Often, during that time of waiting, I stopped to take a look at the things I had in my pocket; always careful that no one about the decks should come near me, to see what I was looking at.
Suddenly the Mate’s voice came sharp along the decks:
“Call the doctor, one of you,” he said. “Tell him to get the fire in and the coffee made.”
“Aye Sir,” said one of the men; and I realized that the dawn was growing vaguely over the sea.
Half an hour later, the “doctor” shoved his head out of the galley doorway, and sung out that coffee was ready.
The watch below turned out, and had theirs with the watch on deck, all sitting along the spar that lay under the port rail.
As the daylight grew, we kept a constant watch over the side; but even now we could see nothing; for the thin mist still hung low on the sea.
“Hear that?” said one of the men, suddenly. And, indeed, the sound must have been plain for a half a mile round.
“Ooaaze, ooaaze, arr, arrrr, oooaze—”
“By George!” said Tallett, one of the other watch; “that’s a beastly sort of thing to hear.”
“Look!” I said. “What’s that out yonder?”
The mist was thinning under the effect of the rising sun, and tremendous shapes seemed to stand towering half-seen, away to port. A few minutes passed, while we stared. Then, suddenly, we heard the Mate’s voice—
“All hands on deck!” he was shouting, along the decks.
I ran aft a few steps.
“Both watches are out, Sir,” I called.
“Very good!” said the Mate. “Keep handy all of you. Some of you have got the axes. The rest had better take a caps-n-bar each, and stand-by till I find what this devilment is, out yonder.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” I said, and turned forrard. But there was no need to pass on the Mate’s orders; for the men had heard, and there was a rush for the capstanbars, which are a pretty hefty kind of cudgel, as any sailorman knows. We lined the rail again, and stared away to port.
“Look out, you sea-divvils,” shouted Timothy Galt, a huge Irishman, waving his bar excitedly, and peering over the rail into the mist, which was steadily thinning, as the day grew.
Abruptly there was a simultaneous cry— “Rocks!” shouted everyone.
I never saw such a sight. As at last the mist thinned, we could see them. All the sea to port was literally cut about with far-reaching reefs of rock. In places the reefs lay just submerged; but in others they rose into extraordinary and fantastic rock-spires, and arches, and islands of jagged rock.
“Jehosaphat!” I heard the Third Mate shout. “Look at that, Mister! Look at that! Lord! how did we take the boat through that, without stoving her!”
Everthing was so still for the moment, with all the men just staring and amazed, that I could hear every word come along the decks.
“There’s sure been a submarine earthquake somewhere,” I heard the First Mate. “The bottom of the sea’s just riz up here, quiet and gentle, during the night; and God’s mercy we aren’t now a-top of one of those ornaments out there.”
And then, you know, I saw it all. Everything that had looked mad and impossible, began to be natural; though it was, none the less, all amazing and wonderful.
There had been during the night, a slow lifting of the sea-bottom, owing to some action of the Internal Pressures. The rocks had risen so gently that they had made never a sound; and the stone ship had risen with them out of the deep sea. She had evidently lain on one of the submerged reefs, and so had seemed to us to be just afloat in the sea. And she accounted for the water we heard running. She was naturally bung full, as you might say, and took longer to shed the water than she did to rise. She had probably some biggish holes in her bottom. I began to get my “soundings” a bit, as I might call it in sailor talk. The natural wonders of the sea beat all made-up yarns that ever were!
The Mate sung out to us to man the boat again, and told the Third Mate to take her out to where we lost the Skipper, and have a final look round, in case there might be any chance to find the Old Man’s body anywhere about.
“Keep a man in the bows to look out for sunk rocks, Mister,” the Mate told the Third, as we pulled off. “Go slow. There’ll be no wind yet awhile. See if you can fix up what made those noises, while you’re looking round.”
We pulled right across about thirty fathoms of clear water, and in a minute we were between two great arches of rock. It was then I realized that the reduplicating of our oar-roll was the echo from these on each side of us. Even in the sunlight, it was queer to hear again that same strange cathedral echoey sound that we had heard in the dark.
We passed under the huge arches, all hung with deep-sea slime. And presently we were heading straight for a gap, where two low reefs swept in to the apex of a huge horseshoe. We pulled for about three minutes, and then the Third gave the word to vast pulling.
“Take the boat-hook, Duprey,” he said, “and go forrard, and see we don’t hit anything.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” I said, and drew in my oar.
“Give way again gently!” said the Third; and the boat moved forward for another thirty or forty yards.
“We’re right on to a reef, Sir,” I said, presently, as I stared down over the bows. I sounded with the boat-hook. “There’s about three feet of water, Sir,” I told him.
“Vast pulling,” ordered the Third. “I reckon we are right over the rock, where we found that rum packet last night.” He leant over the side, and stared down.
“There’s a stone cannon on the rock, right under the bows of the boat,” I said. Immediately afterwards I shouted—
“There’s the hair, Sir! There’s the hair! It’s on the reef. There’s two! There’s three! There’s one on the cannon!”
“All right! All right, Duprey! Keep cool,” said the Third Mate. “I can see them. You’re enough intelligence not to be superstitious now the whole thing’s explained. They’re some kind of big hairy sea-caterpillar. Prod one with your boat-hook.”
I did so; a little ashamed of my sudden bewilderment. The thing whipped round like a tiger, at the boat-hook. It lapped itself round and round the boat-hook, while the hind portions of it kept gripped to the rock, and I could no more pull the boat-hook from its grip, than fly; though I pulled till I sweated.
“Take the point of your cutlass to it, Varley,” said the Third Mate. “Jab it through.”
The bow-oar did so, and the brute loosed the boat-hook, and curled up round a chunk of rock, looking like a great ball of red hair.
I drew the boat-hook up, and examined it.
“Goodness!” I said. “That’s what killed the Old Man—one of those things! Look at all those marks in the wood, where it’s gripped it with about a hundred legs.”
I passed the boat-hook aft to the Third Mate to look at.
“They’re about as dangerous as they can be, Sir, I reckon,” I told him.
“Makes you think of African centipedes, only these are big and strong enough to kill an elephant, I should think.”
“Don’t lean all on one side of the boat!” shouted the Third Mate, as the men stared over. “Get back to your places. Give way, there!… Keep a good look-out for any signs of the ship or the Captain, Duprey.”
For nearly an hour, we pulled to and fro over the reef; but we never saw either the stone ship or the Old Man again. The queer craft must have rolled off into the profound depths that lay on each side of the reef.
As I leant over the bows, staring down all that long while at the submerged rocks, I was able to understand almost everything, except the various extraordinary noises.
The cannon made it unmistakably clear that the ship which had been hove up from the sea-bottom, with the rising of the reef, had been originally a normal enough wooden vessel of a time far removed from our own. At the sea-bottom, she had evidently undergone some natural mineralizing process, and this explained her stony appearance. The stone men had been evidently humans w
ho had been drowned in her cabin, and their swollen tissues had been subjected to the same natural process, which, however, had also deposited heavy encrustations upon them, so that their size, when compared with the normal, was prodigious.
The mystery of the hair, I had already discovered; but there remained, among other things, the tremendous bangs we had heard. These were, possibly, explained later, while we were making a final examination of the rocks to the westward, prior to returning to our ship. Here we discovered the burst and swollen bodies of several extraordinary deep-sea creatures, of the eel variety. They must have had a girth, in life, of many feet, and one that we measured roughly with an oar, must have been quite forty feet long. They had, apparently, burst on being lifted from the tremendous pressure of the deep sea, into the light air pressure above water, and hence might account for the loud reports we had heard; though, personally, I incline to think these loud bangs were more probably caused by the splitting of the rocks under new stresses.
As for the roaring sounds, I can only conclude that they were caused by a peculiar species of grampus-like fish, of enormous size, which we found dead and hugely distended on one of the rocky masses. This fish must have weighed at least four or five tons, and when prodded with a heavy oar, there came from its peculiar snout-shaped mouth, a low, hoarse sound, like a weak imitation of the tremendous sounds we had heard during the past night.
Regarding the apparently carved handrail, like a rope up the side of the cabin stairs, I realize that this had undoubtedly been actual rope at one time.
Recalling the heavy, trundling sounds aboard, just after I climbed down into the boat, I can only suppose that these were made by some stone object, possibly a fossilized gun-carriage, rolling down the decks, as the ship began to slip off the rocks, and bows sank lower in the water.
The varying lights must have been the strongly phosphorescent bodies of some of the deep-sea creatures, moving about on the upheaved reefs. As for the giant splash that occurred in the darkness ahead of the boat, this must have been due to some large portion of heaved-up rock, over-balancing and rolling back into the sea.
No one aboard ever learnt about the jewels. I took care of that! I sold the ruby badly, so I’ve heard since; but I do not grumble even now. Twenty-three thousand pounds I had for it alone, from a merchant in London. I learned afterwards he made double that on it; but I don’t spoil my pleasure by grumbling. I wonder often how the stones and things came where I found them; but she carried guns, as I’ve told, I think; and there’s rum doings happen at sea; yes, by George!
The smell—oh that I guess was due to heaving all that deep-sea slime up for human noses to smell at.
This yarn is, of course, known in nautical circles, and was briefly mentioned in the old Nautical Mercury of 1879. The series of volcanic reefs (which disappeared in 1883) were charted under the name of the “Alfred Jessop Shoals and Reefs”; being named after our Captain who discovered them and lost his life on them.
THE THING IN THE WEEDS
I.
This is an extraordinary tale. We had come up from the Cape, and owing to the Trades heading us more than usual, we had made some hundreds of miles more westing than I ever did before or since.
I remember the particular night of the happening perfectly. I suppose what occurred stamped it solid into my m7emory, with a thousand little details that, in the ordinary way, I should never have remembered an hour. And, of course, we talked it over so often among ourselves that this, no doubt, helped to fix it all past any forgetting.
I remember the mate and I had been pacing the weather side of the poop and discussing various old shellbacks’ superstitions. I was third mate, and it was between four and five bells in the first watch, i.e. between ten and half-past. Suddenly he stopped in his walk and lifted his head and sniffed several times.
“My word, mister,” he said, “there’s a rum kind of stink somewhere about. Don’t you smell it?”
I sniffed once or twice at the light airs that were coming in on the beam; then I walked to the rail and leaned over, smelling again at the slight breeze. And abruptly I got a whiff of it, faint and sickly, yet vaguely suggestive of something I had once smelt before.
“I can smell something, Mr. Lammart,” I said. “I could almost give it name; and yet somehow I can’t.” I stared away into the dark to windward. “What do you seem to smell?” I asked him.
“I can’t smell anything now,” he replied, coming over and standing beside me. “It’s gone again. No! By Jove! there it is again. My goodness! Phew!”
The smell was all about us now, filling the night air. It had still that indefinable familiarity about it, and yet it was curiously strange, and, more than anything else, it was certainly simply beastly.
The stench grew stronger, and presently the mate asked me to go for’ard and see whether the look-out man noticed anything. When I reached the break of the fo’c’s’le head I called up to the man, to know whether he smelled anything.
“Smell anythin’, sir?” he sang out. “Jumpin’ larks! I sh’u’d think I do. I’m fair p’isoned with it.”
I ran up the weather steps and stood beside him. The smell was certainly very plain up there, and after savouring it for a few moments I asked him whether he thought it might be a dead whale. But he was very emphatic that this could not be the case, for, as he said, he had been nearly fifteen years in whaling ships, and knew the smell of a dead whale, “like as you would the smell of bad whiskey, sir,” as he put it. “’Tain’t no whale yon, but the Lord He knows what ’tis. I’m thinking it’s Davy Jones come up for a breather.”
I stayed with him some minutes, staring out into the darkness, but could see nothing; for, even had there been something big close to us, I doubt whether I could have seen it, so black a night it was, without a visible star, and with a vague, dull haze breeding an indistinctness all about the ship.
I returned to the mate and reported that the look-out complained of the smell, but that neither he nor I had been able to see anything in the darkness to account for it.
By this time the queer, disgusting odour seemed to be in all the air about us, and the mate told me to go below and shut all the ports, so as to keep the beastly smell out of the cabins and the saloon.
When I returned he suggested that we should shut the companion doors, and after that we commenced to pace the poop again, discussing the extraordinary smell, and stopping from time to time to stare through our night-glasses out into the night about the ship.
“I’ll tell you what it smells like, mister,” the mate remarked once, “and that’s like a mighty old derelict I once went aboard in the North Atlantic. She was a proper old-timer, an’ she gave us all the creeps. There was just this funny, dank, rummy sort of century-old bilge-water and dead men an’ seaweed. I can’t stop thinkin’ we’re nigh some lonesome old packet out there; an’ a good thing we’ve not much way on us!”
“Do you notice how almighty quiet everything’s gone the last half-hour or so?” I said a little later. “It must be the mist thickening down.”
“It is the mist,” said the mate, going to the rail and staring out. “Good Lord, what’s that?” he added.
Something had knocked his hat from his head, and it fell with a sharp rap at my feet. And suddenly, you know, I got a premonition of something horrid.
“Come away from the rail, sir!” I said sharply, and gave one jump and caught him by the shoulders and dragged him back. “Come away from the side!”
“What’s up, mister?” he growled at me, an twisted his shoulders free. “What’s wrong with you? Was it you knocked off my cap?” He stooped and felt around for it, and as he did so I heard something unmistakably fiddling away at the rail which the mate had just left.
“My God, sir!” I said “there’s something there. Hark!”
The mate stiffened up, listening; then he heard it. It was for all the world as if something was feeling and rubbing the rail there in the darkness, not two fathoms away from
us.
“Who’s there?” said the mate quickly. Then, as there was no answer: “What the devil’s this hanky-panky? Who’s playing the goat there?” He made a swift step through the darkness towards he rail, but I caught him by the elbow.
“Don’t go, mister!” I said, hardly above a whisper. “It’s not one of the men. Let me get a light.”
“Quick, then!” he said, and I turned and ran aft to the binnacle and snatched out the lighted lamp. As I did so I heard the mate shout something out of the darkness in a strange voice. There came a sharp, loud, rattling sound, and then a crash, and immediately the mate roaring to me to hasten with the light. His voice changed even whilst he shouted, and gave out somthing that was nearer a scream than anything else. There came two loud, dull blows and an extraordinary gasping sound; and then, as I raced along the poop, there was a tremendous smashing of glass and an immediate silence.
“Mr. Lammart!” I shouted. “Mr. Lammart!” And then I had reached the place where I had left the mate for forty seconds before; but he was not there.
“Mr. Lammart!” I shouted again, holding the light high over my head and turning quickly to look behind me. As I did so my foot glided on some slippery substance, and I went headlong to the deck with a tremendous thud, smashing the lamp and putting out the light.
I was on my feet again in an instant. I groped a moment for the lamp, and as I did so I heard the men singing out from the maindeck and the noise of their feet as they came running aft. I found the broken lamp and realised it was useless; then I jumped for the companion-way, and in half a minute I was back with the big saloon lamp glaring bright in my hands.
The William Hope Hodgson Megapack Page 43