I fell again to my downward march and looked towards my boat—that is to say, I looked towards the part of the ice where the little haven in which she lay had been, and I found both boat and haven gone!
I rubbed my eyes and stared again. Tush, thought I, I am deceived by the ice. I glanced at the slope behind to keep me to my bearings, and once more sought the haven; but the rock that had formed it was gone, the blue swell rolled brimming past the line of shore there, and my eye following the swing of a fold, I saw the boat about three cables length distant out upon the water, swinging steadily away into the south, and showing and disappearing with the heave.
The dead man’s cloak fell from my arm; I uttered a cry of anguish; I clasped my hands and lifted them to God, and looked up to Him. I was for kicking off my boots and plunging into the water, but, mad as I was, I was not so mad as that; and mad I should have been to attempt it, for I could not swim twenty strokes, and had I been the stoutest swimmer that ever breasted the salt spray, the cold must speedily put an end to my misery.
What was to be done? Nothing! I could only look idly at the receding boat with reeling brain. The full blast of the wind was upon her, and helping the driving action of the billows. I perceived that she was irrecoverable, and yet I stood watching, watching, watching! my head burning with the surgings of twenty impracticable schemes. I cast myself down and wept, stood up afresh and looked at the boat, then cried to God for help and mercy, bringing my hands to my throbbing temples, and in that posture straining my eyes at the fast vanishing structure. She was the only hope I had—my sole chance. My little stock of provisions was in her—oh, what was I to do?
Though I was at some distance from the place where what I have called my haven had been, there was no need for me to approach it to understand how my misfortune had come about. It was likely enough that the very crevice in which I had jammed the mast to secure the boat by was a deep crack that the increased swell had wholly split, so that the mast had tumbled when the rock floated away and liberated the boat.
The horror that this white and frightful scene of desolation had at the beginning filled me with was renewed with such violence when I saw that my boat was lost, and I was to be a prisoner on the death-haunted waste, that I fell down in a sort of swoon, like one partly stunned, and had any person come along and seen me he would have thought me as dead as the body on the hill or the corpse that kept its dismal look-out from the deck of the schooner.
My senses presently returning, I got up, and the rock upon which I stood being level, I fell to pacing it with my hands locked behind me, my head sunk, lost in thought. The wind was steadily freshening; it split with a howling noise upon the ice-crags and unequal surfaces, and spun with a hollow note past my ear; and the thunder of the breakers on the other side of the island was deepening its tone. The sea was lifting and whitening; something of mistiness had grown up over the horizon that made a blue dulness of the junction of the elements there; but though a few clouds out of the collection of vapour in the north-east had floated to the zenith and were sailing down the south-west heaven, the azure remained pure and the sun very frostily white and sparkling.
I am writing a strange story with the utmost candour, and trust that the reader will not judge me severely for my confession of weakness, or consider me as wanting in the stuff out of which the hardy seaman is made for owning to having shed tears and been stunned by the loss of my little boat and slender stock of food. You will say, “It is not in the power of the dead to hurt a man; what more pitiful and harmless than a poor unburied corpse?” I answer, “True,” and declare that of the two bodies, as dead men, I was not afraid; but this mass of frozen solitude was about them, and they took a frightful character from it; they communicated an element of death to the desolation of the snow-clad island; their presence made a principality of it for the souls of dead sailors, and into their lifelike stillness it put its own supernatural spirit of loneliness; so that to my imagination, disordered by suffering and exposure, this melancholy region appeared a scene without parallel on the face of the globe, a place of doom and madness, as dreadful and wild as the highest mood of the poet could reach up to.
By this time the boat was out of sight. I looked and looked, but she was gone. Then came my good angel to my help and put some courage into me. “After all,” thought I, “what do I dread? Death! it can but come to that. It is not long ago that Captain Rosy cried to me, “A man can die but once. He’ll not perish the quicker for contemplating his end with a stout heart.” He that so spoke is dead. The worst is over for him. Were he a babe resting upon his mother’s breast he could not sleep more soundly, be more tenderly lulled, nor be freer from such anguish as now afflicts me who cling to life, as if this—this,” I cried, looking around me, “were a paradise of warmth and beauty. I must be a man, ask God for courage to meet whatever may betide, and stoutly endure what cannot be evaded.”
Do not smile at the simple thoughts of a poor castaway sailor. I hold them still to be good reasoning, and had my flesh been as strong as my spirit they had availed, I don’t doubt. But I was chilled to the marrow; the mere knowing that there was nothing to eat sharpened my appetite, and I felt as if I had not tasted food for a week; and here then were physical conditions which broke ruinously into philosophy and staggered religious trust.
My mind went to the schooner, yet I felt an extraordinary recoil within me when I thought of seeking an asylum in her. I had the figure of her before my fancy, viewed the form of the man on her deck, and the idea of penetrating her dark interior and seeking shelter in a fabric that time and frost and death had wrought into a black mystery was dreadful to me. Nor was this all. It seemed like the very last expression of despair to board that stirless frame; to make a dwelling-place, without prospect of deliverance, in that hollow of ice; to become in one sense as dead as her lonely mariner, yet preserve all the sensibility of the living to a condition he was as unconscious of as the ice that enclosed him.
It must be done nevertheless, thought I; I shall certainly perish from exposure if I linger here; besides, how do I know but that I may discover in that ship some means of escaping from the island? Assuredly there was plenty of material in her for the building of a boat, if I could meet with tools. Or possibly I might find a boat under hatches, for it was common for vessels of her class and in her time to stow their pinnaces in the hold, and, when the necessity for using them arose, to hoist them out and tow them astern.
These reflections somewhat heartened me, and also let me add that the steady mounting of the wind into a small gale served to reconcile me, not indeed to the loss of my boat, but to my detention; for though there might be a miserable languishing end for me here, I could not but believe that there was certain death, too, out there in that high swell and in those sharpening peaks of water off whose foaming heads the wind was blowing the spray. By which I mean the boat could not have plyed in such a wind; she must have run, and by running have carried me into the stormier regions of the south, where, even if she had lived, I must speedily have starved for victuals and perished of cold.
Hope lives like a spark amid the very blackest embers of despondency. Twenty minutes before I had awakened from a sort of swoon and was overwhelmed with misery; and now here was I taking a collected view of my situation, even to the extent of being willing to believe that on the whole it was perhaps as well that I should have been hindered from putting to sea in my little eggshell. So at every step we rebel at the shadowy conducting of the hand of God; yet from every stage we arrive at we look back and know the road we have travelled to be the right one though we start afresh mutinously. Lord, what patience hast Thou!
I turned my back upon the clamorous ocean and started to ascend the slope once more. When I reached the brow of the cliffs I observed that the clouds had lost their fleeciness and taken a slatish tinge, were moving fast and crowding up the sky, insomuch that the sun was leaping from one edge to another and darting a keen and frosty light upon the scene. The wind was
bitterly cold, and screamed shrilly in my ears when I met the full tide of it. The change was sudden, but it did not surprise me. I knew these seas, and that our English April is not more capricious than the weather in them, only that here the sunny smile, though sparkling, is frostier than the kiss of death, and brief as the flight of a musket-ball, whilst the frowns are black, savage, and lasting.
I bore the dead man’s cloak on my arm and helped myself along with the oar, and presently arrived at the brink of the slope in whose hollow lay the ship as in a cup. The wind made a noisy howling in her rigging, but the tackling was frozen so iron hard that not a rope stirred, and the vane at the masthead was as motionless as any of the adjacent steeples or pillars of ice. My heart was dismayed again by the figure of the man. He was more dreadful than the other because of the size to which the frozen snow upon his head, trunk, and limbs had swelled him; and the half-rise of his face was particularly startling, as if he were in the very act of running his gaze softly upwards. That he should have died in that easy leaning posture was strange; however, I supposed, and no doubt rightly, that he had been seized with a sudden faintness, and had leaned upon the rail and so expired. The cold would quickly make him rigid and likewise preserve him, and thus he might have been leaning, contemplating the ice of the cliffs, for years and years!
A wild and dreadful thing for one in my condition to light on and be forced to think of.
My heart, as I have said, sank in me again at the sight of him, and fear and awe and superstition so worked upon my spirits that I stood irresolute, and would have gone back had there been any place to return to. I plucked up after a little, and, rolling up the cloak into a compact bundle, flung it with all my strength to the vessel, and it fell cleverly just within the rail. Then gripping the oar I started on the descent.
The depth was not great nor the declivity sharp; but the surface was formed of blocks of ice, like the collections of big stones you sometimes encounter on the sides of mountains near the base; and I had again and again to fetch a compass so as to gain a smaller block down which to drop, till I was close to the vessel, and here the snow had piled and frozen into a smooth face.
The ship lay with a list or inclination to larboard. I had come down to her on her starboard side. She had small channels with long plates, but her list, on my side, hove them somewhat high, beyond my reach, and I perceived that to get aboard I must seek an entrance on the larboard hand. This was not hard to arrive at; indeed, I had but to walk round her, under her bows. She was so coated with hard snow I could see nothing of her timbers, and was therefore unable to guess at the condition of the hull. She had a most absurd swelling bilge, and her buttocks, viewed on a line with her rudder, doubtless presented the exact appearance of an apple. She was sunk in snow to some planks above the garboard-streak, but her lines forward were fine, making her almost wedge-shaped, though the flair of her bows was great, so that she swelled up like a balloon to the catheads. She had something of the look of the barca-longas of half a century ago—that is, half a century ago from the date of my adventure; but that which, in sober truth, a man would have taken her to be was a vessel formed of snow, sparred and rigged with glass-like frosted ice, the artistic caprice of the genius or spirit of this white and melancholy scene, who, to complete the mocking illusion, had fashioned the figure of a man to stand on deck with a human face toughened into an idle eternal contemplation.
On the larboard hand the ice pressed close against the vessel’s side, some pieces rising to the height of her wash-streak. The face of the hollow was precipitous here, full of cracks and flaws and sharp projections. Indeed, had the breadth of the island been as it was at the extremity I might have counted upon the first violent commotion of the sea snapping this part of the ice, and converting the northern part of the body into a separate berg.
I climbed without difficulty into the fore-chains, the snow being so hard that my feet and hands made not the least impression on it, and somewhat warily—feeling the government of a peculiar awe, mounting into a sort of terror indeed—stood awhile peering over the rail of the bulwarks; then entered the ship. I ran my eyes swiftly here and there, for indeed I did not know what might steal or leap into view. Let it be remembered that I was a sailor, with the superstitious feelings of my calling in me, and though I do not know that I actually believed in ghosts and apparitions and spectrums, yet I felt as if I did; particularly upon the deck of this silent ship, rendered spirit-like by the grave of ice in which she lay and by the long years (as I could not doubt) during which she had thus rested. Hence, when I slipped off the bulwark on to the deck and viewed the ghastly, white, lonely scene, I felt for the moment as if this strange discovery of mine was not to be exhausted of its wonders and terrors by the mere existence of the ship—in other words, that I must expect something of the supernatural to enter into this icy sepulchre, and be prepared for sights more marvellous and terrifying than frozen corpses.
So I stood looking forward and aft, very swiftly, and in a way I dare say that a spectator would have thought laughable enough; nor was my imagination soothed by the clear, harping, ringing sounds of the wind seething through the frozen rigging where the masts rose above the shelter of the sides of the hollow.
Presently, getting the better of my perturbation, I walked aft, and, stepping on to the poop-deck, fell to an examination of the companion or covering of the after-hatch, which, as I have elsewhere said, was covered with snow.
CHAPTER X
ANOTHER STARTLING DISCOVERY
This hatch formed the entrance to the cabin, and there was no other road to it that I could see. If I wanted to use it I must first scrape away the snow; but unhappily I had left my knife in the boat, and was without any instrument that would serve me to scrape with. I thought of breaking the beer-bottle that was in my pocket and scratching with a piece of the glass; but before doing this it occurred to me to search the body on the starboard side.
I approached him as if he were alive and murderously fierce, and I own I did not like to touch him. He resembled the figure of a giant moulded in snow. In life he must have been six feet and a half tall. The snow had bloated him, and though he leaned he stood as high as I, who was of a tolerable stature. The snow was on his beard and mustaches and on his hair; but these features were merged and compacted into the snow on his coat, and as his cap came low and was covered with snow too, he, with the little fragment of countenance that remained, the flesh whereof had the colour and toughness of the skin of a drum that has been well beaten, submitted as terrible an object as mortal sight ever rested on. I say I did not like to touch him, and one reason was I feared he would tumble; and though I know not why I should have dreaded this, yet the apprehension of it so worked in me that for some time it held me idly staring at him.
But I could not enter the cabin without first scraping the snow from the companion door; and the cold, after I had stood a few moments inactive, was so bitter as to set me craving for shelter. So I put my hand upon the body, and discovered it, as I might have foreseen, frozen to the hardness of steel. His coat—if I may call that a coat which resembled a robe of snow—fell to within a few inches of the deck. Steadying the body with one hand, I heartily tweaked the coat with the other, hoping thus to rupture the ice upon it; in doing which I slipped and fell on my back, and in falling gave a convulsive kick which, striking the feet of the figure, dislodged them from their frozen hold of the deck, and down it fell with a mighty bang alongside of me, and with a loud crackling noise, like the rending of a sheet of silk.
I was not hurt, and sprang to my feet with the alacrity of fright, and looking at the body saw that it had managed by its fall much better than my hands could have compassed; for the snow shroud was cracked and crumpled, slabs of it had broken away leaving the cloth of the coat visible, and what best pleased me was the sight of the end of a hanger forking out from the skirt of the coat.
Yet to come at it so as to draw the blade from its scabbard required an intolerable exertion of
strength. The clothes on this body were indeed like a suit of mail. I never could have believed that frost served cloth so. At last I managed to pull the coat clear of the hilt of the hanger; the blade was stuck, but after I had tugged a bit it slipped out, and I found it a good piece of steel.
The corpse was habited in jackboots, a coat of coarse thick cloth lined with flannel, under this a kind of blouse or doublet of red cloth, confined by a belt with leathern loops for pistols. His apparel gave me no clue to the age he belonged to; it was no better, indeed, than a sort of masquerading attire, as though the fashions of more than one country, and perhaps of more than one age, had gone to the habiting of him. He looked a burly, immense creature, as he lay upon the deck in the same bent attitude in which he had stood at the rail, and so dreadful was his face, with a singular diabolical expression of leering malice, caused by the lids of his eyes being half closed, that having taken one peep I had no mind to repeat it, though I was above ten minutes wrestling with his cloak and hanger before I had the weapon fairly in my hand.
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 265