Cast Away in the Cold Part 12

"To be sure we do," replied William. "And if anybody dares to doubt it, I will go, like Count Robert, to the crossroad, and give battle for a week to all comers, just as he did."

"Poking fun at the ancient mariner again,--are you?" said the Captain, trying hard to look serious. "And so I'll punish you, my boy, by knocking off just where we are, and saying not another word this blessed day."

CHAPTER XII.

Relates how a Desert Island became a Rock of Good Hope, and other Hopeful Matters which to be understood must be read of.

"You now see," went on the Captain, when the story was again resumed, "that the Dean and myself had by this time fallen into a regular course of life. 'What cannot be helped,' said the Dean, 'we must make the best of.'

"Being thus obliged to make the best of it, we became resigned; and here let me say that even now I feel much surprised at the ease with which we dropped into ways suitable to our new life. You have seen already how one difficulty after another vanished before our patient efforts; and now that we had a fire to warm us, and a hut to shelter us, we felt as if we could overcome almost anything. So we gained great courage, and were fast settling down to business, like any other people, feeling that our lives were at least in no present danger.

"The Dean and I had a conversation about this time, which I will try to repeat as nearly as I can. We were seated on the hillside overlooking the sea to the west, attracted by what we at first took for a ship under full sail, steering right in towards the island; but you can imagine how great was our disappointment when we found that what we had taken for a ship was nothing more than an iceberg looming up above the sea in a misty atmosphere. This was the third time we had been deceived in that manner. Once the Dean had come rushing towards me, shouting at the top of his voice, 'The fleet! the fleet!' meaning the whale-ships; but he might just as well have saved himself all that trouble, for 'the fleet'

proved to be only a great group of icebergs; but when I told him so he would hardly believe it, until he became at last convinced that they were not moving.

"You must know that these icebergs a.s.sume all sorts of shapes, and it was very natural, since we were always on the lookout for ships, that our imaginations should be excited and disturbed, and ready to see at any time what we most wanted to see; nor were we at all peculiar in this, as many people might tell you who were never cast away in the cold.

"So it is not surprising that we should cry out very frequently 'A sail, a sail!' when there was not a sail perhaps within many hundred miles of us.

"Well, as I was going to say, the Dean and I sat upon the hillside overlooking the sea, thinking the icebergs were ships, or hoping so at least, until hope died away, and then it was that we fell to talking.

"'Do you think, Hardy,' asked the Dean, 'that any other ship than ours ever did come this way or ever will?'

"'I'm afraid not,' said I; and I must have looked very despondent about it, as in truth I was,--much more so than I would have liked to own.

"I had not considered what the Dean was about, for he was despondent enough himself, and no doubt wished very hard that I might say something to cheer him up a bit; but, instead of doing that, I only made him worse, whereupon he seemed to grow angry, and in a rather snappish way he inquired of me if I knew what I was.

"'No,' said I, quite taken aback. 'What do you mean?'

"'Mean!' exclaimed the Dean. 'Why, I mean to say,'--and he spoke in a positive way that was not usual with him,--'I mean to say,' said he, 'that you are a regular Job's comforter, and no mistake.'

"I had not the least idea at that period of my life as to what kind of a thing a Job's comforter was. I had a vague notion that it was something to go round the neck, and I protested that I was nothing of the sort.

"'Yes, you are, and you know you are,' went on the Dean,--'a regular Job's comforter,--croaking all the time, and never seeing any way out of our troubles at all.'

"'I should like to know,' said I,--and I thought I had him there,--'how I can see any way out of our troubles when there isn't any!'

"'Well, you can think there is, if there isn't,--can't you?' and the Dean was ten times more snappish than he was before; and, having thus delivered himself, he snapped himself up and snapped himself off in a great hurry; but, as the little fellow turned to go away, I thought I saw great big tears stealing down his cheeks. I thought that his voice trembled over the last words; and when he went behind a rock and hid himself, I knew that he had gone away to cry, and that he had been ashamed to cry where I could see him.

"After a while I went to him. He was lying on his side, with his head upon his arm. His cap had fallen off, and the light wind was playing gently with his curly hair. The sun was shining brightly in his face, and, sunburnt and weather-beaten though it was, his rosy cheeks were the same as ever. But bitter, scalding tears had left their traces there, for the poor boy had cried himself to sleep.

"His sleep was troubled, for he was calling out, and his hands and feet were twitching now and then, and cruel dreams were weighing on his sleeping, even more heavily, perhaps, than they had been upon his waking thoughts. So I awoke him. He sprang up instantly, looking very wild, and sat upon the rock. 'Where am I? What's the matter? Is that you, Hardy?'

were the questions with which he greeted me so quickly that I could not answer one of them. Then he smiled in his natural way, and said, 'After all, it was only a dream.'

"'What was it?' I asked. 'Tell me, Dean, what it was.'

"'O, it was not much, but you see it put me in a dreadful fright. I thought a ship was steering close in by the land; I thought I saw you spring upon the deck and sail away; and as you sailed away upon the silvery sea, I thought you turned and mocked me, and I cursed you as I stood upon the beach, until some foul fiend, in punishment for my wicked words, caught me by the neck, and dragged me through the sea, and tied me fast to the vessel's keel, and there I was with his last words ringing in my ears, with the gurgling waters, "Follow him to your doom,"

when you awoke me. "Follow him to your doom!" I seem to hear the demon shrieking even now, though I'm wide enough awake.'

"'I don't wonder at your fright, and I'm glad I woke you!' said I, not knowing what else to say.

"'It all comes,' went on the little fellow, 'of my being angry with you, Hardy'; and so he asked me to forgive him, and not think badly of him, and said he would not be so ungrateful any more, and many such things, which it pained me very much to have him say; and so I made him stop, and then somehow or other we got our arms around each other's neck, and we kissed each other's cheeks, and great cataracts of tears came tearing from each other's eyes; and the first and last unkindness that had come between us was pa.s.sed and gone forever.

"'But do you really think,' said the Dean, when he got his voice again,--'do you really think that, if a ship don't come along and take us off, we can live here on this wretched little island,--that is, when the summer goes, and all the birds have flown away, and the darkness and the cold are on us all the time?'"

"'To be sure we can,' I answered; but, to tell the truth, I had very great doubts about it, only I thought that this would strengthen up the Dean; and as I had, by this time, made for myself a better definition to Job's comforter than a something to go around the neck, I had no idea of being called by that name any more.

"'I'm glad to hear you say that!' exclaimed the Dean. 'Indeed I am!'

"There was no need to give me such very strong a.s.surance that he was 'glad to hear it,' for his face showed as plain as could be that he was glad to hear me say anything that had the least hope in it.

"After this the Dean grew quite cheerful. Suddenly he asked, 'Do you know, Hardy, if this island has a name?'

"Of course I did not know, and told him so.

"'Then I'll give it one right off,' said he; 'I'll call it from this minute the Rock of Good Hope, and here we'll make our start in life.

It's as good a place, perhaps, to make a start in life as any other; for n.o.body is likely to dispute our t.i.tle to our lands, or molest us in our fortune-making, which is more than could be said if our lot were cast in any other place.'

"This vein of conversation brightened me up a little. Indeed, it was hard to be very long despondent in the presence of the Dean's hopeful disposition. There was much more said of the same nature, which it is not necessary to repeat. It is enough for me to tell you that the upshot of the whole matter was that we came in the end to regard ourselves as settled on the island, if not for the remainder of our lives, at least for an indefinite time, and we made up our minds that there was no use in being gloomy and cast down about it. So from that time forward we were mostly cheerful, and, though you may think it very strange, were generally contented.

"This was a great step gained, and when we now came to make an inventory of our possessions, we did it just as a farmer or merchant would do.

Being the undisputed owners of this Rock of Good Hope, we considered ourselves none the less owners of all the foxes, ducks, eggs, eider-down, dead beasts, dry bones, and whatsoever else there might be upon it; and, besides this, we had a lien upon all the seals and walruses and whales of every kind that lived in the sea,--that is, if we could catch them.

"We now worked with even a better spirit than we had done before, for the idea of being settled on the island for life seemed to imply that we had need to look ahead farther than when our hopes of rescue had been strong.

"And first we finished the hut in which we were to live,--doing it not as if we were putting up a tent for temporary use, but as a man who has just come into possession of a large property puts up a fine house on it, that he may be comfortable for the remainder of his days.

"I have told you our hut was about twelve feet square, and that we had, after much hard labor, succeeded in closing it up perfectly, and in making it tight. Along the peak of it, where the two rocks came together, there was a crack which gave us much trouble; but at length we succeeded in pounding down into it, with the but-end of our narwhal horn, a great quant.i.ty of moss or turf, and thus closed it tight.

"I must tell you here, while we are on the subject of moss, and since I have spoken about it so often, that the moss grew on our island, as it does in all Arctic countries, with a richness that you never see here,--moss being, in truth, the characteristic vegetation of the Arctic regions. In the valley fronting us there was a bed of it several feet thick. Its fibres were very long,--as much, in some places, as four inches,--all of a single year's growth; and as it had gone on growing year after year, you will understand that there was layer after layer of it. In one place, at the side of the valley to the right as we went down towards the beach, it seemed to have died out after growing for many years; and when we discovered this, we were more rejoiced than we had been at any time since starting the fire; for the moss, being dead, had become dry and hard, and burned almost like peat, as we found when we came to try it in our fireplace; and when we added to it a little of our blubber, it made such a heat that we could not have desired anything better. Indeed, it made our hut so warm that we could leave the door and window both open until the weather became colder.

"One thing which gave us great satisfaction was the immense quant.i.ty of the dead moss which was in this bed,--so much, indeed, that, no matter how long we should live there, we could never burn up the hundredth part of it. At first there had not appeared to be much of it, but it developed more and more, like a coal mine, as we dug farther and farther into it.

"Our fireplace was therefore, as you see, a great success; but we were, after a few days, most unexpectedly troubled with it. Thus far the wind had been blowing only in one direction; but afterwards it shifted to the opposite quarter, driving the smoke all down into the hut, and smothering us out. Neither of us being a skilful mason, we could not imagine what was the matter; but finally it occurred to us, after much useless labor had been spent in tearing part of it down and building it up again, that it was too low, being just on a level with the top of the hut; so we ran it up as much higher as we could lift the stones, which was about four feet, and after that we had no more trouble with it.

"Having succeeded so well with our arrangements towards keeping up a fire, we next fitted up a bed, as the storms now began to trouble us, and we found, when we were driven away from the gra.s.s, and were obliged to sleep inside of the hut, that it was a very hard place to sleep, being nothing but rough stones, which made us very sore, and made our bones ache.

"The first thing we did now was to build a wall about as high as our knees right across the middle of the hut, from side to side; then, across the s.p.a.ce thus enclosed in the back part of the hut, we built up another wall about three feet high,--thus, you see, making two divisions of it.

"One of these divisions we used as a sort of store-room or closet, levelling the bottom of it with flat stone, of which we had no difficulty in getting all we wanted. We also covered the front part of the hut with stones of the same description, thus making quite a smooth floor. It was not large enough, as you will see, to give us much trouble in keeping it clean. Of the second division, in the back part, we made our bed, by first filling it up with moss, then covering the moss over with dry gra.s.s.

"Having given up all hope of a ship coming after us, we now gave up watching for one; and we went to sleep together on our new bed, lying on the dry gra.s.s, and, as before, covering ourselves over with my large overcoat. We found it to be more comfortable than you would think, and altogether better than anything we had yet had to sleep on. But we came near losing our fire by it, as the last embers were just dying out when we awoke from this our first sleep in the hut.

"But this bed did not exactly suit our fancy, and, seeing the necessity for some better kind of bedclothes, our wits were once more set to working, in order to discover something with which to fasten together the duck-skins that we had been saving and drying, and of which we had now almost a hundred. We had spread them out upon the rocks, and dried them in the sun; for we had seen that, if we could only find something with which to sew them together, we might make all the clothing that we wanted.