In the Sargasso Sea Part 4

This would be, of course, the chart actually in use when the steamer got into trouble, and therefore the one that I needed. As it was gone, I opened the drawers of the locker and looked through them in search of a duplicate; or of anything--even a wind-chart or a current-chart would have answered--that would serve my turn. But while there were charts in plenty of West Indian and of English waters, and a set covering the German Ocean, not a chart of any sort relating to the North Atlantic did I find. Neither were there chronometers nor any nautical instruments in the room. In one corner was a strongly made closet in which they may have been kept; but of this the door stood open and the shelves were bare. Even a barometer which had hung near the closet had been wrenched away, as I could tell by the broken bra.s.s gimbals still fast to the bra.s.s supports; but this was a matter of no importance, since I had noticed another in good order in the cabin--to say nothing of the fact that my powerlessness to make any provision against bad weather made me indifferent to warnings of coming storms.

And then, when I continued my search in the wheel-house, though not very hopefully, all that I discovered there was that the binnacle was empty and that the compa.s.s was gone too. In a word, there was absolutely nothing on board the hulk that would enable me to fix my position on the surface of the ocean, or that would guide me should I try the pretty hopeless experiment of going cruising on a raft.

This fact being settled--and hindsight being clearer than foresight--I had no difficulty in accounting for it. In order to lay a course and to keep it, the people in the boats would need precisely the things which had been carried off; and as each boat no doubt had been furnished so that in case of separation it could make its way alone, a clean sweep had been made of all the North Atlantic charts and of all the nautical instruments that the steamer had on board. It was to the credit of the captain that he had kept his wits so well about him--seeing to it, in the sudden skurry for the boats, that the ultimate as well as the immediate safety of his people was provided for--but when I found out, and fairly realized, what his coolness had cost me I fell off once more from good spirits into gloom.

Being left that way all at loose ends as to my reckoning, with no means of finding out where I was nor whether my position changed for the better from day to day, the hopes that I had been building of drifting northward and so falling in with a pa.s.sing vessel fell down in a bunch and left me miserable. I see now, though I did not see it then, that they went quite as unreasonably as they came. In that region of calms--for I was fairly within the horse-lat.i.tudes--the only bit of wind that I was likely to encounter was an eddy from the northeast trades that would set me still farther to the southward; and the only other moving impulse acting upon my hulk--at least while fair weather lasted--would be the slow eddy setting in from the Gulf Stream and moving me in the same direction. In the case of a storm coming up from the south, and so giving me the push northward that I was so eager for, the chances were a thousand to one that my hulk would go to the bottom long before I could get to a part of the ocean where ships were likely to be. And as to navigating a raft through that tangle of weed, already thick enough around me to check the way of a sharply built boat, the notion was so absurd that only a man in my desperate fix would even have thought about it.

But had there been a Job's comforter at hand to put these black thoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed me much. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filled with the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would be bettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed to me when I could not get them--and in this, though the sight-taking had nothing to do with it, there was reason in plenty--that all likelihood of my being rescued had slipped away.

I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer's bridge--which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open s.p.a.ce on which the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall gra.s.s swaying evenly in an easy wind. The broken boat had moved a good deal and already was well to the south of me; showing me that there was motion in that apparent stillness, and compelling me to believe that my hulk--though less rapidly than the boat--was moving southward too.

And what that meant for me I knew. The fair weather might continue almost indefinitely. Days and weeks, even months, might pa.s.s, and I still might live on there in bodily safety; but so far as the world was concerned I was dead already--being fairly caught in the slow eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sarga.s.so Sea.

XII

I HAVE A FEVER AND SEE VISIONS

Because I had felt hungry and thirsty, and the cold chicken and beer had tasted good, I had eaten and drunk a great deal more heartily than was wholesome for me--being so weakened by loss of blood, and by the strain put upon me by the danger that I had pa.s.sed through, and by living only on slops and some sc.r.a.ps of biscuit since my rescue, that my insides were in no condition to deal with such a lot of strong food. And then, within an hour after I so unwisely had stuffed myself, came the blow--in itself hard enough to upset a strong digestion in good working order--of discovering that I could do nothing to save myself, and that my hulk was drifting steadily deeper and deeper into that ocean mystery out of which no man ever yet had come alive.

The first sign that I had that something was going wrong with me was a swimming in my head--so sudden and so violent that I lurched forward and was close to pitching over the rail of the bridge into the sea.

For a moment I fancied that the ship had taken a quick plunge; and then a sick feeling in my own stomach, and a blurring of my eyes that made everything seem misty and shadowy, settled for me the fact that it was I who was reeling about and that the ship was still--and I had sense enough to lie down at full length on the bridge, between the wheel-house and the rail, where I was safe against rolling off. And then the shadows about me got deeper and blacker, and a horrible sense of oppression came over me, and I seemed to be falling endlessly while myriads of black specks arranged themselves in curious geometrical figures before my eyes--and then the black specks and everything else vanished suddenly, and my consciousness left me with what seemed to me a great crash and bang.

Had I begun matters by being roundly sick I might have pulled through my attack without being much the worse for it. But as that did not happen--my weakness, I suppose, not giving nature a chance to set things right in her own way--I had a good deal more to suffer before I began to mend. After a while I got enough of my senses back to know that my head was aching as though it would split open, and to realize how utterly miserable I was lying there on the bridge with the hot sunshine simmering down on me through the haze; and then to think how delightful it would be if only I were back in the cabin again--where the sun could not stew me, and where my berth would be easy and soft.

How I managed to get to the cabin I scarcely know. I faintly remember working my way along the bridge on my hands and knees, and going backward down the steps in the same fashion for fear of falling; and of trying to walk upright when I got to the deck, so that I should not get wet above my knees in the water there, and of falling souse into it and getting soaked all over; and then of crawling aft very slowly--stopping now and then because of my pain and dizziness--and down the companion-way and through the pa.s.sage, and so into the cabin at last; and then, all in my wet clothes, of tumbling anyhow into my berth--and after that there is only a long dead blank.

When I caught up with myself again, night had come and I was in pitch darkness. My head still ached horridly, and I was burning hot all over, and yet from time to time shivering with creeping chills. What I wanted most in the world was a drink of water; but when I tried to get up, in the hope of finding some in the jug that no doubt was in the state-room, I went so dizzy that I had to plump back into my berth again. As the night went on, and I lay there thinking how deliciously the water would taste going cool and sweet down my throat, I got quite crazy with longing for it; and, in a way, really crazy--for through most of the night I was light-headed and saw visions that sometimes comforted me and sometimes made me afraid. The comforting ones were of fresh green meadows with streams running through them, and of shady glens in the woods where springs welled up into little basins surrounded by ferns--just such as I remembered in the woods which bordered the creek where I used to go swimming when I was a boy. The horrible ones were not clear at all, and for that were the more dreadful--being of a fire that was getting nearer and nearer to me, and of a blazing sun that fairly withered me, and of huge hot globes or ponderously vague ma.s.ses of I knew not what which were coming straight on to crush me and from which I could not get away.

At last I got so worn out with it all that I fell off into an uneasy sleep, which yet was better than no sleep and a little rested me. When I woke again there was enough light in the room for me to see the water-jug, and that gave me strength to get to it--and most blessedly it was nearly full. And so I had a long drink, that for a time checked the heat of my fever; and then I lay down in my berth again, with the jug on the floor at my side.

For a while I was almost comfortable. Then the fever came back, and the visions with it--but no longer so painful as those which had been begotten of my thirst. I seemed to be in a region dreamy and unreal.

Sometimes I would see far stretches of mountain peaks, and sometimes the crowded streets of cities; but for the most part my visions were of the sea--tall ships sailing, and little boats drifting over calm water in moonlight, and black steamers gliding quickly past me; and still more frequently, but always in a calm sea, the broken hulks of wrecked ships with shattered masts and tangled rigging and with dead men lying about their decks, and sometimes with a dead man hanging across the wheel and moving a little with the hulk's motion so that in a horrible sort of way he seemed to be half alive.

Night came again, bringing me more pain and the burning of a stronger fever; and then another day, in which the fever rose still higher and the visions became almost intolerable--because of their intense reality, and of my conviction all the while that they were unreal and that I must be well on the way toward a raving madness in which I would die.

It was at the end of this day--or it may have been at the end of still another day, for I have no clear reckoning of how the time pa.s.sed--that my worst vision came to me; hurting me not because it was terrifying in itself, but because it made me feel that even hope had parted company with me at last. And it was more like a dream than a vision, seemingly being brought to my sight by my own bodily movement--not something which floated before my eyes as I lay still.

As the afternoon went on my fever increased a good deal; but in a way that was rather pleasant to me, for the pain in my head lessened and I seemed to be getting back my strength. After a while I began to long to get out of the cabin and up on deck, and so have a look around me over the open sea; and with my longing came the feeling that I was strong enough to realize it.

My getting up seemed entirely real and natural, as did my firm walking--without a touch of dizziness--after I fairly was on my feet; and all the rest of it seemed real too. Even when I came to the companion-way I seemed to go up the stairs easily, and to step out on the deck as steadily as though I had been entirely well.

The sun was near setting, but as I came on the deck my back was toward the sunset and I saw only its red light touching the soft swell of the weed-covered sea extending far before me, and the same red light shimmering in the mist and caught up more strongly on a bank of low-lying clouds. The outlook was much the same as that which I had had from the bridge, only the weed seemed to be packed more closely and there was wreckage about me everywhere. Masts and spars and planks were in sight in all directions, sometimes floating singly and sometimes tangled together in little heaps; half a mile away was what seemed to be a large ship lying bottom upward; near me was a perfectly sound boat, having in its stern-sheets a bit of sail that fell in such folds as to make me think that a human form lay under it; and off toward the horizon was a large raft, with a sort of mast fitted to it, and at the foot of the mast I fancied that I saw a woman in a white robe of some sort stretched out as though asleep. And it seemed to me, though I could not tell why, that all this flotsam, and my own hulk along with it, slowly was drifting closer and closer together; and was packing tighter and tighter in the soft oozy tangle of the weed, which everywhere was matted so thickly that the water did not show at all.

Then I seemed to walk around to the other side of my hulk and to look down into the west--and to feel all hope dying with the sight that I saw there. Far away, under the red mist, across the red gleaming weed and against a sunset sky b.l.o.o.d.y red, I seemed to see a vast ruinous congregation of wrecks; so far-extending that it was as though all the wrecked ships in the world were lying huddled together there in a miserably desolate company. And with sight of them the certain conviction was borne in upon me that my own wreck presently would take its station in that shattered fleet for which there was no salvation; and that it would lie among them rotting slowly, as they were rotting, through months or years--until finally, in its turn, it would drop down from amidst those lepers of the ocean, and would sink with all its foulness upon it into the black depths beneath the oozy weed.

And I knew, too, that whether I already were dead and went down with it, or saved my life for a while longer by getting aboard of another hulk which still floated, sooner or later my end must come to me in that same way. On one or another of those rotting dead ships my own dead body surely must sink at last.

XIII

I HEAR A STRANGE CRY IN THE NIGHT

That was the end of my visions. Through the night that followed--my fever having run its course, I suppose--I slept easily; and when another day came and I woke again my fever was gone. I was pretty weak and ragged, but the cut in my head was healing and no longer hurt me much, and my mind was clear. There still was water left in the jug, and I drank freely and felt the better for it; and toward afternoon I felt so hungry that I managed to get up and go to the pantry on a foraging expedition for something to eat.

This time I was careful not to stuff myself. I found a box of light biscuit and ate a couple of them; and then I filled my water-jug at the tank and brought it and the biscuit back to my stateroom without going on the deck at all. My light meal greatly refreshed me; and in an hour or two I ate another biscuit--and kept on nibbling at them off and on through the night when I happened to wake up. In between whiles my sleep was of a sort to do me good; not deep, but restful. With the coming of another morning I felt so strong that I went to the pantry again for food of a better sort--venturing to eat a part of a tin of meat with my biscuit and to add to my water a little wine; and when this was down I began to feel quite like myself once more, and to long so strongly for some sunshine and fresh air that I climbed up the companion-way to the deck.

But when I got there I thought at first that my visions were coming back again. Indeed, what I saw was so nearly my last vision over again as to make me half believe, later, that I really did go on deck in my delirium and really did see that blood-red sunset and all the rest that had seemed to me a dream. At any rate, there was no doubting this second time--if it were the second time--the reality of what I beheld; and because I no longer was fever-struck, and so could take in fully the wonder of it, my astonishment kept my spirits from being wholly pulled down.

The haze was so thick as to be almost like a fog hanging about me, but the hot sunshine pouring down into it gave it a golden brightness and I could see through it dimly for a good long way; and there was no need for far-seeing to be sure that I had before me what I think must be the strangest sight that the world has in it for the eyes of man.

For what I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest, which through four centuries--from the time when sailors first pushed out upon the great western ocean--has been gathering slowly, and still more slowly wasting, in the central fastnesses of the Sarga.s.so Sea.

The nearest edge of this ma.s.s of wreckage was not a quarter of a mile off from me; but it swept away in a great irregular curve to the right and left and vanished into the golden haze softly--and straight ahead I could see it stretching dimly away from me, getting thicker and closer until it seemed to be almost as solid as a real island would have been. And, indeed, it had a good deal the look of being a real island; the loom through the haze of countless broken masts rising to various heights and having frayed ropes streaming from them having much the effect of trees growing there, while the irregularities of the surface made it seem as though little houses were scattered thickly among the trees. But in spite of the golden light which hung over it, and which ought to have given it a cheerful look, it was the most desolate and sorrowful place I ever saw; for it seemed to belong--and in a way really did belong, since every hulk in all that fleet was the slowly wasting dead body of a ship slain by storm or disaster--to that outcast region of mortality in which death has achieved its ugliness but to which the cleansing of a complete dissolution has not yet been brought by time.

Yet the curious interest that I found in this strange sight kept me from feeling only the horror of it. In my talks with Bowers about the old-time sea-wonders which must be hidden in the Sarga.s.so Sea my imagination had been fired; and when I thus found myself actually in the way to see these wonders I half forgot how useless the sight was to me--being myself about the same as killed in the winning of it--and was so full of eagerness to press forward that I grew almost angry because of the infinite slowness with which my hulk drifted on to its place in the ruined ranks.

There was no hurrying my progress. Around me the weed and wreckage were packed so closely that the wonder was that my hulk moved through it at all. Of wind there was not a particle; indeed, as I found later, under that soft golden haze was a dead calm that very rarely in those still lat.i.tudes was ruffled by even the faintest breeze. Only a weak swirl of current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward; and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching that I could see--yet even then could not be quite certain about it--that my position a very little had changed.

Save that now and then I went below and got some solid food into me--and as I was careful to eat but little at a time I got the good of it--I sat there on the deck all day long gazing; and by nightfall my hulk had gone forward by perhaps as much as a hundred yards. But my motion was a steady and direct one, and I saw that if it continued it would end by laying me aboard of a big steamer--having the look of being a cargo-boat--that stood out a little from the others and evidently herself had not long been a part of that broken company. She was less of a wreck, in one way, than my own hulk; for she floated on an even keel and so high out of the water as to show that she had no leak in her; but her masts had been swept clean away and even her funnel and her bridge were gone--as though a sharp-edged sea had sliced like a razor over her and shaved her decks clean.

Immediately beyond this steamer lay a big wooden ship evidently waterlogged; for she lay so low that the whole of her hull, save a bit of her stern, was hidden from me by the steamer, and the most of her that showed was her broken masts. And beyond her again was a jam of wrecks so confused that I could not make out clearly any one of them from the rest.

Taken all together, they made a sort of promontory that jutted out from what I may call the main-land of wreckage; and to the right and left of the promontory there went off in long receding lines the coast of that country of despair.

At last the sun sunk away to the horizon, and as it fell off westward pink tones began to show in the clouds there and then to be reflected in the haze; and these tones grew warmer and deeper until I saw just such another blood-red sunset as I had seen in what I had fancied was my dream. And under the crimson haze lay the dead wrecks, looming large in it, with gleams of crimson light striking here and there on spars and masts and giving them the look of being on fire. And then the light faded slowly, through shades of purple and soft pink and warm gray, until at last the blessed darkness came and shut off everything from my tired eyes.

Indeed, I was glad when the darkness fell; for as I sat there looking and looking and feeling the bitter hopelessness of it all, I was well on my way to going crazy with sorrow. But somehow, not seeing any longer the ruin which was so near to me, and of which I knew myself to be a part, it seemed less real to me--and so less dreadful. And being thus eased a little I realized that I was hungry again, and that commonplace natural feeling did me good too.

I went below to the pantry, striking a match to see my way by; and when I had lighted the big lamp that was hanging there--the gla.s.s chimney of which, in some wonderful way, had pulled through the crash which had sent the mizzen-mast flying--the place seemed so cheerful that my desire for supper increased prodigiously, and tended still farther to down my sorrowful thoughts. I even had a notion of trying to light a fire in the galley and cooking over it some of the beef or mutton that I had found in the cold-room; but I gave that up, just then, because I really was too hungry to wait until I could carry through so large a plan.

But there was a plenty of good food in tins easily to be got at; and what was still better I felt quite strong enough to eat a lot of it without hurting myself. I even went at my meal a little daintily, spreading a napkin--that I got from a locker filled with table linen--on the pantry dresser, and setting out on it a tin of chicken and a bunch of cheese and some bread which was pretty stale and hard and a pot of jam to end off with; and from the wine-room I brought a bottle of good Bordeaux.

As I ate my supper, greatly relishing it, the oddness of what I was doing did not occur to me; but often since I have thought how strange was that meal of mine--in that brightly lighted cosey little room, and myself really cheerful over it--in its contrast with the utterly desperate strait in which I was. And I think that the contrast was still sharper, my supper being ended, when I fetched a steamer-chair that I had noticed lying on the floor of the cabin and settled myself in it easily--facing toward the stern, so that the slope of the deck only made the slope of the chair still easier--and so sat there in the brightness smoking a very good cigar.

And after a while--what with my comfort of body, and the good meal in my stomach, and the good wine there too--a soothing drowsiness stole over me, and I had the feeling that in another moment or two I should fall away into a delicious doze. And then, all of a sudden, I was roused wide awake again by hearing faintly, but quite distinctly, a long and piercingly shrill cry.

I fairly jumped from my chair, so greatly was I startled; and for a good while I stood quite still, drawing my breath softly, in waiting wonder for that strange cry to come again. But it did not come again--and as the silence continued I fell to doubting if I had not been asleep, and that this sound which had seemed so real to me had not been only a part of a dream.

XIV