XX
HOW I SPENT A NIGHT WEARILY
I got down from the rail and seated myself on the brig's deck, leaningmy back against her bulwarks and a little sheltered by theirold-fashioned in-board overhang. But I had no very clear notion ofwhat I was doing; and my feeling, so far as I had any feeling, wasless that I was moving of my own volition than that I was being movedby some power acting from outside of me--the sensation ofirresponsibility that comes to one sometimes in a dream.
Indeed, the whole of that night seemed to me then, and still seems tome, much more a dream than a reality: I being utterly wearied by mylong hard day's work in scrambling about among the wrecks, and alittle light-headed because of my stomach's emptiness, and feverishbecause of my growing thirst, and my mind stunned by the dull pain ofmy despair. And it was lucky for me, I suppose, that my thinkingpowers were so feeble and so blunted. Had I been fully awake to my ownmisery I might very well have gone crazy there in the darkness; orhave been moved by a sharp horror of my surroundings to try to escapethem by going on through the black night from ship to ship--whichwould have ended quickly by my falling down the side of one or anotherof them and so drowning beneath the weed.
Yet the sort of stupor that I was in did not hold fast my innerconsciousness; being rather a numbing cloud surrounding me andseparating me from things external--though not cutting me off fromthem wholly--while within this wrapping my spirit in a way was awakeand free. And the result of my being thus on something less thanspeaking terms with my own body was to make my attitude toward it thatof a sympathizing acquaintance, with merely a lively pity for itsill-being, rather than that of a personal partaker in its pains. Andeven my mental attitude toward myself was a good deal of the samesort: for my thoughts kept turning sorrowfully to the sorrow of my ownspirit solitary there, shrinking within itself because of its chillforsakenness and lonely pain of finding itself so desolate--the onething living in that great sea-garnering of the dead.
And after a while--either because my light-headedness increased, orbecause I dozed and took to dreaming--I had the feeling that the denseblackness about me, a gloom that the heavily overhanging mist madealmost palpable, was filling with all those dead spirits come topeer curiously into my living spirit; and that they hated it and wereenvious of it because it was not as they were but still was alive. Andfrom this, presently, I went on to fancying that I could see themabout me clad again dimly in the forms which had clothed them whenthey also in their time had been living men. At first they wereuncertain and shadowy, but before long they became so distinct that Iplainly saw them: shaggy-bearded resolute fellows, roughly dressed instrange old-fashioned sea-gear, with here and there among them othersin finer garb having the still more resolute air of officers; and allwith the fierce determined look of those old-time mariners of theperiod when all the ocean was a battling-place where seamen spenttheir time--and most of them, in the end, spent their lives also--infighting with each other and in fighting with the sea.
Gradually this throng of the sea-dead filled the whole deck about meand everywhere hemmed me in; but they gave no heed to me, and wereranged orderly at their stations as though the service of the ship wasbeing carried on. Among themselves they seemed to talk; but I couldhear nothing of what they were saying, though I fancied that there wasa humming sound filling the air about me like the murmur of a far-awaycrowd. Now and then an angry bout would spring up suddenly between twoor three of them; and in a moment they would be fighting together,and would keep at it until one of their stern officers was upon themwith blows right and left with his fists or with the butt of hispistol or with the pommel of his sword--and so would scatter the roughbrutes, scowling, and as it seemed uttering growls such as beastslashed by their keepers would give forth.
And at other times they would seem to be fighting with someenemy--serving at their guns stripped half-naked, with handkerchiefsknotted about their heads, and with the grime of powder-smoke upontheir bare flesh and so blackening their faces as to give theirgleaming eyes a still more savage look; falling dead or wounded withtheir blood streaming out upon the deck and making slimy pools inwhich a man running sometimes would slip and go down headlong--andwould get up, with a laugh and a curse, only in another moment to dropfor good as a musket-ball struck him or as a round-shot sliced him intwo; and all of them with a savage joy in their work, and going at itwith a lust for blood that made them delight in it--and take no morethought than any other fighting brutes would take of guarding theirown lives.
Or, again, they would seem to be in the midst of a tempest, with theroar of the wind and the rush of the waves upon them, and would befighting the gale and the ocean's turbulence with the same devil'sdaring that they had shown in fighting the enemy--and with the samecarelessness as to what happened to themselves so long as they stuckto their duty and did the best that was in them to bring their shipsafely through the storm. And so they went on ringing the changes ontheir old-time wild sea-life--their savage fights among themselves,and their battlings with foemen of a like metal, and their warfarewith the ocean--while the dark night wore on.
Yet even when these visionary forms were thickest about me--and whenit seemed, too, as though from all the dead hulks about me the shadowsof the dead were rising in the same fashion in pale fierce throngs--Itried to hold fast, and pretty well succeeded in it, to the steadyingconviction that the making of them was in my own imagination and thatthey were not real. And then, too, I fell off from time to time into alight sleep which still was deep enough to rid me of them wholly; andwhich also gave me some of the rest that I so much needed after allthat I had passed through during that weary day.
What I could not get rid of, either sleeping or waking, was my gnawinghunger and my still worse thirst. For an hour or two after nightfall,the air being fresher and the haze turning to a damp cool mist, mythirst was a good deal lessened; which was a gain in one way, thoughnot in another--for that same chill of night very searchinglyquickened my longing for food. But as the hours wore away my desirefor water got the better of every other feeling, even changing myhaunting visions of dead crews rising from the dead ships about meinto visions of brooks and rivulets--which only made my burningcraving the more keen.
Nor did what little reasoning I could bring to bear upon my case, whenfrom time to time I partly came out from the sort of lethargy that hadhold of me, do much for my comforting. It was possible, I perceived,that I might find even in a long-wrecked ship some half-rotten scrapsof old salted meat, or some remnant of musty flour, that at leastwould serve to keep life in me. But even food of this wretched sortwould do me no good without water--and water was to be found only inone of the wrecks forming the outer fringe of my prison, toward whichI had been trying so long vainly to find my way.
Yet in spite of my having already gone astray half a dozen times overin daylight I still did have, deep down in me, a feeling that if onlythe darkness would pass I could manage to steer a true course. Andwhen at last, as it seemed to me after years of waiting for it, Ibegan to see a little pink tone showing in the mist dimly it almostseemed as though my troubles were coming instantly to an end. And,at least, the horror of deep darkness, which all night long had beencrushing me, did leave me from the moment when that first gleam ofreturning daylight appeared.
In the Sargasso Sea Page 20