waves sprang with rage against the
rock of the lighthouse licking with foam the foundation walls.  In
the distance a storm was beginning to bellow.  On the dark, disturbed
expanse certain green lanterns gleamed from the masts of ships.
These green points rose high and then sank; now they swayed to the
right, and now to the left.  Skavinski descended to his room.  The
storm began to howl.  Outside, people on those ships were struggling
with night, with darkness, with waves; but inside the tower it was
calm and still.  Even the sounds of the storm hardly came through the
thick walls, and only the measured tick-tack of the clock lulled the
wearied old man to his slumber.



II

Hours, days, and weeks began to pass.  Sailors assert that sometimes
when the sea is greatly roused, something from out the midst of night
and darkness calls them by name.  If the infinity of the sea may call
out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too,
from another infinitely still darker and more deeply mysterious; and
the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him.
But to hear them quiet is needed.  Besides old age loves to put
itself aside as if with a foreboding of the grave.  The lighthouse
had become for Skavinski such a half grave.  Nothing is more
monotonous than life on a beacon-tower.  If young people consent to
take up this service they leave it after a time.  Lighthouse keepers
are generally men not young, gloomy, and confined to themselves.  If
by chance one of them leaves his lighthouse and goes among men, he
walks in the midst of them like a person roused from deep slumber.
On the tower there is a lack of minute impressions which in ordinary
life teach men to adapt themselves to everything.  All that a
lighthouse keeper comes in contact with is gigantic, and devoid of
definitely outlined forms.  The sky is one whole, the water another;
and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness.
That is a life in which thought is continual meditation, and out of
that meditation nothing rouses the keeper, not even his work.  Day is
like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the
only variety.  But Skavinski felt more happiness than ever in life
before.  He rose with the dawn, took his breakfast, polished the
lens, and then sitting on the balcony gazed into the distance of the
water; and his eyes were never sated with the pictures which he saw
before him.  On the enormous turquoise ground of the ocean were to be
seen generally flocks of swollen sails gleaming in the rays of the
sun so brightly that the eyes were blinking before the excess of
light.  Sometimes the ships, favoured by the so-called trade winds,
went in an extended line one after another, like a chain of sea-mews
or albatrosses.  The red casks indicating the channel swayed on the
light wave with gentle movement.  Among the sails appeared every
afternoon gigantic grayish feather-like plumes of smoke.  That was a
steamer from New York which brought passengers and goods to
Aspinwall, drawing behind it a frothy path of foam.  On the other
side of the balcony Skavinski saw, as if on his palm, Aspinwall and
its busy harbour, and in it a forest of masts, boats and craft; a
little farther, white houses and the towers of the town.  From the
height of his tower the small houses were like the nests of sea-mews,
the boats were like beetles and the people moved around like small
points on the white boulevard.  From early morning a light eastern
breeze brought a confused hum of human life, above which predominated
the whistle of steamers.  In the afternoon six o'clock came; the
movement in the harbour began to cease; the mews hid themselves in
the rent of the cliffs; the waves grew feeble and became in some sort
lazy; and then on the land, on the sea, and on the tower came a time
of stillness unbroken by anything.  The yellow sands from which the
waves had fallen back glittered like golden stripes on the width of
the waters; the body of the tower was outlined definitely in blue.
Floods of sunbeams were poured from the sky on the water and the
sands and the cliff.  At that time a certain lassitude full of
sweetness seized the old man.  He felt that the rest which he was
enjoying was excellent; and when he thought that it would be
continuous nothing was lacking to him.

Skavinski was intoxicated with his own happiness and since a man
adapts himself easily to improved condition, he gained faith and
confidence by degrees; for he thought that if men built houses for
invalids, why should not God gather up at last His own invalids?
Time passed, and confirmed him in this conviction.  The old man grew
accustomed to his tower, to the lantern, to the rock, to the
sand-bars, to solitude.  He grew accustomed also to the sea-mews
which hatched in the crevices of the rock, and in the evening held
meetings on the roof of the lighthouse.  Skavinski threw to them
generally the remnants of his food; and soon they grew tame, and
afterward, when he fed them, a real storm of white wings encircled
him, and the old man went among the birds like a shepherd among
sheep.  When the tide ebbed he went to the low sand-banks, on which
he collected savory periwinkles and beautiful pearl shells of the
nautilus, which receding waves had left on the sand.  In the night by
the moonlight and the tower he went to catch fish, which frequented
the windings of the cliff in myriads.  At last he was in love with
his rocks and his treeless little island, grown over only with small
thick plants exuding sticky resin.  The distant views repaid him for
the poverty of the island, however.  During afternoon hours, when the
air became very clear he could see the whole isthmus covered with the
richest vegetation.  It seemed to Skavinski at such times that he saw
one gigantic garden,--bunches of cocoa, and enormous musa, combined,
as it were, in luxurious tufted bouquets, right there behind the
houses of Aspinwall.  Farther on, between Aspinwall and Panama, was a
great forest over which every morning and evening hung a reddish haze
of exhalations,--a real tropical forest with its feet in stagnant
water, interlaced with lianas and filled with the sound of one sea of
gigantic orchids, palms, milk-trees, iron-trees, gum-trees.

Through his field-glass the old man could see not only trees and the
broad leaves of bananas, but even legions of monkeys and great
marabous and flocks of parrots, rising at times like a rainbow cloud
over the forest.  Skavinski knew such forests well, for after being
wrecked on the Amazon he had wandered whole weeks among similar
arches and thickets.  He had seen how many dangers and deaths lie
concealed under those wonderful and smiling exteriors.  During the
nights which he had spent in them he heard close at hand the
sepulchral voices of howling monkeys and the roaring of the jaguars;
he saw gigantic serpents coiled like lianas on trees; he knew those
slumbering forest lakes full of torpedo-fish and swarming crocodiles;
he knew under what a yoke man lives in those unexplored wildernesses
in which are single leaves that exceed a man's size ten
times,--wildernesses swarming with blood-drinking mosquitoes,
tree-leeches, and gigantic poisonous spiders.  He had experienced
that forest life himself, had witnessed it, had passed through it;
therefore it gave him the greater enjoyment to look from his height
and gaze on those _matos_, admire their beauty, and be guarded from
their treacherousness.  His tower preserved him from every evil.  He
left it only for a few hours on Sunday.  He put on then his blue
keeper's coat with silver buttons, and hung his crosses on his
breast.  His milk-white head was raised with a certain pride when he
heard at the door, while entering the church, the Creoles say among
themselves, "We have an honourable lighthouse keeper and not a
heretic, though he is a Yankee."  But he returned straightway after
Mass to his island, and returned happy, for he had still no faith in
the mainland.  On Sunday also he read the Spanish newspaper which he
bought in the town, or the _New York Herald_, which he borrowed from
Falconbridge; and he sought in it European news eagerly.  The poor
old heart on that lighthouse tower, and in another hemisphere, was
beating yet for its birthplace.  At times, too, when the boat brought
his daily supplies and water to the island, he went down from the
tower to talk with Johnson, the guard.  But after awhile he seemed to
grow shy.  He ceased to go to the town to read the papers and to go
down to talk politics with Johnson.  Whole weeks passed in this way,
so that no one saw him and he saw no one.  The only signs that the
old man was living were the disappearance of the provisions left on
shore, and the light of the lantern kindled every evening with the
same regularity with which the sun rose in the morning from the
waters of those regions.  Evidently, the old man had become
indifferent to the world.  Homesickness was not the cause, but just
this,--that even homesickness had passed into resignation.  The whole
world began now and ended for Skavinski on his island.  He had grown
accustomed to the thought that he would not leave the tower till his
death, and he simply forgot that there was anything else besides it.
Moreover, he had become a mystic; his mild blue eyes began to stare
like the eyes of a child, and were as if fixed on something at a
distance.  In the presence of a surrounding uncommonly simple and
great, the old man was losing the feeling of personality; he was
ceasing to exist as an individual, was becoming merged more and more
in that which inclosed him.  He did not understand anything beyond
his environment: he felt only unconsciously.  At last it seems to him
that the heavens, the water, his rock, the tower, the golden
sand-banks and the swollen sails, the sea-mews, the ebb and flow of
the tide--all form a mighty unity.  One enormous mysterious soul;
that he is sinking in that mystery and feels that soul which lives
and lulls itself.  He sinks and is rocked, forgets himself; and in
that narrowing of his own individual existence, in that half-waking,
half-sleeping, he has discovered a rest so great that it nearly
resembles half-death.



III

But the awakening came.

On a certain day, when the boat brought water and a supply of
provisions, Skavinski came down an hour later from the tower, and saw
that besides the usual cargo there was an additional package.  On the
outside of this package were postage stamps of the United States, and
the address: "Skavinski, Esq.," written on coarse canvas.

The old man, with aroused curiosity, cut the canvas, and saw books;
he took one in his hand, looked at it, and put it back; thereupon his
hands began to tremble greatly.  He covered his eyes as if he did not
believe them; it seemed to him as if he were dreaming.  The book was
Polish,--what did that mean?  Who could have sent the book?  Clearly,
it did not occur to him at the first moment that in the beginning of
his lighthouse career he had read in the _Herald_, borrowed from the
consul, of the formation of a Polish society in New York, and had
sent at once to that society half his month's salary, for which he
had, moreover, no use on the tower.  The Society had sent him the
books with thanks.  The books came in the natural way; but at the
first moment the old man could not seize those thoughts.  Polish
books in Aspinwall, on his tower, amid his solitude,--that was for
him something uncommon, a certain breath from the past times, a kind
of miracle.  Now it seemed to him, as to those sailors in the night,
that something was calling him by name with a voice greatly beloved
and nearly forgotten.  He sat for a while with closed eyes, and was
almost certain that, when he opened them, the dream would be gone.

The package, cut open, lay before him, shone upon clearly by the
afternoon sun, and on it was an open book.  When the old man
stretched his hand toward it again, he heard in the stillness the
beating of his own heart.  He looked; it was poetry.  On the outside
stood printed in great letters the title, underneath the name of the
author.  The name was not strange to Skavinski; he saw that it
belonged to the great poet,[1] whose productions he had read in 1830,
in Paris.  Afterward, when campaigning in Algiers and Spain, he had
heard from his countrymen of the growing fame of the great seer; but
he was so accustomed to the musket at that time that he took no book
in hand.  In 1849 he went to America, and in the adventurous life
which he led he hardly ever met a Pole, and never a Polish book.
With the greater eagerness, therefore, and with a livelier beating of
the heart, did he turn to the title-page.  It seemed to him then that
on his lonely rock some solemnity was about to take place.  Indeed it
was a moment of great calm and silence.  The clocks of Aspinwall were
striking five in the afternoon.  Not a cloud darkened the clear sky;
only a few sea-mews were sailing through the air.  The ocean was as
if cradled to sleep.  The waves on the shore stammered quietly,
spreading softly on the sand.  In the distance the white houses of
Aspinwall, and the wonderful groups of palm, were smiling.  In truth,
there was something there solemn, calm, and full of dignity.
Suddenly, in the midst of that calm of Nature, was heard the
trembling voice of the old man, who read aloud as if to understand
himself better:

  "Thou art like health, O my birth-land Litva![2]
  How much we should prize thee he only can know who has lost thee.
  Thy beauty in perfect adornment this day
  I see and describe, because I am yearning for thee."


[1] Mickiewicz (pronounced Mitskyevich), the greatest poet of Poland.

[2] Lithuania.


His voice failed Skavinski.  The letters began to dance before his
eyes; something broke in his breast, and went like a wave from his
heart higher and higher, choking his voice and pressing his throat.
A moment more he controlled himself, and read further:

  "O Holy Lady, who guardest bright Chenstohova,
  Who shinest in Ostrobrama and preservest
  The castle town Novgrodek with its trusty people,
  As Thou didst give me back to health in childhood,
  When by my weeping mother placed beneath Thy care
  I raised my lifeless eyelids upward,
  And straightway walked unto Thy holy threshold,
  To thank God for the life restored me,--
  So by a wonder now restore us to the bosom of our birthplace."


The swollen wave broke through the restraint of his will.  The old
man sobbed, and threw himself on the ground; his milk-white hair was
mingled with the sand of the sea.  Forty years had passed since he
had seen his country, and God knows how many since he heard his
native speech; and now that speech had come to him itself--it had
sailed to him over the ocean, and found him in solitude on another
hemisphere,--it so loved, so dear, so beautiful!  In the sobbing
which shook him there was no pain,--only a suddenly aroused immense
love, in the presence of which other things are as nothing.  With
that great weeping he had simply implored forgiveness of that beloved
one, set aside because he had grown so old, had become so accustomed
to his solitary rock, and had so forgotten it that in him even
longing had begun to disappear.  But now it returned as if by a
miracle; therefore the heart leaped in him.

Moments vanished one after another; he lay there continually.  The
mews flew over the lighthouse, crying as if alarmed for their old
friend.  The hour in which he fed them with the remnants of his food
had come; therefore, some of them flew down from the lighthouse to
him; then more and more came, and began to pick and shake their wings
over his head.  The sound of the wings roused him.  He had wept his
fill, and had now a certain calm brightness; but his eyes were as if
inspired.  He gave unwittingly all his provisions to the birds, which
rushed at him in uproar, and he himself took the book again.  The sun
had gone already behind the gardens and the forest of Panama, and was
going slowly beyond the isthmus to the other ocean; but the Atlantic
was full of light yet; in the open air there was still perfect
vision; therefore, he read further:

"Now bear my longing soul to those forest slopes, to those green
meadows."


At last the dusk obliterates the letters on the white paper--the dusk
short as a twinkle.  The old man rested his head on the rock, and
closed his eyes.  Then "She who defends bright Chenstohova" took his
soul, and transported it to "those fields coloured by various grain."
On the sky were burning yet those long stripes, red and golden, and
on those brightnesses he was flying to beloved regions.  The
pine-woods were sounding in his ears; the streams of his native place
were murmuring.  He saw everything as it was; everything asked him,
"Dost remember?"  He remembers! he sees broad fields; between the
fields, woods and villages.  It is night now.  At this hour his
lantern usually illuminates the darkness of the sea; but now he is in
his native village.  His old head dropped on his breast, and he is
dreaming.  Pictures are passing before his eyes quickly, and a little
disorderly.  He does not see the house in which he was born, for war
had destroyed it; he does not see his father and mother, for they
died when he was a child; but still the village is as if he had left
it yesterday,--the line of cottages with lights in the windows, the
mound, the mill, the two ponds opposite each other, and thundering
all night with a chorus of frogs.  Once he had been on guard in that
village all night; now that past stood before him at once in a series
of views.  He is an Ulan again, and he stands there on guard; at a
distance is the public-house; he looks with swimming eyes.  There
thundering and singing and shouting amid the silence of the night
with voices of fiddles and bass-viols "U-ha!  U-ha!"  Then the Ulans
knock out fire with their horseshoes, and it is wearisome for him
there on his horse.  The hours drag on slowly; at last the lights are
quenched; now as far as the eye reaches there is mist, and mist
impenetrable; now the fog rises, evidently from the fields, and
embraces the whole world with a whitish cloud.  You would say, a
complete ocean.  But those are fields; soon the land-rail will be
heard in the darkness, and the bitterns will call from the reeds.
The night is calm and cool,--in truth, a Polish night!  In the
distance the pine-wood is sounding without wind, like the roll of the
sea.  Soon dawn will whiten the East.  In fact, the cocks are
beginning to crow behind the hedges.  One answers to another from
cottage to cottage; the storks are screaming somewhere on high.  The
Ulan feels well and bright.  Some one had spoken of a battle
to-morrow.  Hei! that will go on, like all the others, with shouting,
with fluttering of flaglets.  The young blood is playing like a
trumpet, though the night cools it.  But it is dawning.  Already
night is growing pale; out of the shadows come forests, the thicket,
a row of cottages, the mill, the poplars.  The well is squeaking like
a metal banner on a tower.  What a beloved land, beautiful in the
rosy gleams of the morning!  Oh, the one land, the one land!

Quiet! the watchful picket hears that some one is approaching.  Of
course, they are coming to relieve the guard.

Suddenly some voice is heard above Skavinski,--

"Here, old man!  Get up!  What's the matter?"

The old man opens his eyes, and looks with wonder at the person
standing before him.  The remnants of the dream-visions struggle in
his head with reality.  At last the visions pale and vanish.  Before
him stands Johnson, the harbour guide.

"What's this?" asked Johnson; "are you sick?"

"No."

"You didn't light the lantern.  You must leave your place.  A vessel
from St. Geromo was wrecked at the bar.  It is lucky that no one was
drowned, or you would go to trial.  Get into the boat with me; you'll
hear the rest at the Consulate."

The old man grew pale; in fact he had not lighted the lantern that
night.

A few days later, Skavinski was seen on the deck of a steamer, which
was going from Aspinwall to New York.  The poor man had lost his
place.  There opened before him new roads of wandering; the wind had
torn that leaf away again to whirl it over lands and seas, to sport
with it till satisfied.  The old man had failed greatly during those
few days, and was bent over; only his eyes were gleaming.  On his new
road of life he held at his breast his book, which from time to time
he pressed with his hand as if in fear that that too might go from
him.




VI

THE WRECK

GUY DE MAUPASSANT


It was yesterday, the 31st of December.

I had just finished breakfast with my old friend Georges Garin when
the servant handed him a letter covered with seals and foreign stamps.

Georges said:

"Will you excuse me?"

"Certainly."

And so he began to read the letter, which was written in a large
English handwriting, crossed and re-crossed in every direction.  He
read slowly, with serious attention and the interest which we only
pay to things that touch our hearts.

Then he put the letter on the mantel-piece and said:

"That was a curious story!  I've never told you about it, I think.
Yet it was a sentimental adventure, and it really happened to me.
That was a strange New Year's Day indeed!  It must have been twenty
years ago, since I was then thirty, and am now fifty years old.

"I was then an inspector in the Maritime Insurance Company, of which
I am now director.  I had arranged to pass the _fête_ of New Year's
in Paris--since it is a convention to make that day a _fête_--when I
received a letter from the manager, asking me to proceed at once to
the island of Ré, where a three-masted vessel from Saint-Nazaire,
insured by us, had just been driven ashore.  It was then eight
o'clock in the morning.  I arrived at the office at ten, to get my
advices, and that evening I took the express, which put me down in La
Rochelle the next day, the thirty-first of December.

"I had two hours to wait before going aboard the boat for Ré.  So I
made a tour in the town.  It is certainly a fantastic city, La
Rochelle, with a strong character of its own--streets tangled like a
labyrinth, sidewalks running under endless arcaded galleries like
those of the Rue de Rivoli, but low, mysterious, built as if to form
a fit scene for conspirators, and making an ancient and striking
background for those old-time wars, the savage heroic wars of
religion.  It is indeed the typical old Huguenot city, conservative,
discreet, with no fine art to show, with no wonderful monuments, such
as make Rouen; but it is remarkable for its severe, somewhat cunning
look; it is a city of obstinate fighters, a city where fanaticisms
might well blossom, where the faith of the Calvinists became exalted,
and which gave birth to the plot of the 'Four Sergeants.'

"After I had wandered for some time about these curious streets, I
went aboard the black, rotund little steamboat which was to take me
to the island of Ré.  It was called the _Jean Guiton_.  It started
with angry puffings, passed between the two old towers which guard
the harbour, crossed the roadstead, and issued from the mole built by
Richelieu, the great stones of which can be seen at the water's edge,
enclosing the town like a great necklace.  Then the steamboat turned
to the right.

"It was one of those sad days which give one the blues, tighten the
heart and kill in us all energy and force--a gray, cold day, with a
heavy mist which was as wet as rain, as cold as frost, as bad to
breathe as the mist of a wash-tub.

"Under this low ceiling of sinister fog, the shallow, yellow, sandy
sea of all gradually receding coasts lay without a wrinkle, without a
movement, without life, a sea of turbid water, greasy water, of
stagnant water.  The _Jean Guiton_ passed over it, rolling a little
from habit, dividing the smooth, dark blue water, and leaving behind
a little chopping sea, a few big waves, which were soon calm.

"I began to talk to the captain, a little man with small feet, as
round as his boat and balancing himself like it.  I wanted some
details about the disaster on which I was to give a report.  A great
square-rigged three-master, the _Marie Joseph_, of Saint-Nazaire, had
gone ashore one night in a hurricane on the sands of the island of Ré.

"The owner wrote us that the storm had thrown the ship so far ashore
that it was impossible to float her, and that they had to remove
everything which could be detached, with the utmost possible haste.
Nevertheless, I must examine the situation of the wreck, estimate
what must have been her condition before the disaster, and decide
whether all efforts had been used to get her afloat.  I came as an
agent of the company in order to give contradictory testimony, if
necessary, at the trial.

"On receipt of my report, the manager would take what measures he
might think necessary to protect our interests.

"The captain of the _Jean Guiton_ knew all about the affair, having
been summoned with his boat to assist in the attempts at salvage.

"He told me the story of the disaster.  The _Marie Joseph_, driven by
a furious gale, lost her bearings completely, in the night, and
steering by chance over a heavy foaming sea--'a milk-soup sea,' said
the captain--had gone ashore on those immense banks of sand which
make the coasts of this country seem like limitless Saharas at hours
when the tide is low.

"While talking I looked around and ahead.  Between the ocean and the
lowering sky lay a free space where the eye could see far.  We were
following a coast.  I asked:

"'Is that the island of Ré?'

"'Yes, sir.'

"And suddenly the captain stretched his right hand out before us,
pointed to something almost invisible in the middle of the sea, and
said:

"'There's your ship!'

"'The _Marie Joseph_?'

"'Yes.'

"I was stupefied.  This black, almost imperceptible speck, which
looked to me like a rock, seemed at least three miles from land.

"I continued:

"'But, captain, there must be a hundred fathoms of water in that
place.'

"He began to laugh.

"'A hundred fathoms, my child!  Well, I should say about two!'

"He was from Bordeaux.  He continued:

"'It's now nine-forty, just high tide.  Go down along the beach with
your hands in your pockets after you've had lunch at the Hotel du
Dauphin, and I'll wager that at ten minutes to three, or three
o'clock, you'll reach the wreck without wetting your feet, and have
from an hour and three-quarters to two hours aboard of her; but not
more, or you'll be caught.  The faster the sea goes out the faster it
comes back.  This coast is as flat as a turtle!  But start away at
ten minutes to five, as I tell you, and at half-past seven you will
be aboard of the _Jean Guiton_ again, which will put you down this
same evening on the quay at La Rochelle.'

"I thanked the captain, and I went and sat down in the bow of the
steamer to get a good look at the little city of Saint-Martin, which
we were now rapidly drawing near.

"It was just like all small seaports which serve as the capitals of
the barren islands scattered along the coast--a large fishing
village, one foot on sea and one on shore, living on fish and
wild-fowl, vegetables and shell-fish, radishes and mussels.  The
island is very low, and little cultivated, yet it seems to be thickly
populated.  However, I did not penetrate into the interior.

"After breakfast I climbed across a little promontory, and then, as
the tide was rapidly falling, I started out across the sands toward a
kind of black rock which I could just perceive above the surface of
the water, out a considerable distance.

"I walked quickly over the yellow plain; it was elastic, like flesh,
and seemed to sweat beneath my foot.  The sea had been there very
lately; now I perceived it at a distance, escaping out of sight, and
I no longer could distinguish the line which separated the sands from
ocean.  I felt as though I were assisting at a gigantic supernatural
work of enchantment.  The Atlantic had just now been before me, then
it had disappeared into the strand, just as does scenery through a
trap; and I now walked in the midst of a desert.  Only the feeling,
the breath of the salt-water, remained in me.  I perceived the smell
of the wreck, the smell of the wide sea, the good smell of
sea-coasts.  I walked fast; I was no longer cold; I looked at the
stranded wreck, which grew in size as I approached, and came now to
resemble an enormous shipwrecked whale.

"It seemed fairly to rise out of the ground, and on that great, flat,
yellow stretch of sand assumed wonderful proportions.  After an
hour's walk I at last reached it.  Bulging out and crushed, it lay
upon its side, which, like the flanks of an animal, displayed its
broken bones, its bones of tarry wood pierced with great bolts.  The
sand had already invaded it, entering it by all the crannies, and
held it, and refused to let it go.  It seemed to have taken root in
it.  The bow had entered deep into this soft, treacherous beach;
while the stern, high in air, seemed to cast at heaven, like a cry of
despairing appeal, the two white words on the black planking, _Marie
Joseph_.

"I climbed upon this carcass of a ship by the lowest side; then,
having reached the deck, I went below.  The daylight, which entered
by the stove-in hatches and the cracks in the sides, showed me a long
somber cellar full of demolished woodwork.  There was nothing here
but the sand, which served as foot-soil in this cavern of planks.

"I began to take some notes about the condition of the ship.  I was
seated on a broken empty cask, writing by the light of a great crack,
through which I could perceive the boundless stretch of the strand.
A strange shivering of cold and loneliness ran over my skin from time
to time; and I would often stop writing for a moment to listen to the
mysterious noises: the noise of the crabs scratching the planking
with their crooked claws; the noise of a thousand little creatures of
the sea already crawling over this dead body.

"Suddenly, very near me, I heard human voices; I started as though I
had seen a ghost.  For a second I really thought I was about to see
drowned men rise from the sinister depths of the hold, who would tell
me about their death.  At any rate, it did not take me long to swing
myself on deck.  There, below the bow, I found standing a tall
Englishman with three young girls.  Certainly, they were a good deal
more frightened at seeing this sudden apparition on the abandoned
three-master than I had been at seeing them.  The youngest girl
turned round and ran; the two others caught their father by the arms;
as for him, he opened his mouth--that was the only sign of his
emotion which he showed.

"Then, after several seconds, he spoke:

"'Môsieu, are you the owner of this ship?'

"'I am.'

"'May I go over it?"

"'You may.'

"Then he uttered a long sentence in English, in which I only
distinguished the word 'gracious,' repeated several times.

"As he was looking for a place to climb up, I showed him the best,
and gave him a hand.  He ascended.  Then we helped up the three
little girls, who had now quite recovered their composure.  They were
charming, especially the oldest, a blonde of eighteen, fresh as a
flower, and very dainty and pretty!  Ah yes! the pretty Englishwomen
have indeed the look of tender fruits of the sea.  One would have
said of this one that she had just risen from the sands and that her
hair had kept their tint.  They all, with their exquisite freshness,
make you think of the delicate colours of pink sea-shells, and of
shining pearls hidden in the unknown depths of the ocean.

"She spoke French a little better than her father, and she acted as
interpreter.  I must tell all about the shipwreck, and I romanced as
though I had been present at the catastrophe.  Then the whole family
descended into the interior of the wreck.  As soon as they had
penetrated into this sombre, dim-lit gallery, they uttered cries of
astonishment and admiration.  Suddenly the father and his three
daughters were holding sketch-books in their hands, which they had
doubtless carried hidden somewhere in their heavy weather-proof
clothes, and were all beginning at once to make pencil sketches of
the melancholy and fantastic place.

"They had seated themselves side by side on a projecting beam, and
the four sketch-books on the eight knees were being rapidly covered
with little black lines which were intended to represent the
half-opened hulk of the _Marie Joseph_.

"I continued to inspect the skeleton of the ship, and the oldest girl
talked to me while she worked.

"They had none of the usual English arrogance; they were simple
honest hearts of that class of constant travellers with which England
covers the globe.  The father was long and thin, with a red face
framed in white whiskers, and looking like a living sandwich, placed
between two wedges of hair.  The daughters, like little wading-birds
in embryo, had long legs and were also thin--except the oldest.  All
three were pretty, especially the tallest.

"She had such a droll way of speaking, of laughing, of understanding
and of not understanding, of raising her eyes to ask a question (eyes
blue as the deep ocean), of stopping her drawing a moment to make a
guess at what you meant, of returning once more to work, of saying
'yes' or 'no'--that I could have listened and looked indefinitely.

"Suddenly she murmured:

"'I hear a little movement on this boat.'

"I lent an ear; and I immediately distinguished a low, steady,
curious sound.  I rose and looked out of the crack, and I uttered a
violent cry.  The sea had come back; it had already surrounded us!

"We were on deck in an instant.  It was too late.  The water circled
us about, and was running towards the coast with awful swiftness.
No, it did not run, it raced, it grew longer, like a kind of great
limitless blot.  The water on the sands was barely a few centimeters
deep; but the rising flood had gone so far that we no longer saw the
flying line of its edge.

"The Englishman wanted to jump.  I held him back.  Flight was
impossible because of the deep places which we had been obliged to go
round on our way out, and through which we could not pass on our
return.

"There was a minute of horrible anguish in our hearts.  Then the
little English girl began to smile, and murmured:

"'So we too are shipwrecked?'

"I tried to laugh; but fear caught me tight, a fear which was
cowardly and horrid and base and mean, like the tide.  All the
dangers which we ran appeared to me at once.  I wanted to shriek
'Help!'  But to whom?

"The two younger girls were clinging to their father, who regarded,
with a look of consternation, the measureless sea which hedged us
round about.

"The night fell as swiftly as the ocean rose--a lowering, wet, icy
night.

"I said:

"'There's nothing to do but to stay on the ship.'

"The Englishman answered:

"'Oh, yes!'

"And we waited there a quarter of an hour, half an hour, indeed I
don't know how long, watching that creeping water which grew deep
about us, whirled round and round the wreck.

"One of the little girls was cold, and we went below to shelter
ourselves from the light but freezing wind which blew upon us and
pricked our skins.

"I leaned over the hatchway.  The ship was full of water.  So we must
cower against the stern planking, which shielded us a little.

"The shades were now enwrapping us, and we remained pressed close to
one another.  I felt trembling against my shoulder the shoulder of
the little English girl, whose teeth chattered from time to time.
But I also felt the gentle warmth of her body through her ulster, and
that warmth was as delicious to me as a kiss.  We no longer spoke; we
sat motionless, mute, cowering down like animals in a ditch when a
hurricane is raging.  And, nevertheless, despite the night, despite
the terrible and increasing danger, I began to feel happy that I was
there, glad of the cold and the peril, to rejoice in the long hours
of darkness and anguish which I must pass on this plank so near this
dainty and pretty little girl.

"I asked myself, 'Why this strange sensation of well-being and of
joy?'

"Why!  Does one know?  Because she was there?  Who?  She, a little
unknown English girl?  I did not love her, I did not even know her.
And for all that I was touched and conquered.  I wanted to save her,
to sacrifice myself for her, to commit a thousand follies!  Strange
thing!  How does it happen that the presence of a woman overwhelms us
so?  Is it the power of her grace which infolds us?  Is it the
seduction in her beauty and youth, which intoxicates one like wine?

"Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who
seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the
instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?

"The silence of the shades and of the sky became dreadful, because we
could thus hear vaguely about us an infinite low roar, the dull sound
of the rising sea, and the monotonous dashing of the waves against
the ship.

"Suddenly I heard the sound of sobs.  The youngest of the little
girls was crying.  Her father tried to console her, and they began to
talk in their own tongue, which I did not understand.  I guessed that
he was reassuring her, and that she was still afraid.

"I asked my neighbour:

"'You are not too cold, are you, Mademoiselle?'

"'Oh, yes.  I am very cold.'

"I offered to give her my cloak; she refused it.  But I had taken it
off, and I covered her with it against her will.  In the short
struggle her hand touched mine.  It made a charming shiver run over
my body.

"For some minutes the air had been growing brisker, the dashing of
the water stronger against the flanks of the ship.  I raised myself;
a great gust of wind blew in my face.  The wind was rising!

"The Englishman perceived this at the same time that I did, and said,
simply:

"'This is bad for us, this--'

"Of course it was bad, it was certain death if any breakers, however
feeble, should attack and shake the wreck, which was already so loose
and broken that the first big sea would carry it off.

"So our anguish increased momentarily as the squalls grew stronger
and stronger.  Now the sea broke a little, and I saw in the darkness
white lines appearing and disappearing, which were lines of foam;
while each wave struck the _Marie Joseph_, and shook her with a short
quiver which rose to our hearts.

"The English girl was trembling; I felt her shiver against me.  And I
had a wild desire to take her in my arms.

"Down there before and behind us, to left and right, lighthouses were
shining along the shore--lighthouses white and yellow and red,
revolving like the enormous eyes of giants who were staring at us,
watching us, waiting eagerly for us to disappear.  One of them in
especial irritated me.  It went out every thirty seconds and it lit
up again as soon.  It was indeed an eye, that one, with its lid
ceaselessly lowered over its fiery look.

"From time to time the Englishman struck a match to see the hour;
then he put his watch back in his pocket.  Suddenly he said to me,
over the heads of his daughters, with a gravity which was awful:

"'I wish you a Happy New Year, Môsieu.'

"It was midnight.  I held out my hand, which he pressed.  Then he
said something in English, and suddenly he and his daughters began to
sing 'God Save the Queen,' which rose through the black and silent
air and vanished into space.

"At first I felt a desire to laugh; then I was seized by a strong,
fantastic emotion.

"It was something sinister and superb, this chant of the shipwrecked,
the condemned, something like a prayer, and also something grander,
something comparable to the ancient '_Ave Cæsar morituri te
salutamus_.'

"When they had finished I asked my neighbour to sing a ballad alone,
anything she liked, to make us forget our terrors.  She consented,
and immediately her clear young voice rang out into the night.  She
sang something which was doubtless sad, because the notes were long
drawn out, and hovered, like wounded birds, about the waves.

"The sea was rising now and beating upon our wreck.  As for me, I
thought only of that voice.  And I thought also of the sirens.  If a
ship had passed nearby us what would the sailors have said?  My
troubled spirit lost itself in the dream!  A siren!  Was she not
really a siren, this daughter of the sea, who had kept me on this
worm-eaten ship, and who was soon about to go down with me deep into
the waters?

"But suddenly we were all five rolling on the deck, because the
_Marie Joseph_ had sunk on her right side.  The English girl had
fallen upon me, and before I knew what I was doing, thinking that my
last moment was come, I had caught her in my arms and kissed her
cheek, her temple, and her hair.

"The ship did not move again, and we, we also, remained motionless.

"The father said, 'Kate!'  The one whom I was holding answered,
'Yes,' and made a movement to free herself.  And at that moment I
should have wished the ship to split in two and let me fall with her
into the sea.

"The Englishman continued:

"'A little rocking; it's nothing.  I have my three daughters safe.'

"Not having seen the oldest, he had thought she was lost overboard!

"I rose slowly, and suddenly I made out a light on the sea quite near
us.  I shouted; they answered.  It was a boat sent out in search of
us by the hotel-keeper, who had guessed at our imprudence.

"We were saved.  I was in despair.  They picked us up off our raft,
and they brought us back to Saint-Martin.

"The Englishman began to rub his hands and murmur:

"'A good supper!  A good supper!'

"We did sup.  I was not gay.  I regretted the _Marie Joseph_.

"We had to separate the next day after much handshaking and many
promises to write.  They departed for Biarritz.  I wanted to follow
them.

"I was hard hit; I wanted to ask this little girl to marry me.  If we
had passed eight days together, I should have done so!  How weak and
incomprehensible a man sometimes is!

"Two years passed without my hearing a word from them.  Then I
received a letter from New York.  She was married, and wrote to tell
me.  And since then we write to each other every year, on New Year's
Day.  She tells me about her life, talks of her children, her
sisters, never of her husband!  Why?  Ah! why? ... And as for me I
only talk of the _Marie Joseph_.  That was perhaps the only woman I
have ever loved.  No--that I ever should have loved....  Ah, well!
who can tell?  Facts master you....  And then--and then--all
passes....  She must be old now; I should not know her....  Ah! she
of the by-gone time, she of the wreck!  What a creature! ... Divine!
... She writes me her hair is white....  That caused me terrible
pain....  Ah! her yellow hair....  No, my English girl exists no
longer....  They are sad, such things as that!"




VII

A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

EDGAR ALLAN POE


"The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways;
nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the
vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, _which have
a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus_."--JOSEPH
GLANVILLE.


We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag.  For some minutes
the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.

"Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided you on
this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years
past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to
mortal man--or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of--and
the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up
body and soul.  You suppose me a very old man--but I am not.  It took
less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to
white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I
tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow.  Do you
know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting
giddy?"

The "little cliff," upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown
himself down to rest, that the weightier portion of his body hung
over it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his
elbow on its extreme and slippery edge--this "little cliff" arose, a
sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some fifteen or
sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us.  Nothing
would have tempted me to within half-a-dozen yards of its brink.  In
truth, so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my
companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the
shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky--while
I struggled in vain to divest myself of the idea that the very
foundations of the mountain were in danger from the fury of the
winds.  It was long before I could reason myself into sufficient
courage to sit up and look out into the distance.

"You must get over these fancies," said the guide, "for I have
brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the
scene of that event I mentioned--and to tell you the whole story with
the spot just under your eye.

"We are now," he continued, in that particularising manner which
distinguished him--"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast--in the
sixty-eighth degree of latitude--in the great province of
Nordland--and in the dreary district of Lofoden.  The mountain upon
whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy.  Now raise yourself up a
little higher--hold on to the grass if you feel giddy--so--and look
out, beyond the belt of vapour beneath us, into the sea."

I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters
wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian
geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum.  A panorama more
deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive.  To the right
and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay out-stretched,
like ramparts of the world, lines of horribly black and beetling
cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated
by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly
crest, howling and shrieking forever.  Just opposite the promontory
upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six
miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island;
or, more properly, its position was discernible through the
wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped.  About two miles
nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and
barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark
rocks.

The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant
island and the shore, had something very unusual about it.  Although,
at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the
remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly
plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing
like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of
water in every direction--as well in the teeth of the wind as
otherwise.  Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity
of the rocks.

"The island in the distance," resumed the old man, "is called by the
Norwegians Vurrgh.  The one mid-way is Moskoe.  That a mile to the
northward is Ambaaren.  Yonder are Islesen, Hotholm, Keildhelm,
Suarven, and Buckholm.  Farther off--between Moskoe and Vurrgh--are
Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Stockholm.  These are the true
names of the places--but why it has been thought necessary to name
them at all, is more than either you or I can understand.  Do you
hear anything?  Do you see any change in the water?"

We had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen, to which
we had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught
no glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit.  As
the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing
sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American
prairie; and at the same moment I perceived what seamen term the
_chopping_ character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing
into a current which set to the eastward.  Even while I gazed, this
current acquired a monstrous velocity.  Each moment added to its
speed--to its headlong impetuosity.  In five minutes the whole sea,
as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was
between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway.
Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand
conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied
convulsion--heaving, boiling, hissing--gyrating in gigantic and
innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the
eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes, except
in precipitous descents.

In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical
alteration.  The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the
whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam
became apparent where none had been seen before.  These streaks, at
length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into
combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided
vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast.
Suddenly--very suddenly--this assumed a distinct and definite
existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter.  The edge of
the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no
particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose
interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining,
and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of
some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a
swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an
appalling voice, half-shriek, half-roar, such as not even the mighty
cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked.  I threw
myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of
nervous agitation.

"This," said I at length, to the old man--"this can be nothing else
than the great whirlpool of the Maelström."

"So it is sometimes termed," said he.  "We Norwegians call it the
Moskoe-ström, from the island of Moskoe in the midway."

The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for
what I saw.  That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most
circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception either
of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene--or of the wild
bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder.  I am
not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it,
nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of
Helseggen, nor during a storm.  There are some passages of his
description, nevertheless, which may be quoted for their details,
although their effect is exceedingly feeble in conveying an
impression of the spectacle.

"Between Lofoden and Moskoe," he says, "the depth of the water is
between thirty-six and forty fathoms; but on the other side, toward
Ver (Vurrgh), this depth decreases so as not to afford a convenient
passage for a vessel, without the risk of splitting on the rocks,
which happens even in the calmest weather.  When it is flood, the
stream runs up the country between Lofoden and Moskoe with a
boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to the sea is
scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts, the noise
being heard several leagues off; and the vortices or pits are of such
an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it
is inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom, and there beat
to pieces against the rocks; and when the water relaxes, the
fragments thereof are thrown up again.  But these intervals of
tranquillity are only at the turn of the ebb and flood, and in calm
weather, and last but a quarter of an hour, its violence gradually
returning.  When the stream is most boisterous, and its fury
heightened by a storm, it is dangerous to come within a Norway mile
of it.  Boats, yachts, and ships have been carried away by not
guarding against it before they were within its reach.  It likewise
happens frequently, that whales come too near the stream, and are
overpowered by its violence; and then it is impossible to describe
their howlings and bellowings in their fruitless struggles to
disengage themselves.  A bear once, attempting to swim from Lofoden
to Moskoe, was caught by the stream and borne down, while he roared
terribly, so as to be heard on shore.  Large stocks of firs and pine
trees, after being absorbed by the current, rise again broken and
torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon them.  This plainly
shows the bottom to consist of craggy rocks, among which they are
whirled to and fro.  This stream is regulated by the flux and reflux
of the sea--it being constantly high and low water every six hours.
In the year 1645, early in the morning of Sexagesima Sunday, it raged
with such noise and impetuosity that the very stones of the houses on
the coast fell to the ground."

In regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this could
have been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of the vortex.
The "forty fathoms" must have reference only to portions of the
channel close upon the shore either of Moskoe or Lofoden.  The depth
in the centre of the Moskoe-ström must be immeasurably greater; and
no better proof of this fact is necessary than can be obtained from
even the sidelong glance into the abyss of the whirl which may be had
from the highest crag of Helseggen.  Looking down from this pinnacle
upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling at the
simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter
difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for
it appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing, that the largest
ships of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that
deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather in the
hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once.

The attempts to account for the phenomenon--some of which, I
remember, seemed to me sufficiently plausible in perusal--now wore a
very different and unsatisfactory aspect.  The idea generally
received is that this, as well as three smaller vortices among the
Faroe Islands, "have no other cause than the collision of waves
rising and falling, at flux and reflux, against a ridge of rocks and
shelves, which confines the water so that it precipitates itself like
a cataract; and thus the higher the flood rises, the deeper must the
fall be, and the natural result of all is a whirlpool or vortex, the
prodigious suction of which is sufficiently known by lesser
experiments."--These are the words of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the
Maelström is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very
remote part--the Gulf of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in
one instance.  This opinion, idle in itself, was the one to which, as
I gazed, my imagination most readily assented; and, mentioning it to
the guide, I was rather surprised to hear him say that, although it
was the view almost universally entertained of the subject by the
Norwegians, it nevertheless was not his own.  As to the former
notion, he confessed his inability to comprehend it; and here I
agreed with him--for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes
altogether unintelligible, and even absurd, amid the thunder of the
abyss.

"You have had a good look at the whirl now," said the old man, "and
if you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and
deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will
convince you I ought to know something of the Moskoe-ström."

I placed myself as desired, and he proceeded.

"Myself and my two brothers once owned a schooner-rigged smack of
about seventy tons burden, with which we were in the habit of fishing
among the islands beyond Moskoe, nearly to Vurrgh.  In all violent
eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities, if one
has only the courage to attempt it; but among the whole of the
Lofoden coast-men, we three were the only ones who made a regular
business of going out to the islands, as I tell you.  The usual
grounds are a great way lower down to the southward.  There fish can
be got at all hours, without much risk, and therefore these places
are preferred.  The choice spots over here among the rocks, however,
not only yield the finest variety, but in far greater abundance; so
that we often got in a single day, what the more timid of the craft
could not scrape together in a week.  In fact, we made it a matter of
desperate speculation--the risk of life standing instead of labour,
and courage answering for capital.

"We kept the smack in a cove about five miles higher up the coast
than this; and it was our practice, in fine weather, to take
advantage of the fifteen minutes' slack to push across the main
channel of the Moskoe-ström, far above the pool, and then drop down
upon anchorage somewhere near Otterholm, or Sandflesen, where the
eddies are not so violent as elsewhere.  Here we used to remain until
nearly time for slack-water again, when we weighed and made for home.
We never set out upon this expedition without a steady side wind for
going and coming--one that we felt sure would not fail us before our
return--and we seldom made a miscalculation upon this point.  Twice,
during six years, we were forced to stay all night at anchor on
account of a dead calm, which is a rare thing indeed just about here;
and once we had to remain on the grounds nearly a week, starving to
death, owing to a gale which blew up shortly after our arrival, and
made the channel too boisterous to be thought of.  Upon this occasion
we should have been driven out to sea in spite of everything, (for
the whirlpools threw us round and round so violently, that, at
length, we fouled our anchor and dragged it) if it had not been that
we drifted into one of the innumerable cross currents--here to-day
and gone to-morrow--which drove us under the lee of Flimen, where, by
good luck, we brought up.

"I could not tell you the twentieth part of the difficulties we
encountered 'on the ground'--it is a bad spot to be in, even in good
weather--but we made shift always to run the gauntlet of the
Moskoe-ström itself without accident; although at times my heart has
been in my mouth when we happened to be a minute or so behind or
before the slack.  The wind sometimes was not as strong as we thought
it at starting, and then we made rather less way than we could wish,
while the current rendered the smack unmanageable.  My eldest brother
had a son eighteen years old, and I had two stout boys of my own.
These would have been of great assistance at such times, in using the
sweeps, as well as afterward in fishing--but, somehow, although we
ran the risk ourselves, we had not the heart to let the young ones
get into danger--for, after all said and done, it was a horrible
danger, and that is the truth.

"It is now within a few days of three years since what I am going to
tell you occurred.  It was on the 10th of July, 18--, a day which the
people of this part of the world will never forget--for it was one in
which blew the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the
heavens.  And yet all the morning, and indeed until late in the
afternoon, there was a gentle and steady breeze from the south-west,
while the sun shone brightly, so that the oldest seaman among us
could not have foreseen what was to follow.

"The three of us--my two brothers and myself--had crossed over to the
islands about two o'clock.  P.M., and soon nearly loaded the smack
with fine fish, which, we all remarked, were more plenty that day
than we had ever known them.  It was just seven, by my watch, when we
weighed and started for home, so as to make the worst of the Ström at
slack water, which we knew would be at eight.

"We set out with a fresh wind on our starboard quarter, and for some
time spanked along at a great rate, never dreaming of danger, for
indeed we saw not the slightest reason to apprehend it.  All at once
we were taken aback by a breeze from over Helseggen.  This was most
unusual--something that had never happened to us before--and I began
to feel a little uneasy, without exactly knowing why.  We put the
boat on the wind, but could make no headway at all for the eddies,
and I was upon the point of proposing to return to the anchorage,
when, looking astern, we saw the whole horizon covered with a
singular copper-coloured cloud that rose with the most amazing
velocity.

"In the meantime the breeze that had headed us off fell away, and we
were dead becalmed, drifting about in every direction.  This state of
things, however, did not last long enough to give us time to think
about it.  In less than a minute the storm was upon us--in less than
two the sky was entirely overcast--and what with this and the driving
spray, it became suddenly so dark that we could not see each other in
the smack.

"Such a hurricane as then blew it is folly to attempt describing.
The oldest seamen in Norway never experienced anything like it.  We
had let our sails go by the run before it cleverly took us; but, at
the first puff, both our masts went by the board as if they had been
sawed off--the mainmast taking with it my youngest brother, who had
lashed himself to it for safety.

"Our boat was the lightest feather of a thing that ever sat upon
water.  It had a complete flush deck, with only a small hatch near
the bow, and this hatch it had always been our custom to batten down
when about to cross the Ström, by way of precaution against the
chopping seas.  But for this circumstance we should have foundered at
once--for we lay entirely buried for some moments.  How my elder
brother escaped destruction I cannot say, for I never had an
opportunity of ascertaining.  For my part, as soon as I had let the
foresail run, I threw myself flat on deck, with my feet against the
narrow gunwale of the bow, and with my hands grasping a ring-bolt
near the foot of the foremast.  It was mere instinct that prompted me
to do this--which was undoubtedly the very best thing I could have
done--for I was too much flurried to think.

"For some moments we were completely deluged, as I say, and all this
time I held my breath, and clung to the bolt.  When I could stand it
no longer, I raised myself upon my knees, still keeping hold with my
hands, and thus got my head clear.  Presently our little boat gave
herself a shake, just as a dog does in coming out of the water, and
thus rid herself, in some measure, of the seas.  I was now trying to
get the better of the stupor that had come over me, and to collect my
senses, so as to see what was to be done, when I felt somebody grasp
my arm.  It was my elder brother, and my heart leaped for joy, for I
had made sure that he was overboard; but the next moment all this joy
was turned into horror, for he put his mouth close to my ear, and
screamed out the word '_Moskoe-ström_!'

"No one ever will know what my feelings were at that moment.  I shook
from head to foot as if I had the most violent fit of the ague.  I
knew what he meant by that one word well enough--I knew what he
wished to make me understand.  With the wind that now drove us on, we
were bound for the whirl of the Ström, and nothing could save us!

"You perceive that in crossing the Ström channel, we always went a
long way up above the whirl, even in the calmest weather, and then
had to wait and watch carefully for the slack--but now we were
driving right upon the pool itself, and in such a hurricane as this!
'To be sure,' I thought, 'we shall get there just about the
slack--there is some little hope in that'--but in the next moment I
cursed myself for being so great a fool as to dream of hope at all.
I knew very well that we were doomed, had we been ten times a
ninety-gun ship.

"By this time the first fury of the tempest had spent itself, or
perhaps we did not feel it so much, as we scudded before it, but at
all events the seas, which at first had been kept down by the wind,
and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains.  A
singular change, too, had come over the heavens.  Around in every
direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there
burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky--as clear as I
ever saw--and of a deep bright blue--and through it there blazed
forth the full moon with a lustre that I never before knew her to
wear.  She lit up everything about us with the greatest
distinctness--but, O God, what a scene it was to light up!

"I now made one or two attempts to speak to my brother--but in some
manner which I could not understand, the din had so increased that I
could not make him hear a single word, although I screamed at the top
of my voice in his ear.  Presently he shook his head, looking as pale
as death, and held up one of his fingers, as if to say '_Listen!_'

"At first I could not make out what he meant--but soon a hideous
thought flashed upon me.  I dragged my watch from its fob.  It was
not going.  I glanced at its face by the moonlight, and then burst
into tears as I flung it far away into the ocean.  _It had run down
at seven o'clock!  We were behind the time of the slack, and the
whirl of the Ström was in full fury!_

"When a boat is well built, properly trimmed, and not deep laden, the
waves in a strong gale, when she is going large, seem always to slip
from beneath her--which appears very strange to a landsman--and this
is what is called _riding_, in sea phrase.

"Well, so far we had ridden the swells very cleverly; but presently a
gigantic sea happened to take us right under the counter, and bore us
with it as it rose--up--up--as if into the sky.  I would not have
believed that any wave could rise so high.  And then down we came
with a sweep, a slide, and a plunge, that made me feel sick and
dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty mountain-top in a dream.
But while we were up I had thrown a quick glance around--and that one
glance was all sufficient.  I saw our exact position in an instant.
The Moskoe-ström whirlpool was about a quarter of a mile dead
ahead--but no more like the everyday Moskoe-ström, than the whirl as
you now see it, is like a mill-race.  If I had not known where we
were, and what we had to expect, I should not have recognized the
place at all.  As it was, I involuntarily closed my eyes in horror.
The lids clenched themselves together as if in a spasm.

"It could not have been more than two minutes afterward until we
suddenly felt the waves subside, and were enveloped in foam.  The
boat made a sharp half turn to larboard, and then shot off in its new
direction like a thunderbolt.  At the same moment the roaring noise
of the water was completely drowned in a kind of shrill shriek--such
a sound as you might imagine given out by the water-pipes of many
thousand steam-vessels, letting off their steam all together.  We
were now in the belt of surf that always surrounds the whirl; and I
thought, of course, that another moment would plunge us into the
abyss--down which we could only see indistinctly on account of the
amazing velocity with which we were borne along.  The boat did not
seem to sink into the water at all, but to skim like an air-bubble
upon the surface of the surge.  Her starboard side was next the
whirl, and on the larboard arose the world of ocean we had left.  It
stood like a huge writhing wall between us and the horizon.

"It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the very jaws of the
gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching it.
Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of
that terror which unmanned me at first.  I supposed it was despair
that strung my nerves.

"It may look like boasting--but what I tell you is truth--I began to
reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and
how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my
own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God's
power.  I do believe that I blushed with shame when this idea crossed
my mind.  After a little while I became possessed with the keenest
curiosity about the whirl itself.  I positively felt a wish to
explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my
principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old
companions on shore about the mysteries I should see.  These, no
doubt, were singular fancies to occupy a man's mind in such
extremity--and I have often thought since, that the revolutions of
the boat around the pool might have rendered me a little light-headed.

"There was another circumstance which tended to restore my
self-possession; and this was the cessation of the wind, which could
not reach us in our present situation--for, as you saw yourself, the
belt of surf is considerably lower than the general bed of the ocean,
and this latter now towered above us, a high, black, mountainous
ridge.  If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form
no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and spray
together.  They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all
power of action or reflection.  But we were now, in a great measure,
rid of these annoyances--just as death-condemned felons in prison are
allowed petty indulgences, forbidden them while their doom is yet
uncertain.

"How often we made the circuit of the belt it is impossible to say.
We careered round and round for perhaps an hour, flying rather than
floating, getting gradually more and more into the middle of the
surge, and then nearer and nearer to its horrible inner edge.  All
this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt.  My brother was at the
stern, holding on to a small empty water-cask, which had been
securely lashed upon the coop of the counter, and was the only thing
on deck that had not been swept overboard when the gale first took
us.  As we approached the brink of the pit he let go his hold upon
this, and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror,
he endeavoured to force my hands, as it was not large enough to
afford us both a secure grasp.  I never felt deeper grief than when I
saw him attempt this act--although I knew he was a madman when he did
it--a raving maniac through sheer fright.  I did not care, however,
to contest the point with him.  I knew it could make no difference
whether either of us held on at all; so I let him have the bolt, and
went astern to the cask.  This there was no great difficulty in
doing; for the smack flew round steadily enough, and upon an even
keel--only swaying to and fro, with the immense sweeps and swelters
of the whirl.  Scarcely had I secured myself in my new position, when
we gave a wild lurch to starboard, and rushed headlong into the
abyss.  I muttered a hurried prayer to God, and thought all was over.

"As I felt the sickening sweep of the descent, I had instinctively
tightened my hold upon the barrel, and closed my eyes.  For some
seconds I dared not open them--while I expected instant destruction,
and wondered that I was not already in my death-struggles with the
water.  But moment after moment elapsed.  I still lived.  The sense
of falling had ceased; and the motion of the vessel seemed much as it
had been before, while in the belt of foam, with the exception that
she now lay more along.  I took courage and looked once again upon
the scene.

"Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration
with which I gazed about me.  The boat appeared to be hanging, as if
by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel, vast in
circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides
might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity
with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly
radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that
circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described,
streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far
away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.

"At first I was too much confused to observe anything accurately.
The general burst of terrific grandeur was all that I beheld.  When I
recovered myself a little, however, my gaze fell instinctively
downward.  In this direction I was able to obtain an unobstructed
view, from the manner in which the smack hung on the inclined surface
of the pool.  She was quite upon an even keel--that is to say, her
deck lay in a plane parallel with that of the water--but this latter
sloped at an angle of more than forty-five degrees, so that we seemed
to be lying upon our beam-ends.  I could not help observing,
nevertheless, that I had scarcely more difficulty in maintaining my
hold and footing in this situation, than if we had been upon a dead
level; and this, I suppose, was owing to the speed at which we
revolved.

"The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the
profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on
account of a thick mist in which everything there was enveloped, and
over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow and
tottering bridge which Mussulmans say is the only pathway between
Time and Eternity.  This mist, or spray, was no doubt occasioned by
the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as they all met
together at the bottom--but the yell that went up to the heavens from
out of that mist, I dare not attempt to describe.

"Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam above,
had carried us to a great distance down the slope; but our farther
descent was by no means proportionate.  Round and round we swept--not
with any uniform movement--but in dizzying swings and jerks, that
sent us sometimes only a few hundred yards--sometimes nearly the
complete circuit of the whirl.  Our progress downward, at each
revolution, was slow, but very perceptible.

"Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we
were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in
the embrace of the whirl.  Both above and below us were visible
fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of
trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture,
broken boxes, barrels and staves.  I have already described the
unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors.
It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my
dreadful doom.  I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the
numerous things that floated in our company.  I must have been
delirious--for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the
relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below.
'This fir tree,' I found myself at one time saying, 'will certainly
be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears,' and
then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant
ship overtook it and went down before.  At length, after making
several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all--this
fact--the fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train
of reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat
heavily once more.

"It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a
more exciting _hope_.  This hope arose partly from memory and partly
from present observation.  I called to mind the great variety of
buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been
absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-ström.  By far the
greater number of the articles were shattered in the most
extraordinary way--so chafed and roughened as to have the appearance
of being stuck full of splinters--but then I distinctly recollected
that there were _some_ of them which were not disfigured at all.  Now
I could not account for this difference except by supposing that the
roughened fragments were the only ones which had been _completely
absorbed_--that the others had entered the whirl at so late a period
of the tide, or, from some reason, had descended so slowly after
entering, that they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the
flood came, or of the ebb as the case might be.  I conceived it
possible, in either instance, that they might thus be whirled up
again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those
which had been drawn in more early or absorbed more rapidly.  I made,
also, three important observations.  The first was, that as a general
rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent--the
second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical,
and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent
was with the sphere--the third, that, between two masses of equal
size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other shape, the
cylinder was absorbed the more slowly.  Since my escape, I have had
several conversations on this subject with an old schoolmaster of the
district; and it was from him that I learned the use of the words
'cylinder' and 'sphere.'  He explained to me--although I have
forgotten the explanation--how what I observed was, in fact, the
natural consequence of the forms of the floating fragments--and
showed me how it happened that a cylinder, swimming in a vortex,
offered more resistance to its suction, and was drawn in with greater
difficulty than an equally bulky body of any form whatever.*


* See Archimedes, De Incidentibus in Fluido, lib. 2.


"There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in
enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn them
to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we passed
something like a barrel, or else the yard or the mast of a vessel,
while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first
opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up
above us, and seemed to have moved but little from their original
station.

"I no longer hesitated what to do.  I resolved to lash myself
securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose
from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water.  I
attracted my brother's attention by signs, pointed to the floating
barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him
understand what I was about to do.  I thought at length that he
comprehended my design--but whether this was the case or not, he
shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by
the ring-bolt.  It was impossible to reach him; the emergency
admitted of no delay; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him
to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings
which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into
the sea, without another moment's hesitation.

"The result was precisely what I had hoped it might be.  As it is
myself who now tell you this tale--as you see that I did escape--and
as you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was
effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have further to
say--I will bring my story quickly to conclusion.  It might have been
an hour, or thereabout, after my quitting the smack, when, having
descended to a vast distance beneath me, it made three or four wild
gyrations in rapid succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it,
plunged headlong, at once and for ever, into the chaos of foam below.
The barrel to which I was attached sunk very little farther than half
the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the spot at which I
leaped overboard, before a great change took place in the character
of the whirlpool.  The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became
momentarily less and less steep, the gyrations of the whirl grew
gradually less and less violent.  By degrees, the froth and the
rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to
uprise.  The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full
moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the
surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and
above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-ström had been.  It was
the hour of the slack--but the sea still heaved in mountainous waves
from the effects of the hurricane.  I was borne violently into the
channel of the Ström, and in a few minutes, was hurried down the
coast into the 'grounds' of the fishermen.  A boat picked me
up--exhausted from fatigue--and (now that the danger was
removed)--speechless from the memory of its horror.  Those who drew
me on board were my old mates and daily companions--but they knew me
no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land.
My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as
you see it now.  They say, too, that the whole expression of my
countenance had changed.  I told them my story--they did not believe
it.  I now tell it to _you_--and I can scarcely expect you to put
more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden."



END




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