And in that a tale. Now yer Ahab, can he tell a tale straightforward, without the bellowing, the rodomontade, the perorations, the puffery, the repetitions, the perambulations, the phrases circumlocutory, the tangent and from there the tangent again, the roundabout sans exit? Why yes he can, as ye shall now see. For when the telling requires a certain precision—as in this case it must—why yer Ahab in that is the equal of any man, and the better of most. As the man he sayeth: list’ me now!
Our motley fleet were some four days out from Foilhummerum and the cable lay some two-and-a-half miles beneath us. The day it had broke thick and hazy then became more warm and with better seeing. The sea was calm, her whitecaps small and now more widely spaced, and in response, the arrogant and misbegotten G____ E______ decided to show the world what she could do by way of steaming. And so the stokers and fire-men bent low to their task, feeding coal into the maws of the furnaces, unseen of course by yer Ahab who was, let us recall, upon another ship. Yet Ahab he knoweth that the furnaces burned bright; and that the black soot adhered to the stokers’ faces, affixed there by the sweat of their labor.
The Terrible could not keep up, nor could the Sphinx. The Terrible, as signal, sent down her top-gallant masts— But the signal either went unseen by the G____E______‘s master, or, if ‘twere seen, went unheeded. Mine own Valparaiso, powered as it was by wind and not by steam, lagged as well. The Valparaiso was content to watch the paddle-wheeled railway car go as fast as she might wish, gain as much distance as she might want. To refresh the memory: the G____E______ was more in need of us than we of her. Let her outpace by fire what the rest of us by nature’s gusty motivants might accomplish. Let her be self-proud and alone, unaccompanied by her protectors. We not be paid to worry on her behalf.
Our course was NW½W.; the wind NNW. She moved forward and, as we watched, payed out backward. All seemed well until—it was the work of an instant—all did not. The snap was not audible from here but it was visible indeed as the lazy downward arc of the cable concatenated and the cable now dipped, straight down, from the V wheel at the G____E______‘s stern, down to the grey and choppy sea. Clear and apparent to all: the cable, she had snapped.
The large double-hulled craft cut her engines allowing first her escorts, the Terrible and the Sphinx, more nearly to approach, port and starboard respectively. The Valparaiso brought up the rear, but even as our ship was approaching the iron maiden she had put out a skiff whose oarsmen were making straight for us. Ahab he was being summoned.
The greeting by the large craft’s captain, Anderson by name, ‘twas perfunctory, and Mr. Field, presumably somewhere aboard, was in that instant nowhere to be seen. Ahab was escorted downdeck to the cable hold. The room was dominated by a V wheel, the speed of which was regulated by a friction bearing on the same shaft. Around the bearing were thick leather straps weighted by levers and running on tanks full of water to keep the cable taut to the drum. Between the repeater drum and the driving pulleys were Appold brakes, and then, between them and a stern wheel, a dynamometer. It would tell you the speed at which the cable was being payed out. Right now its red needle was to the left of the zero. The pay-out, as much else, had clearly ceased; and the large spindle, larger than any other e’er made, was winding counter-clock. The sailors in the room stood about, features immobile, lips compressed.
“Hast ye hauled back the cable, that we might examine the break?” said yer Ahab.
“That we do now,” said the officer, hands holding one another, tight, behind his coat. The screech of straps and bearings, never pleasant while paying out, became, on reverse, louder and more sad, as if the middle note of a chord had been lowered half a step, the resultant triad now shifted into minor.
“How much left to go,” asked yer Ahab.
“We were more than two thousand in depth,” said the officer. “By my lights we’ve recovered some half of that.”
“Was there a pull, or—”
“Just— A stop.”
Ahab watched as the spindle pulled back the cable that it had, not so long before, far more happily dispensed. It had taken the better part of an hour for the skiff to reach Ahab, for Ahab to board, for Ahab to be led here. It would be something like that before we would reach the cable’s fag end. Ahab he motioned for some grog to be brought, sat down upon an up-ended cask, watched the sad reverse spinning, smelt the intake of salted sea, listened to the mournful threnody of spindles ne’er meant to turn ‘gainst the clock.
Now the cable, stinking of the depths from which it had been retrieved, returned to spool. ‘Twas a task monotonous to watch yet with its own Mesmeric tension. With each revolve of the wheel would we reach the break? And what, once seen, would that break tell us, about its Cause?
As yer Ahab drank the grog he knew it was that question, that question alone, he had here been brought to answer. And as yer Ahab waited he saw in the mind’s theater various wise in which the cable might be sundered. Roughly, as if exploded, with strands as wild as Medusa’s hair; raggedly, as rope cut by dull knife—
The musings of yer Ahab were then brought up sharp as, with great screech and commotion, the spooling up ceased and the dynamometer needle sprang to center, holding fast at the zero. The task it were done. In a matter of moments we would gaze upon the break as if, from what remained, we might narrate what had transpired. To gaze into the wound and by doing so: divine our disease.
The officers gathered round and it was Captain Anderson who widened the circle, making room for Ahab. And as we pulled close, the cable-man went at it with a deck swab, rubbing off the glut and grime, residuum of the cable’s stay upon the ocean floor. Gutta-percha was coated with sea-bottom muck all the way to the break. No one among us spoke, but ‘twas clear to yer Ahab that all among us knew, at once, the significance of what we’d seen: that the break occurred not near-surface, not mid-depth, but all the way down at the bottom of the sea: two and a half miles down. Whatever had rent the cable had no difficulty at depths that would crush a human, implode him, crack his skull as if ‘twere the shell of an egg.
The cableman stroked and swabbed, debriding the gutta-percha yet retaining the spent rags that they might be of use to us for purposes diagnostic. When the muck proved too resilient he applied a solvent, taking care not to touch the last yard where the secrets, if any, would reside.
At last it was before us, laid out on a carpenter’s bench. The gutta-percha intact, sans corrosion or rot. And at the end of the cable: no fray, no lap, no tendril, no wild coil of individual strand, no hair of the Gorgon, no wounded frenzy. Just a cut. The cable coming to abrupt end— And with it, all our notions of futurity.
“Let me through,” came a voice from the back. It was Mr. Field’s science-man Everett and he came with a satchel. Opened it. Produced his set of lenses.
“I need more light,” he said, and we stepped aside so as not to block what weak sunlight suffused via the aftward gate.
He bent close, holding lens to the cable. From time to time he could be heard to speak, yet without words— Sounds of satisfaction, bemusement, puzzlement, sounds of wonder and dismay. Grunts such as one might hear from a lover yet there was no love to it. The small noises they did quiet. Then he said: “Look here.”
We pulled close, yers truly at the fore (there is no one steps in front of Ahab, be it upon a ship Ahab himself commands or any other). Peered through the glass. Saw the shear in all its perpendicularity, its smoothness. One polished slice, save a small lip at the lower end of the braid. The cut gleamed in the light. It was not a gleam that offered comfort to head or heart or gut.
“Can you opine?” Captain Anderson asked.
“Here is what there is to say,” replied the science-man Everett. “This be cut. Not snapped, or nibbled at, or corroded, or rusted, or decayed. Cut. Rent. Nor was it tugged or snapped. This be not yer tension snap. This be not yer concatenation of frays. Third, no defect in the manufacture. This was made right, wove right— Then: cut right. And more: whatever done cut thi
s, cut it swift. No residue of hesitation. Nor was it a sawing motion, the back and the forth, as that leaves trace, and of such trace there be none. No hack, no hew. This were done in one.”
There was a silence what enveloped the hold broken only by the creak of deck above, the lap of waters below. Neither shift of weight, nor murmur of phlegm—
“With what force?” asked the Captain.
“Enough to pass through annealed copper with the ease of knife through a drunkard’s belly.”
“And what done it?” said the Captain.
“A jaw,” said science-man Everett. “‘Tis a question of lever and fulcrum.”
“To what,” asked the Captain, “does that jaw belong?”
“Hard to say.”
There were again some moments of silence. Then the silence parted, making room for Ahab to speak, and so did Ahab speak, and none interrupted.
“Hath anyone a flame? A flame with some heat to it? Ahab would like to put the end in flame and see how it burns. How it glows. With what colors, with what intensity. Why we know that there is copper, and copper will burn with a flame now blue, now green. It is a distinct hue, and one that many here will recognize. Other elements have, each of them, their own insignia. We know, thanks to the work of yon science-man Everett, something of the force with which the cable was rent. We know magnitude. What we seek now is to know something of mechanism. We need to know, and know without delay, the contours of our nemesis.”
Captain Anderson, recognizing wisdom when he heard it, nodded gravely and in assent. And so made his reply, that reply consisting of but one word: “Furnace.”
A moment of silence, then the clang and scurry of motion, grand motion, as the Cableman took hold of the end of the thing, and the Brakeman took the straps off the spool, and we all of us grabbed ahold, and marched, from the very aft of the ship, through the hold, up onto the deck, toward the mizzenmast, then down again, past the mid-axis, down toward the firehold, and all the while the cable snaking out behind. Pulling and tugging and marching up and marching across and marching down, yer Ahab with his Aaron’s rod marking time.
Hey don’t yer see that black cloud a-risin’?
‘Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
Hey don’t yer see that black cloud a-risin’?
‘Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
‘Tis like the sailor to strike up the chant. Ye might call ‘em sailors who sing, ye might call ‘em singers who sail. So much of our work is heave and rest, heave and rest, so we find our way to song. And the song keeps shoulder to wheel, lifts the spirits when they are down, sets the beat for the labor.
We loaded for the homeward run, all hands so free an’ aisy,
‘Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
And in his galley sat the doc, a-makin’ plum-duff graisy.
‘Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
Now yer narrator not be sayin’ we sang as we hauled. We do, of course, at times, as we have told ye, and laid out for ye, and explained to ye that even the slowest among ye might understand. But this be not be one of those times. We were too much in the shock of things to make use of the throat-and-bellow. Still, as we hauled the cable-laid wires, ONE-two, ONE-two, it’d be strange did we not hear, in the mind’s ear of each and every head, the lilt of a chantey. And since we was hauling: a haulin’ chantey.
Yiz call yerself a second mate an’ cannot tie a bowline,
Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
Ye cannot even stand up straight when the packet she’s a-rollin’.
‘Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
And what with thoughts of shear and severance all agog in our noggins, we of course were put in mind of this next verse, the most à propos to our task of the moment, and of course, as ye might have imagined, the personal favorite of yers truly:
King Louis wuz the King o’ France, afore the revolution,
‘Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
But the people cut his big head orf an’ spoiled his constitution.
All together now:
‘Way haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!
So we hauled, and so we sang in silence, as we bore the severed neck of our serpent from aft to fore, dragging all behind—
And then we reached the fire hold.
Where the stokers stoked, dispatching shovel after shovel of black coal, not a gleaming black but a dull and unreflective black, not light but its opposite, aha! Flinging it into the maw that was nothing but light, light so bright it stabbed, hurting the eyes e’en before ye were close enough to get beat back by the heat. It was like gazing into the sun if sans the satisfactions thereof. It’d not blind ye, nay— Just bright enough that ye could stare into it, day after day, and have just enough sight left to do yer job. Which was the day in, and the day out, from the first watch at midnight round to the blessed eight bells, feeding the impossible bright beast with chunks of darkness, chunks that served not to blot the flame but to feed its increase. This be the infernal paradox of yer stoker. Ye needs be small of brain to become a fire-man, and if ye not be small of brain when ye signed on, ye will be soon, lads, ye will be soon. ‘Tis the most thankless task aboard a ship and the most wearying. Should ye take any task aboard a sail-ship, there be more humanity in it than in the feeding of the furnace in yer steam-driven vessel! The G____ E______‘s furnaces, larger than any seagoing hellboxes yet been built, and by a factor not of two or three but of six, said furnaces were a feat of engineering for that railway man, yes, but ‘twas a life sentence for those whose job it is to make ‘em run. Mr. Isambard Railway Man, did he think of that, did he, at his table in some tonier part of London, when he set down the plans? Ahab was not there, in Isambard Railway Man’s study, and Ahab was not there, inside Isambard Railway Man’s head— Yet he knows the answer, and that answer is no, a resounding no, a haul-away no. Follow yer logic: had Isambard Railway Man given it the thought, he’d not that way have built it.
So now we was in the fire hold and the stokers parting before us, making way for the men and the cable. As all this be Ahab’s fine idea in the first place, yer Captain Anderson did to Ahab defer, and so Ahab walked into the flame— No he did not, are ye paying attention? Ahab he walked up to the flame, he walked up to the fiery maw of the boiler belly but he took no step further. No, ye lads, no; no, ye lassies, no. What he did do, Ahab did: he took his arm, his harpoon arm, the mightiest and truest arm in all the North Atlantic, and some would say well beyond— He took his harpoon arm and with it picked up the cable. Held that cable high, as if it were his weapon, a fierce rending barb ready to plunge into the tenderest parts of mortal foe. Ahab held that cable, that cable-laid cable, that braid of copper and gutta-percha, he held it up high, and while he so held it, there was not an exhalation of breath aboard the G____ E______ entire, not in the boiler hold, not nowhere else neither. Nor did a clock tick, nor did the sun’s gnomon shadow move ‘cross the dial. The waves themselves paused, some in peak, some in trough. Drops and droplets of sea water churned by those waves held, mid-air. Then, after that eternity—and how dost thou measure an eternity?—Ahab with his arm did lunge, and the churn of life recommenced, while the boiler hold crew looked on, rapt— As yer one and onlie captain thrust cable into fire.
The flames they did leap up. Oh did they leap. Fierce and terrible, with a heat beyond imagining, and for one short moment it seemed as if the boiler hold itself would be consumed. In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni! That’s Latin for, in the middle of the night we turn and are consumed by flame! And what’s more: ‘tis the same backward as ‘tis forward! Aha!
After the initial flare that threatened to consume the world, but did not, the flame did settle back as if cowed by Ahab’s unremitting gaze. And then the flames did part, enough to render visible the sheared edge of the cable. And from it: the hues they did arise. There was in background the yellow-hot flame of the coal furnace, to be sure, but now other colors, too, dancing rapid, ethereal.
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br /> There was of course the blue-green of copper, a verdigris, but purer and more intense. A haunting tone, and lovely to cast eyes upon: no dull glaucous earthbound green but a blue-green that spoke of less of corporeal satisfactions than of what lies beyond. But that was not the only color, no! There was entwined with that fine blue-green a yellow glow, less pure and of less intensity— A pale and evanescent yellow, the signature yellow of yer sodium chloride.
So there be copper, and there be salt. Both known, both expected. But what other colors danced essential in the maw’s revealing heat? Was there yellow-red? The fine and mellow yellow-red of calcium? For if there were, we might know, or reasonably infer, that yer cable, she were chomped by teeth-and-bone, by the hard and calciferous mandible of some deep-dwelling creation— So deep as to ne’er have been seen by human eye! Whose origins go back before recorded time! That hast lived in briny depths e’er since! Yet even as Ahab stared—and, if we may remind, ‘twas like staring into the heart of the sun—he saw no yellow-red.
What he saw was gold.
A gleaming gold, not the baser gold of worn and tarnished coins, but an altogether purer hue, translucent, diaphanous, fugitive, a gold that was barely there before the eye and gold ye might see clear through, a slight and light and evanescent gold, the gown of some Scheherazade. And as he saw that gold yer Ahab froze in place. Of the men in the boiler hold only Ahab—and yes, perhaps the science-man Everett, who was trained in sun-fixing, and in mathematicks, and in the allied sciences—knew the meaning of that gold.
‘Twas not the signature of the element gold, counter as that might be to the intuition. No, ‘twas not gold. ‘Twas the carte de visite of—Iron.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WHAT COULD BE seen through the iris, through Nemo’s Large Glass: the swirl of deep anemone; the seabed flora; the end of the cable where, in one leveraged slice, the pantograph had neatly severed it.
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