The Purple Cloud
Page 15
continually; till some prick, or voice, in my brain wouldstartle me into the consciousness that I was staring, whispering theprofound confidential warning: _You must not stare so, or it is overwith you!_' Well, lost in a blank trance of this sort, I was leaningover the wheel during the afternoon of the 15th, when it was as if someinstinct or premonition in my soul leapt up, and said aloud: 'If youlook just yonder, _you will see...!_' I started, and in one instant hadsurged up from all that depth of reverie to reality: I glanced to theright: and there, at last, my God, I saw something human which moved,rapidly moved: at last!--and it came to me.
That sense of recovery, of waking, of new solidity, of the comfortableusual, a million-fold too intense for words--how sweetly consoling itwas! Again now, as I write, I can fancy and feel it--the rocky solidity,the adamant ordinary, on which to base the feet, and live. From the daywhen I stood at the Pole, and saw there the dizzy thing that made meswoon, there had come into my way not one sign or trace that otherbeings like myself were alive on the earth with me: till now, suddenly,I had the sweet indubitable proof: for on the south-western sea, notfour knots away, I saw a large, swift ship: and her bows, which weresharp as a hatchet, were steadily chipping through the smooth sea at apretty high pace, throwing out profuse ribbony foams that wentwide-vawering, with outward undulations, far behind her length, as sheran the sea in haste, straight northward.
At the moment, I was steering about S.E. by S., fifteen miles out from ashadowy-blue series of Norway mountains; and just giving the wheel onefrantic spin to starboard to bring me down upon her, I flew to thebridge, leant my back on the main-mast, which passed through it, put afoot on the white iron rail before me, and there at once felt all themocking devils of distracted revelry possess me, as I caught the capfrom my long hairs, and commenced to wave and wave and wave, red-facedmaniac that I was: for at the second nearer glance, I saw that she wasflying an ensign at the main, and a long pennant at the main-top, and Idid not know what she was flying those flags there for: and I wasembittered and driven mad.
With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness inthat five minutes' interval: she was painted a dull and cholera yellow,like many Russian ships, and there was a faded pink space at her bowsunder the line where the yellow ceased: the ensign at her main I madeout to be the blue-and-white saltire, and she was clearly a Russianpassenger-liner, two-masted, two-funnelled, though from her funnels cameno trace of smoke, and the position of her steam-cones was anywhere. Allabout her course the sea was spotted with wobbling splendours of the lowsun, large coarse blots of glory near the eye, but lessening to asmaller pattern in the distance, and at the horizon refined to ahomogeneous band of livid silver.
The double speed of the _Boreal_ and the other, hastening opposite ways,must have been thirty-eight or forty knots, and the meeting wasaccomplished in certainly less than five minutes: yet into that time Icrowded years of life. I was shouting passionately at her, my eyesstarting from my head, my face all inflamed with rage the most prone,loud and urgent. For she did not stop, nor signal, nor make sign ofseeing me, but came furrowing down upon me like Juggernaut, withsteadfast run. I lost reason, thought, memory, purpose, sense ofrelation, in that access of delirium which transported me, and can onlyremember now that in the midst of my shouting, a word, uttered by thefiends who used my throat to express their frenzy, set me laughing highand madly: for I was crying: 'Hi! Bravo! Why don't you stop? _Madmen! Ihave been to the Pole!'_
That instant an odour arose, and came, and struck upon my brain, mostdetestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was awareof her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing pastme on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. Shewas a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling foroffal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of deckspiled thick with her festered dead.
In big black letters on the round retreating yellow stern my eye-cornercaught the word _Yaroslav_, as I bent over the rail to retch and coughand vomit at her. She was a horrid thing.
This ship had certainly been pretty far south in tropical orsub-tropical latitudes with her great crowd of dead: for all the bodieswhich I had seen till then, so far from smelling ill, seemed to give outa certain perfume of the peach. She was evidently one of those manyships of late years which have substituted liquid air for steam, yetretained their old steam-funnels, &c., in case of emergency: for air, Ibelieve, was still looked at askance by several builders, on account ofthe terrible accidents which it sometimes caused. The _Boreal_ herselfis a similar instance of both motors. This vessel, the _Yaroslav_, musthave been left with working engines when her crew were overtaken bydeath, and, her air-tanks being still unexhausted, must have beenranging the ocean with impunity ever since, during I knew not how manymonths, or, it might be, years.
Well, I coasted Norway for nearly a hundred and sixty miles without oncegoing nearer land than two or three miles: for something held me back.But passing the fjord-mouth where I knew that Aadheim was, I suddenlyturned the helm to port, almost before I knew that I was doing it, andmade for land.
In half an hour I was moving up an opening in the land with mountains oneither hand, streaky crags at their summit, umbrageous boscage below;and the whole softened, as it were, by veils woven of the rainbow.
This arm of water lies curved about like a thread which one drops, onlythe curves are much more pointed, so that every few minutes the scenewas changed, though the vessel just crawled her way up, and I could seebehind me nothing of what was passed, or only a land-locked gleam like alake.
I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble,reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over whichhardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpledabout the bluff _Boreal_, which seemed to move as if careful not tobruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, ordewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacleyonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet allseemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, andmade of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rindsof the peach.
I saw it not only with delight, but with complete astonishment: havingforgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice andsea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human,familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachyscent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe and a charm in that placeat that hour, as it were of those gardens of Hesperus, and fields ofasphodel, reserved for the spirits of the just.
Alas! but I had the glass at my side, and for me nepenthe was mixed witha despair immense as the vault of heaven, my good God: for anon I wouldtake it up to spy some perched hut of the peasant, or burg of the'bonder,' on the peaks: and I saw no one there; and to the left, at thethird marked bend of the fjord, where there is one of those watch-towersthat these people used for watching in-coming fish, I spied, lying on acraggy slope just before the tower, a body which looked as if it mustsurely tumble head-long, but did not. And when I saw that, I feltdefinitely, for the first time, that shoreless despair which I alone ofmen have felt, high beyond the stars, and deep as hell; and I fell tostaring again that blank stare of Nirvana and the lunacy of Nothingness,wherein Time merges in Eternity, and all being, like one drop of water,flies scattered to fill the bottomless void of space, and is lost.
The _Boreal's_ bow walking over a little empty fishing-boat roused me,and a minute later, just before I came to a new promontory and bend, Isaw two people. The shore there is some three feet above the water, andedged with boulders of rock, about which grows a fringe of shrubs andsmall trees: behind this fringe is a path, curving upward through asombre wooded little gorge; and on the path, near the water, I saw adriver of one of those Norwegian sulkies that were called karjolers: he,on the high front seat, was dead, lying sideways and backwards, with lowhead resting on the wheel; and on a trunk strapped to a frame on theaxle behind was a
boy, his head, too, resting sideways on the wheel,near the other's; and the little pony was dead, pitched forward on itshead and fore-knees, tilting the shafts downward; and some distance fromthem on the water floated an empty skiff.
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When I turned the next fore-land, I all at once began to see a number ofcraft, which increased as I advanced, most of them small boats, withsome schooners, sloops, and larger craft, the majority a-ground: andsuddenly now I was conscious that, mingling with that delicious odour ofspring-blossoms--profoundly modifying, yet not destroying it--wasanother odour, wafted to me on the wings of the very faint land-breeze:and 'Man,' I said, 'is decomposing': for I knew it well: it was theodour of human corruption.
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The fjord opened finally in a somewhat wider basin, shut-in by quitesteep, high-towering mountains, which reflected themselves in