The Purple Cloud

by M. P. Shiel

the waterto their last cloudy crag: and, at the end of this I saw ships, a quay,and a modest, homely old town.

  Not a sound, not one: only the languidly-working engines of the_Boreal_. Here, it was clear, the Angel of Silence had passed, and hisscythe mown.

  I ran and stopped the engines, and, without anchoring, got down into anempty boat that lay at the ship's side when she stopped; and I paddledtwenty yards toward the little quay. There was a brigantine with all hercourses set, three jibs, stay-sails, square-sails, main and fore-sails,and gaff-top-sail, looking hanging and listless in that calm place, andwedded to a still copy of herself, mast-downward, in the water; therewere three lumber-schooners, a forty-ton steam-boat, a tiny barque, fiveNorway herring-fishers, and ten or twelve shallops: and thesailing-craft had all fore-and-aft sails set, and about each, as Ipassed among them, brooded an odour that was both sweet and abhorrent,an odour more suggestive of the very genius of mortality--the inner mindand meaning of Azrael--than aught that I could have conceived: for all,as I soon saw, were crowded with dead.

  Well, I went up the old mossed steps, in that strange dazed state inwhich one notices frivolous things: I remember, for instance, feelingthe lightness of my new clothes: for the weather was quite mild, and theday before I had changed to Summer things, having on now only a commonundyed woollen shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and cord trousers, with abelt, and a cloth cap over my long hair, and an old pair of yellowshoes, without laces, and without socks. And I stood on the unhewnstones of the edge of the quay, and looked abroad over a largish pieceof unpaved ground, which lay between the first house-row and the quay.

  What I saw was not only most woeful, but wildly startling: woeful,because a great crowd of people had assembled, and lay dead, there; andwildly startling, because something in their _tout ensemble_ told me inone minute why they were there in such number.

  They were there in the hope, and with the thought, to fly westward byboat.

  And the something which told me this was a certain _foreign_ air aboutthat field of the dead as the eye rested on it, something un-northern,southern, and Oriental.

  Two yards from my feet, as I stepped to the top, lay a group of three:one a Norway peasant-girl in skirt of olive-green, scarlet stomacher,embroidered bodice, Scotch bonnet trimmed with silver lace, and bigsilver shoe-buckles; the second was an old Norway man in knee-breeches,and eighteenth-century small-clothes, and red worsted cap; and the thirdwas, I decided, an old Jew of the Polish Pale, in gaberdine andskull-cap, with ear-locks.

  I went nearer to where they lay thick as reaped stubble between thequay and a little stone fountain in the middle of the space, and I sawamong those northern dead two dark-skinned women in costly dress, eitherSpanish or Italian, and the yellower mortality of a Mongolian, probablya Magyar, and a big negro in zouave dress, and some twenty-five obviousFrench, and two Morocco fezes, and the green turban of a shereef, andthe white of an Ulema.

  And I asked myself this question: 'How came these foreign stragglershere in this obscure northern town?'

  And my wild heart answered: 'There has been an impassioned stampede,northward and westward, of all the tribes of Man. And this that I, AdamJeffson, here see is but the far-tossed spray of that monstrous,infuriate flood.'

  * * * * *

  Well, I passed up a street before me, careful, careful where I trod. Itwas not utterly silent, nor was the quay-square, but haunted by a prettydense cloud of mosquitoes, and dreamy twinges of music, like the drawingof the violin-bow in elf-land. The street was narrow, pavered, steep,and dark; and the sensations with which I, poor bent man, passedthrough that dead town, only Atlas, fabled to bear the burden of thisEarth, could divine.

  * * * * *

  I thought to myself: If now a wave from the Deep has washed over thisplanetary ship of earth, and I, who alone happened to be in the extremebows, am the sole survivor of that crew?... What then, my God, shall Ido?

  * * * * *

  I felt, I felt, that in this townlet, save the water-gnats of Norway,was no living thing; that the hum and the savour of Eternity filled, andwrapped, and embalmed it.

  The houses are mostly of wood, some of them fairly large, with a_porte-cochere_ leading into a semi-circular yard, around which thebuilding stands, very steep-roofed, and shingled, in view of the heavysnow-masses of winter. Glancing into one open casement near the ground,I saw an aged woman, stout and capped, lie on her face before a verylarge porcelain stove; but I paced on without stoppage, traversedseveral streets, and came out, as it became dark, upon a piece ofgrass-land leading downward to a mountain-gorge. It was some distancealong this gorge that I found myself sitting the next morning: and how,and in what trance, I passed that whole blank night is obliterated frommy consciousness. When I looked about with the return of light I sawmajestic fir-grown mountains on either hand, almost meeting overhead atsome points, deeply shading the mossy gorge. I rose, and careless ofdirection, went still onward, and walked and walked for hours,unconscious of hunger; there was a profusion of wildmountain-strawberries, very tiny, which must grow almost into winter, afew of which I ate; there were blue gentianellas, andlilies-of-the-valley, and luxuriance of verdure, and a noise of waters.Occasionally, I saw little cataracts on high, fluttering like white wildrags, for they broke in the mid-fall, and were caught away, andscattered; patches also of reaped hay and barley, hung up, in a singularway, on stakes six feet high, I suppose to dry; there were perched huts,and a seemingly inaccessible small castle or burg, but none of these didI enter: and five bodies only I saw in the gorge, a woman with a babe,and a man with two small oxen.

  About three in the afternoon I was startled to find myself there, andturned back. It was dark when I again passed through those gloomystreets of Aadheim, making for the quay, and now I felt both my hungerand a dropping weariness. I had no thought of entering any house, butas I passed by one open _porte-cochere_, something, I know not what,made me turn sharply in, for my mind had become as fluff on the winds,not working of its own action, but the sport of impulses that seemedexternal. I went across the yard, and ascended a wooden spiral stair bya twilight which just enabled me to pick my way among five or six vagueforms fallen there. In that confined place fantastic qualms beset me; Imounted to the first landing, and tried the door, but it was locked; Imounted to the second: the door was open, and with a chill reluctance Itook a step inward where all was pitch darkness, the window-stores beingdrawn. I hesitated: it was very dark. I tried to utter that word ofmine, but it came in a whisper inaudible to my ears: I tried again, andthis time heard myself say: '_anyone_?' At the same time I had madeanother step forward, and trodden upon a soft abdomen; and at thatcontact terrors the most cold and ghastly thrilled me through andthrough, for it was as though I saw in that darkness the sudden eyeballsof Hell and frenzy glare upon me, and with a low gurgle of affright Iwas gone, helter-skelter down the stairs, treading upon flesh, acrossthe yard, and down the street, with pelting feet, and open arms, andsobbing bosom, for I thought that all Aadheim was after me; nor was myhorrid haste appeased till I was on board the _Boreal_, and moving downthe fjord.

  Out to sea, then, I went again; and within the next few days I visitedBergen, and put in at Stavanger. And I saw that Bergen and Stavangerwere dead.

  It was then, on the 19th August, that I turned my bow toward my nativeland.

  * * * * *

  From Stavanger I steered a straight course for the Humber.

  I had no sooner left behind me the Norway coast than I began to meet theships, the ships--ship after ship; and by the time I entered the zoneof the ordinary alternation of sunny day and sunless night, I was movingthrough the midst of an incredible number of craft, a mighty andwide-spread fleet.

  Over all that great expanse of the North Sea, where, in its mostpopulous days of trade, the sailor might perhaps sight a sail or two, Ihad now at every moment at least ten or twelve within scope of theglass,
oftentimes as many as forty, forty-five.

  And very still they lay on a still sea, itself a dead thing, livid asthe lips of death; and there was an intensity in the calm that wasappalling: for the ocean seemed weighted, and the air drugged.

  Extremely slow was my advance, for at first I would not leave any ship,however remotely small, without approaching sufficiently to investigateher, at least with the spy-glass: and a strange multitudinous mixture ofspecies they were, trawlers in hosts, war-ships of every nation, used,it seemed, as passenger-boats, smacks, feluccas, liners, steam-barges,great four-masters with sails, Channel boats, luggers, a Venetian_burchiello_, colliers, yachts, _remorqueurs_, training ships, dredgers,two _dahabeeahs_ with curving gaffs, Marseilles fishers, a Maltese_speronare_, American off-shore sail, Mississippi steam-boats, Sorrentolug-schooners, Rhine punts, yawls, old frigates and three-deckers,called to novel use, Stromboli caiques, Yarmouth tubs, xebecs, Rotterdamflat-bottoms, floats, mere gunwaled rafts--anything from anywhere thatcould