XXXVIII
HOW I FOUGHT MY WAY THROUGH THE SARGASSO WEED
What I did on that first day of my voyage was what I did on everysucceeding day during so long a time that it seemed to me the end ofit never would come.
When my craft fairly was started, with the fire well fed and a lightenough weight on the safety-valve to guard against any sudden chancerise in the steam pressure, I went forward to the bows with thecompass and set myself to my sawing. The wheel being lashed with therudder amidships, all the steering was managed from the bows--anydeviation from the straight line westward being corrected by my takingthe saw out from the guide-bars and cutting to the right or to theleft with it until I had the boat's nose pointing again the right way.But there was not often need for cutting of this sort. Held by theguide-bars, the saw cut a straight path for the boat to follow; while,conversely, the boat held the saw true. And so, for the most part, Ihad only to stand like a machine there--endlessly hauling the saw upand endlessly thrusting it down. Behind me my little engine puffedand snorted; over the bows, below me, was the soft crunching sound ofthe weed opening as the boat thrust her nose into it; and on each sideof me was the soft hissing rustling of the weed against the boat'ssides. From time to time I would stop for sheer weariness--foranything more back-breaking than the steady working of that saw Inever came across; and from time to time I had to stop myengine--which I managed, and also the starting of it, by means of apair of lines brought forward into the bows from the lever-bar--whileI attended to feeding the fire.
The only breaks in this deadly monotonous round were when I ate mymeals--and at first these were as pleasant as they were restful, withthe cat sitting beside me and eating very contentedly too--and when Ifell in with a bit of wreckage that I had to steer clear of or to moveout of my way. Interruptions of this latter sort--even though theygave me a change from my wearying sawing--were hard to put up with;for they not only held me back woefully, but they kept me in continualalarm lest I should break my saw. When the obstacle was a derelict, oranything so large that I could see it well ahead of me and so couldhave plenty of time in which to swing the boat to one side of it byslicing a diagonal way for her, I could get along without muchdifficulty; but when it was only a spar or a mast, so bedded in theweed that my first knowledge of it was finding it close under my bows,there was no chance to make a detour and I had to thrust it aside witha boat-hook or go to hacking at it with an axe until I had cut itthrough. And often it happened that I knew nothing at all of theobstacle, the weed covering it completely, until my saw struck againstit; and that would send a cold shiver through me, as I whipped my sawout of the water--for I had only two saws with me, and I knew that tobreak one of them cut down my chances of escape by a half. Indeed, myfirst saw did get broken while I still was in the thick of the tangle;and after that I was in a constant tremor, which became almost agonywhen I felt the least jar in my cutting, for fear that the otherwould go too.
But with it all I managed to make pretty fair progress, and betterthan I had counted upon; for I succeeded in covering, as nearly as Icould reckon it, close upon three miles a day. After I fairly got outupon my course I had no means whatever of judging distances; but myestimate of my advance was made at the end of my first day's run, whenthe wreck-pack still was in sight behind me and enabled me to make aclose guess at how far I had come. As the sun went down that nightover my bows--making a long path of crimson along the weed ahead ofme, and filling the mist with a crimson glow--I still could make out,though very faintly, the continent of wrecks from which I had started;and with my glass I could distinguish the _Ville de Saint Remy_ by thethree flags which I had left flying on her masts. And the sight ofher, and the thought of how comfortable and how safe I had been aboardof her, and of how I was done with her forever and was tying to asslim a chance of life as ever a man tied to, for a while put a greatheaviness upon my heart. Not until darkness came and shut her out fromme, and I was resting in my brightly lighted comfortable littlecabin--with my supper to cheer me, and with my cat to cheer metoo--did my spirits rise again; and I was glad, when I got under wayonce more in the morning, that the heavy mist cut her off from me--andthat by the time the sun had thinned the mist a little I had made suchprogress as to put her out of sight of me for good and all.
Through my second day I still could make out the loom of thewreck-pack behind me--a dark line low down in the mist that I shouldhave taken for a rain-cloud had I not known what it was; but that alsowas pretty well gone by evening, and from my third day onward I wasencompassed wholly by the soft veil of golden mist hanging low aroundme over the weed-covered sea. Only about noon time, when this veilgrew thinner and had in it a brighter golden tone--or at sunset, whenit was shot through with streams of crimson light which filled itwith a ruddy glow--was it possible for me to see for more than a mileor so in any direction; and even when my horizon thus was enlarged alittle my view still was the same: always the weed spread out over thewater so thickly that nowhere was there the slightest break in it, andso dense and solid that it would have seemed like land around me butfor its very gentle undulating motion--which made me giddy if I lookedat it for long at a time. The only relief to this dull flat surfacewas when I came upon a wrecked ship, or upon a hummock of wreckage,rising a little up from it--also swaying very gently with a wearyingmotion that seemed as slow as time. And the silent despairingdesolateness of it all sunk down into my very soul.
Even my cat seemed to feel the misery of that great loneliness andlost so much of his cheerfulness that he got to be but a dullcompanion for me; though likely enough what ailed him was the reflexof my own poor spirits, made low by my constant bodily weariness, andhad I shown any liveliness he would have been lively too. But I wastoo tired to think much about him--or about anything else--as dayafter day I stood in the bow of the boat working my saw up and downwith a deadly dull monotony: that had no break save when I stopped torest a little my aching body, or to have a tussle with a bit ofwreckage that barred my passage, or to stoke myself with food, or toput coal beneath my boiler, or to lie down at night with every one ofmy bones and muscles heavy with a dull pain.
And all the sound that there was in that still misty solitude was thepuffing of my engine, and the wheel churning in the water, and thesharp hiss of the saw as it severed the matted fibres, and thecrunching and rustling that the boat made as it went onward with aleaden slowness through the weed.
In the Sargasso Sea Page 38
