The Purple Cloud
Page 13
overhauledher thoroughly, and spent three more days in oiling and cleaning theengine. Then, all being ready, I dragged my twelve dead and laid themtogether in two rows on the chart-room floor; and I hoisted for love thepoor little kayak which had served me through so many tribulations. Atnine in the morning of the 6th July, a week from my first sighting ofthe _Boreal_, I descended to the engine-room to set out.
The screws, like those of most quite modern ships, were driven by thesimple contrivance of a constant stream of liquid air, contained in verypowerful tanks, exploding through capillary tubes into non-expansionslide-valve chests, much as in the ordinary way with steam: a motorwhich gave her, in spite of her bluff hulk, a speed of sixteen knots. Itis, therefore, the simplest thing for one man to take these ships roundthe world, since their movement, or stopping, depend upon nothing butthe depressing or raising of a steel handle, provided that one does notget blown to the sky meantime, as liquid air, in spite of its thousandadvantages, occasionally blows people. At any rate, I had tanks of airsufficient to last me through twelve years' voyaging; and there was theordinary machine on board for making it, with forty tons of coal, incase of need, in the bunkers, and two excellent Belleville boilers: so Iwas well supplied with motors at least.
The ice here was quite slack, and I do not think I ever saw Arcticweather so bright and gay, the temperature at 41 deg.. I found that I wasmidway between Franz Josef and Spitzbergen, in latitude 79 deg. 23' N. andlongitude 39 deg. E.; my way was perfectly clear; and something almost likea mournful hopefulness was in me as the engines slid into their clankingturmoil, and those long-silent screws began to churn the Arctic sea. Iran up with alacrity and took my stand at the wheel; and the bows of myeventful Argo turned southward and westward.
* * * * *
When I needed food or sleep, the ship slept, too: when I awoke, shecontinued her way.
Sixteen hours a day sometimes I stood sentinel at that wheel,overlooking the varied monotony of the ice-sea, till my knees wouldgive, and I wondered why a wheel at which one might sit was notcontrived, rather delicate steering being often required among the floesand bergs. By now, however, I was less weighted with my ball of Polarclothes, and stood almost slim in a Lap great-coat, a round Siberian furcap on my head.
At midnight when I threw myself into my old berth, it was just as thoughthe engines, subsided now into silence, were a dead thing, and had aghost which haunted me; for I heard them still, and yet not them, butthe silence of their ghost.
Sometimes I would startle from sleep, horrified to the heart at somesound of exploding iceberg, or bumping floe, noising far through thatwhite mystery of quietude, where the floes and bergs were as floatingtombs, and the world a liquid cemetery. Never could I describe thestrange Doom's-day shock with which such a sound would recall me fromfar depths of chaos to recollection of myself: for often-times, bothwaking and in nightmare, I did not know on which planet I was, nor inwhich Age, but felt myself adrift in the great gulf of time and spaceand circumstance, without bottom for my consciousness to stand upon; andthe world was all mirage and a new show to me; and the boundaries ofdream and waking lost.
Well, the weather was most fair all the time, and the sea like a pond.During the morning of the fifth day, the 11th July, I entered, and wentmoving down, an extraordinary long avenue of snow-bergs and floes, mostregularly placed, half a mile across and miles long, like a Titanicdouble-procession of statues, or the Ming Tombs, but rising and sinkingon the cadenced swell; many towering high, throwing placid shadows onthe aisle between; some being of a lucid emerald tint; and three or fourpouring down cascades that gave a far and chaunting sound. The seabetween was of a strange thick bluishness, almost like raw egg-white;while, as always here, some snow-clouds, white and woolly, floated inthe pale sky. Down this avenue, which produced a mysterious impressionof Cyclopean cathedrals and odd sequesteredness, I had not passed amile, when I sighted a black object at the end.
I rushed to the shrouds, and very soon made out a whaler.
Again the same panting agitations, mad rage to be at her, at oncepossessed me; I flew to the indicator, turned the lever to full, thenback to give the wheel a spin, then up the main-mast ratlins, waving along foot-bandage of vadmel tweed picked up at random, and by the time Iwas within five hundred yards of her, had worked myself to such a pitch,that I was again shouting that futile madness: 'Hullo! Hi! Bravo! _Ihave been to the Pole!_'
And those twelve dead that I had in the chart-room there must have heardme, and the men on the whaler must have heard me, and smiled theirsmile.
For, as to that whaler, I should have known better at once, if I had notbeen crazy, since she _looked_ like a ship of death, her boom slammingto port and starboard on the gentle heave of the sea, and her fore-sailreefed that serene morning. Only when I was quite near her, and hurryingdown to stop the engines, did the real truth, with perfect suddenness,drench my heated brain; and I almost ran into her, I was so stunned.
However, I stopped the _Boreal_ in time, and later on lowered the kayak,and boarded the other.
This ship had evidently been stricken silent in the midst of a perfectdrama of activity, for I saw not one of her crew of sixty-two who wasnot busy, except one boy. I found her a good-sized thing of 500 oddtons, ship-rigged, with auxiliary engine of seventy horse-power, andpretty heavily armour-plated round the bows. There was no part of herwhich I did not over-haul, and I could see that they had had a greattime with whales, for a mighty carcass, attached to the outside of theship by the powerful cant-purchase tackle, had been in process offlensing and cutting-in, and on the deck two great blankets of blubber,looking each a ton-weight, surrounded by twenty-seven men in manyattitudes, some terrifying to see, some disgusting, several grotesque,all so unhuman, the whale dead, and the men dead, too, and death wasthere, and the rank-flourishing germs of Inanity, and a mesmerism, and asilence, whose dominion was established, and its reign was growing old.Four of them, who had been removing the gums from a mass of stratifiedwhalebone at the mizzen-mast foot, were quite imbedded in whale-flesh;also, in a barrel lashed to the top of the main top-gallant masthead wasvisible the head of a man with a long pointed beard, looking steadilyout over the sea to the S.W., which made me notice that five only of theprobable eight or nine boats were on board; and after visiting the'tween-decks, where I saw considerable quantities of stowed whaleboneplates, and about fifty or sixty iron oil-tanks, and cut-up blubber; andafter visiting cabin, engine-room, fo'cas'le, where I saw a lonely boyof fourteen with his hand grasping a bottle of rum under all theturned-up clothes in a chest, he, at the moment of death, beingevidently intent upon hiding it; and after two hours' search of theship, I got back to my own, and half an hour later came upon all thethree missing whale-boats about a mile apart, and steered zig-zag nearto each. They contained five men each and a steerer, and one had theharpoon-gun fired, with the loose line coiled round and round the headand upper part of the stroke line-manager; and in the others hundreds offathoms of coiled rope, with toggle-irons, whale-lances, hand-harpoons,and dropped heads, and grins, and lazy _abandon_, and eyes that stared,and eyes that dozed, and eyes that winked.
After this I began to sight ships not infrequently, and used regularlyto have the three lights burning all night. On the 12th July I met one,on the 15th two, on the 16th one, on the 17th three, on the 18thtwo--all Greenlanders, I think: but, of the nine, I boarded only three,the glass quite clearly showing me, when yet far off, that on the otherswas no life; and on the three which I boarded were dead men; so thatthat suspicion which I had, and that fear, grew very heavy upon me.
I went on southward, day after day southward, sentinel there at mywheel; clear sunshine by day, when the calm pale sea sometimes seemedmixed with regions of milk, and at night the immense desolation of aworld lit by a sun that was long dead, and by a light that was gloom. Itwas like Night blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom ofdeath and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state andlimbo of nothingness, when unr
eal sea and spectral sky, all boundarieslost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale toutter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoonin immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anonwaftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidlygrew. But still the _Boreal_ moved, traversing, as it were, bottomlessEternity: and I reached latitude 72 deg., not far now from Northern Europe.
And now, as to that blossomy peach-scent--even while some floes were yetaround me--I was just like some fantastic mariner, who, having set outto search for Eden and the Blessed Islands, finds them, and balmy galesfrom their gardens come out, while he is yet afar, to meet him withtheir perfumes of almond and champac, cornel and jasmin and lotus. For Ihad now reached a zone where the peach-aroma was constant; all the worldseemed embalmed in its spicy fragrance; and I could easily imaginemyself voyaging beyond the world toward some clime of perpetual andenchanting