Some time passed, and at last, about seven bells, he reappeared, this time bringing a tray with my breakfast. Placing it upon the table, he came across to me and proceeded to unlock the cuffs from off my wrists. Then for the first time he spoke.
“Mr. Barlow desires me to say, sir, that you are to have the liberty of your cabin so long as you will agree not to cause any bother. Should you wish for anything, I am under his orders to supply you.” He retreated hastily toward the door.
On my part, I was almost speechless with astonishment and rage.
“One minute, Jones!” I shouted, just as he was in the act of leaving the cabin. “Kindly explain what you mean. You said Mr. Barlow. Is it to him that I owe all this?” And I waved my hand towards the irons which the man still held.
“It is by his orders,” replied he, and turned once more to leave the cabin.
“I don’t understand!” I said, bewildered. “Mr. Barlow is my friend, and this is my yacht! By what right do you dare to take your orders from him? Let me out!”
As I shouted the last command, I leapt from my bunk, and made a dash for the door, but the steward, so far from attempting to bar it, flung it open and stepped quickly through, thus allowing me to see that a couple of the sailors were stationed in the alleyway.
“Get on deck at once!” I said angrily. “What are you doing down here?”
“Sorry sir,” said one of the men. “We’d take it kindly if you’d make no trouble. But we ain’t lettin’ you out, sir. Don’t make no bloomin’ error.”
I hesitated, then went to the table and sat down. I would, at least, do my best to preserve my dignity.
After an inquiry as to whether he could do anything further, the steward left me to breakfast and my thoughts. As may be imagined, the latter were by no means pleasant.
Here was I prisoner in my own yacht, and by the hand of the very man I had loved and befriended through many years. Oh, it was too incredible and mad!
For a while, leaving the table, I paced the deck of my room; then, growing calmer, I sat down again and attempted to make some sort of a meal.
As I breakfasted, my chief thought was as to why my one-time chum was treating me thus; and after that I fell to puzzling how he had managed to get the yacht into his own hands.
Many things came back to me—his familiarity with the men, his treatment of me—which I had put down to a temporary want of balance—the fooling with the compasses; for I was certain now that he had been the doer of that piece of mischief. But why? That was the great point.
As I turned the matter over in my brain, an incident that had occurred some six days back came to me. It had been on the very day after the captain’s report to me of the tampering with the compasses.
Barlow had, for the first time, relinquished his brooding and silenc, and had started to talk to me, but in such a wild strain that he had made me feel vaguely uncomfortable about his sanity, for he told me some wild yarn of an idea which he had got into his head. And then, in an overbearing way, he demanded that the navigating of the yacht should be put into his hands.
He had been very incoherent and was plainly in a state of considerable mental excitement. He had rambled on about some derelict, and then had talked in an extraordinary fashion of a vast world of seaweed.
Once or twice in his bewilderingly disconnected speech he had mentioned the name of his sweetheart, and now it was the memory of her name that gave me the first inkling of what might possibly prove a solution of the whole affair.
I wished now that I had encouraged his incoherent ramble of speech, instead of heading him off; but I had done so because I could not bear to have him talk as he had.
Yet, with the little I remembered, I began to shape out a theory. It seemed to me that he might be nursing some idea that he had formed—goodness knows how or when—that his sweetheart (still alive) was aboard some derelict in the midst of an enormous “world,” he had termed it, of seaweed.
He might have grown more explicit had I not attempted to reason with him, and so lost the rest.
Yet, remembering back, it seemed to me that he must undoubtedly have meant the enormous Sargasso Sea—that great seaweed-laden ocean, vast almost as Continental Europe, and the final resting-place of the Atlantic’s wreckage.
Surely, if he proposed any attempt to search through that, then there could be no doubt but that he was temporarily unbalanced. And yet I could do nothing. I was a prisoner and helpless.
IV
Eight days of variable but strongish winds passed, and still I was a prisoner in my cabin. From the ports that opened out astern and on each side—for my cabin runs right across the whole width of the stern—I was able to command a good view of the surrounding ocean, which now had commenced to be laden with great floating patches of Gulf weed—many of them hundreds and hundreds of yards in length.
And still we held on, apparently towards the nucleus of the Sargasso Sea. This I was able to assume by means of a chart which I had found in one of the lockers, and the course I had been able to gather from the “tell-tale” compass set into the cabin ceiling.
And so another and another day went by, and now we were among weed so thick that at times the vessel found difficulty in forcing her way through, while the surface of the sea had assumed a curious oily appearance, though the wind was still quite strong.
It was later in the day that we encountered a bank of weed so prodigious that we had to up helm and run round it, and after that the same experience was many times repeated; and so the night found us. The following morning found me at the ports, eagerly peering out across the water. From one of those on the starboard side, I could discern at a considerable distance a huge bank of weed that seemed to be unending and to run parallel with our broadside. It appeared to rise in places a couple of feet above the level of the surrounding sea.
For a long while I stared, then went across to the port side. Here I found that a similar bank stretched away on our port beam. It was as though we were sailing up an immense river, the low banks of which were formed of seaweed instead of land.
And so that day passed hour by hour, the weed-banks growing more definite and seeming to be nearer. Towards evening, something came into sight—a far, dim hulk, the masts gone, the whole hull covered with growth, an unwholesome green, blotched with brown in the light from the dying sun.
I saw this lonesome craft from a port on the starboard side, and the sight roused a multitude of questionings and thoughts.
Evidently we had penetrated into the unknown central portion of the enormous Sargasso, the Great Eddy of the Atlantic, and this was some lonely derelict, lost ages ago perhaps to the outside world.
Just at the going down of the sun, I saw another; she was nearer and still possessed two of her masts, which stuck up bare and desolate into the darkening sky. She could not have been more than a quarter of a mile in from the edge of the weed. As we passed, I craned out my head through the port to stare at her. As I stared, the dusk grew out of the abyss of the air, and she faded presently from sight into the surrounding loneliness.
Through all that night I sat at the port and watched, listening and peering; for the tremendous mystery of that inhuman weed-world was upon me. In the air there rose no sound; even the wind was scarcely more than a low hum aloft among the sails and gear, and under me the oily water gave no rippling noise. All was silence, supreme and unearthly.
About midnight, the moon rose away on our starboard beam, and from then until the dawn I stared out upon a ghostly world of noiseless weed, fantastic, silent, and unbelievable, under the moonlight.
On four separate occasions my gaze lit on black hulks that rose above the surrounding weeds—the hulks of long-lost vessels. And once, just when the strangeness of dawn was in the sky, a faint, long-drawn wailing seemed to come floating to me across the immeasurable waste of weed.
It startled my strung nerves, and I assured myself that it was the cry of some lone sea bird. Yet, my imagination reached out for so
me stranger explanation.
The eastward sky began to flush with the dawn, and the morning light grew subtly over the breadth of the enormous ocean of weed until it seemed to me to reach away unbroken on each beam into the grey horizons. Only astern of us, like a broad road of oil, ran the strange river-like gulf up which we had sailed.
Now I noticed that the banks of weed were nearer, very much nearer, and a disagreeable thought came to me. This vast rift that had allowed us to penetrate into the very nucleus of the Sargasso Sea—suppose it should close! It would mean inevitably that there would be one more among the missing—another unanswered mystery of the inscrutable ocean.
I resisted the thought, and came back more directly into the present.
Evidently the wind was still dropping, for we were moving slowly, as a glance at the ever-nearing weed-banks told me. The hours passed on, and my breakfast, when the steward brought it, I took to one of the ports, and there ate; for I would lose nothing of the strange surroundings into which we were so steadily plunging.
And so the morning passed.
V
It was about an hour after dinner that I observed the open channel between the weedbanks to be narrowing almost minute by minute with uncomfortable speed. I could do nothing except watch and surmise.
At times I felt convinced that the immense masses of weed were closing in upon us, but I fought off the thought with the more hopeful one that we were surely approaching some narrowing outlet of the gulf that yawned so far across the seaweed.
By the time the afternoon was half-through, the weed-banks had approached so close that occasional out-jutting masses scraped the yacht’s sides in passing. It was now with the stuff below my face, within a few feet of my eyes, that I discovered the immense amount of life that stirred among all the hideous waste.
Innumerable crabs crawled among the seaweed, and once, indistinctly, something stirred among the depths of a large outlying tuft of weed. What it was I could not tell, though afterwards I had an idea; but all I saw was something dark and glistening. We were past it before I could see more.
The steward was in the act of bringing in my tea when from above there came a noise of shouting, and almost immediately a slight jolt. The man put down the tray he was carrying, and glanced at me, with startled expression.
“What is it, Jones?” I questioned.
“I don’t know, sir. I expect it’s the weed,” he replied.
I ran to the port, craned out my head, and looked forward. Our bow seemed to be embedded in a mass of weeds, and as I watched it came further aft.
Within the next five minutes we had driven through it into a circle of sea that was free from the weed. Across this we seemed to drift, rather than sail, so slow was our speed.
Upon its opposite margin we brought up, the vessel swinging broadside on to the weed, being secured thus with a couple of kedges cast from the bows and stern, though of this I was not aware until later. As we swung, and at last I was able from my port to see ahead, I saw a thing that amazed me.
There, not three hundred feet distant across the quaking weed, a vessel lay embedded. She had been a three-master; but of these only the mizzen was standing. For perhaps a minute I stared, scarcely breathing in my exceeding interest.
All around above her bulwarks, to the height of apparently some ten feet, ran a sort of fencing formed, so far as I could make out, from canvas, rope, and spars. Even as I wondered at the use of such a thing, I heard my chum’s voice overhead. He was hailing her:
“Graiken, ahoy!” he shouted. “Graiken, ahoy!”
At that I fairly jumped. Graiken! What could he mean? I stared out of the port. The blaze of the sinking sun flashed redly upon her stern, and showed the lettering of her name and port; yet the distance was too great for me to read.
I ran across to my table to see if there were a pair of binoculars in the drawers. I found one in the first I opened; then I ran back to the port, racking them out as I went. I reached it, and clapped them to my eyes. Yes; I saw it plainly, her name Graiken and her port London.
From her name my gaze moved to that strange fencing about her. There was a movement in the aft part. As I watched a portion of it slid to one side, and a man’s head and shoulders appeared.
I nearly yelled with the excitement of that movement. I could scarcely believe the thing I saw. The man waved an arm, and a vague hail reached us across the weed; then he disappeared. A moment later a score of people crowded the opening, and among them I made out distinctly the face and figure of a girl.
“He was right, after all!” I heard myself saying out loud in a voice that was toneless through very amazement.
In a minute, I was at the door, beating it with my fists. “Let me out, Ned! Let me out!” I shouted.
I felt that I could forgive him all the indignity that I had suffered. Nay, more; in a queer way I had a feeling that it was I who needed to ask him for forgiveness. All my bitterness had gone, and I wanted only to be out and give a hand in the rescue.
Yet though I shouted, no one came, so that at last I returned quickly to the port, to see what further developments there were.
Across the weed I now saw that one man had his hands up to his mouth shouting. His voice reached me only as a faint, hoarse cry; the distance was too great for anyone aboard the yacht to distinguish its import.
From the derelict my attention was drawn abruptly to a scene alongside. A plank was thrown down on to the weed, and the next moment I saw my chum swing himself down the side and leap upon it.
I had opened my mouth to call out to him that I would forgive all were I but freed to lend a hand in this unbelievable rescue. But even as the words formed they died, for though the weed appeared so dense, it was evidently incapable of bearing any considerable weight, and the plank, with Barlow upon it, sank down into the weed almost to his waist.
He turned and grabbed at the rope with both hands, and in the same moment he gave a loud cry of sheer terror, and commenced to scramble up the yacht’s side.
As his feet drew clear of the weed I gave a short cry. Something was curled about his left ankle—something oily, supple, and tapered. As I stared another rose up out from the weed and swayed through the air, made a grab at his leg, missed, and appeared to wave aimlessly. Others came towards him as he struggled upwards.
Then I saw hands reach down from above and seize Barlow beneath the arms. They lifted him by main force, and with him a mass of weed that enfolded something leathery, from which numbers of curling arms writhed.
A hand slashed down with a sheath-knife, and the next instant the hideous thing had fallen back among the weed.
For a couple of seconds longer I remained, my head twisted upwards; then faces appeared once more over our rail, and I saw the men extending arms and fingers, pointing. From above me there rose a hoarse chorus of fear and wonder, and I turned my head swiftly to glance down and across that treacherous extraordinary weedworld.
The whole of the hitherto silent surface was all of a move in one stupendous undulation—as though life had come to all that desolation.
The undulatory movement continued, and abruptly, in a hundred places, the seaweed was tossed up into sudden, billowy hillocks. From these burst mighty arms, and in an instant the evening air was full of them, hundreds and hundreds, coming towards the yacht.
“Devil-fishes!” shouted a man’s voice from the deck. “Octopuses! My Lord!”
Then I caught my chum shouting.
“Cut the mooring ropes!” he yelled.
This must have been done almost on the instant, for immediately there showed between us and the nearest weed a broadening gap of scummy water.
“Haul away, lads!” I heard Barlow shouting; and the same instant I caught the splash, splash of something in the water on our port side. I rushed across and looked out. I found that a rope had been carried across to the opposite seaweed, and that the men were now warping us rapidly from those invading horrors.
I raced back to th
e starboard port, and, lo! as though by magic, there stretched between us and the Graiken only the silent stretch of demure weed and some fifty feet of water. It seem inconceivable that it was a covering to so much terror.
And then speedily the night was upon us, hiding all; but from the decks above there commenced a sound of hammering that continued long throughout the night—long after I, weary with my previous night’s vigil, had passed into a fitful slumber, broken anon by that hammering above.
VI
“Your breakfast, sir,” came respectfully enough in the steward’s voice; and I woke with a start. Overhead, there still sounded that persistent hammering, and I turned to the steward for an explanation.
“I don’t exactly know, sir,” was his reply. “It’s something the carpenter’s doing to one of the lifeboats.” And then he left me.
I ate my breakfast standing at the port, staring at the distant Graiken. The weed was perfectly quiet, and we were lying about the centre of the little lake.
As I watched the derelict, it seemed to me that I saw a movement about her side, and I reached for the glasses. Adjusting them, I made out that there were several of the cuttlefish attached to her in different parts, their arms spread out almost starwise across the lower portions of her hull.
Occasionally a feeler would detached itself and wave aimlessly. This it was that had drawn my attention. The sight of these creatures, in conjunction with that extraordinary scene the previous evening, enabled me to guess the use of the great screen running about the Graiken. It had obviously been erected as a protection against the vile inhabitants of that strange weedworld.
From that my thoughts passed to the problem of reaching and rescuing the crew of the derelict. I could by no means conceive how this was to be effected.
As I stood pondering, whilst I ate, I caught the voices of men chaunteying on deck. For a while this continued; then came Barlow’s voice shouting orders, and almost immediately a splash in the water on the starboard side.
I poked my head out through the port, and stared. They had got one of the lifeboats into the water. To the gunnel of the boat they had added a superstructure ending in a roof, the whole somewhat resembling a gigantic dog-kennel.
The William Hope Hodgson Megapack Page 6