It was as well that the skiff was light, for their voyage was pulling all the way; the breeze had dropped away shortly after Fox and his company dipped below the horizon, and although an unusually strong current swept them along the southern shore, from the western point right along the island's high straight north face they had to pull very hard indeed, and as Bonden observed, if the tide had been running with the current they could not have stemmed it at all. The island was more or less rectangular, like a battered book set down on the sea at an angle, the southern side awash, the northern an almost sheer rise, a couple of hundred feet high in places, with caves in it, some of them deeply recessed, with small beaches to them.
As they rowed along they heard a shrill halooing from one of the cliffs, and looking up they saw Dr Maturin, waving a handkerchief. He called out when he saw they had seen him, but although the air was so still and the sea so calm all they could make out was the word soup.
Between taking his angles and recording depths, Jack turned this over in his mind, but he could make nothing of it until after sunset, when they reached the ship, her great stern window glowing its full width and Stephen sitting there in the restored cabin, his cello between his knees. He smiled and nodded, carried the phrase, part of his own Saint Cecilia's Day, through to its end, and said, 'Did you see our streeted camp?'
'Only a glimmer of white from the sea. Surely it is not finished already?'
'Finished to Welby's satisfaction, no; but much is standing and even more is marked out to the exact inch and degree. I have rarely seen a man take more pleasure in what he was about. Though I may say I believe I took even more delight in my afternoon than Welby. I found the edible-nest swallow! Hirundo esculenta, the bird's-nest soup swallow! Colonies of them, several thousand strong, on those cliffs from which I saw you. In the depths of those caves their nests lie in rows. Little small grey birds they are, not three inches long, but true swallows and even swifter than ours; and their nests are almost white. I hope you will come and see them tomorrow.'
'Certainly, if work permits. Was it very difficult to get through the forest?'
'Tolerably so, because of the lianas; yet there are boars in plenty, and by crouching one can follow their paths fairly well. There are some other paths too, though much overgrown; people must come here from time to time - the animals are by no means tame.'
Jack fetched his violin and while Stephen gave him a short account of the island's flora and fauna he tuned it lovingly. 'So much for the ring-tailed ape,' said Stephen at last, and with one accord they swept into his Saint Cecilia. After that, and after a visit from Fielding to report, they ate their customary toasted cheese and played on and on, the music echoing the length of the almost empty ship with quite another resonance.
Jack turned in late and he slept deep, although his cot moved no more than if it had been slung in the Tower of London; yet he woke uneasy. Of course any man commanding a King's ship that is poised on a reef with several days before he can hope to float her off must wake uneasy, even when expert opinion has told him that the fine weather will continue and when he knows for certain that Thursday's high-water will be as high as that during which she struck, while the full springtide on Sunday will be higher by far - will necessarily raise her free. But this was an uneasiness of another nature, closer to superstitious or instinctive dread.
Washing, shaving, and then a hearty breakfast dispelled some of it; a most encouraging tour of the hold with the carpenter - Mr Hadley's repairs meant that now the pumps were in action for only half a glass in each watch - did away with more; and after a visit to Welby's encampment he was almost himself again. The encampment, with its exact earthwork (for Welby had interpreted ditch very freely), its trim lines, its store-tent in the middle, and its well with three and a half feet of water already, was a joy to behold; and so was the pleasure of the Marines, now for once the experts, aware that they had astonished the foremast jacks.
But at low tide he took a small party to buoy the guns; the men were the ship's few swimmers and three or four were competent divers too; he went in, and down, with them, and there was something indefinably wrong about the water: not only too warm to be at all refreshing but also in some way unclean. They buoyed the guns neatly, but the uneasiness returned, and although at dinner he told Stephen how reasonable it was to expect the ship to lift off on Thursday without any cruel dragging over the remaining length of reef and how nearly certain it was on Sunday, with the sun and the new moon both pulling the spring tide to its fullest height, at least half a fathom more, he had no appetite, and leaving both wine and pudding he went on deck to look at the sea and the sky.
Neither pleased him. It was slack water - a very low tide indeed - and there was an odd heave and shudder on the surface, a motion not unlike twitching. The sky had been somewhat veiled before dinner. Now it was hazy and low: no breeze at all, and the exposed rocks smelt disagreeable in the oppressive heat. A large pale fish, a shark of a kind he had not seen before, passed slowly by.
He watched the sea; and even before the turn of the tide he saw an unnatural swell set in: unnaturally sudden, unnaturally strong. His uneasiness increased, and after half an hour he turned to the master.
'Mr Warren,' he said, 'the signal for officers and all boats, if you please; and meanwhile let the people get ready to lay out the small bower as before, but with two cables.'
Over on a level stretch of green outside the camp he saw the ordered pattern of a game of cricket break up and the players run down to the landing-place; and already the surf was sending its long lines of white along the shore.
'Mr Warren,' he said again, 'I did ask whether you had a barometer, did I not?'
'Yes, sir, you did; and I had to say I gave it to Dr Graham to have adjusted in Plymouth. It is still there, in course.'
Jack nodded and walked up and down, looking eastward at each turn, for not only was the swell coming from that direction but the horizon and the sky for ten degrees above it was taking on a dark coppery glare rarely to be seen.
'Mr Fielding,' he said as soon as the first lieutenant was aboard, 'is the Doctor on shore?'
'Yes, sir: he is under the impression that you may go for a walk in the forest with him, and perhaps climb down the farther cliff. He has a coil of stout, supple line and Sorley, a cragsman from one of the Scotch islands.'
'Not today, I am afraid. Let all hands turn to and lighten ship: carronades, small arms, ammunition; whatever purser, carpenter, gunner, armourer, sailmaker and bosun think most important in their own line; then the hands' bags and chests, officers' personal property. And beg the Doctor to come aboard for his own things and the medicine-chest.'
Doctor Maturin came by the first returning boat, and though the tide of flood was not yet a half hour old, surf was breaking high on the rocks that closed the little bay on the west, breaking at unusually long and solemn intervals. He found Jack in the cabin with his clerk, assembling the ship's documents, registers, signal-books, the enormous and sometimes most secret paper-work of a man-of-war. 'Mr Butcher,' said Jack, 'do not for Heaven's sake let us forget Mr Humboldt's readings: they are on that locker over there. Let them be packed up with my hydrographical remarks.'
'I will take them at once, sir,' said Butcher, who had suffered from these hundreds of hours of accurate measurement and who valued them at their true worth.
'Brother,' said Stephen, when the clerk had staggered off with the files clutched to his bosom, 'what is afoot?'
'I am not sure,' said Jack, 'but it may be your St Cecilia:
And when that last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.
Look out to the east, will you?' They gazed through the stern window, where deep purple was massing beneath the coppery glare. 'I only remember to have seen a sky like that once,' said Jack after a long considering
pause, 'and that was when we were in the South Sea, standing for the Marquesas. You saw precious little of it, because a lee-lurch tossed you into the waist and you hit your head on a gun, but it came before a most stupendous blow, that same blow that wrecked the Norfolk. I do not like this sudden swell, neither. So I am clearing the ship as much as ever I can and I beg you will have everything you value taken ashore, and all your physic and saws and pills. If I am wrong, there is no great harm; they can only call me an old woman.'
It was perfectly clear that by now none of the seamen belonging to the frigate were going to call their Captain an old woman; they were all of his opinion, and their total conviction infected the afterguard, the landmen and the first-voyage Marines, vexed at first by the loss of their game of cricket but now silent, casting anxious glances at the eastern sky.
The boats plied to and fro at racing speed, but with the making tide the much fiercer surf ran farther up the beach, much farther every voyage, however fast they pulled; and soon it was very hard to work the boats out through it to the ship. Worse: the ship being stern-on to the swell gave no shelter and coming alongside grew more and more perilous, so that chests, stores, cases had to be lowered or often tossed from the head-rails.
It was now that Jack called his first lieutenant below and said, 'Mr Fielding, if this develops as I fear it may, let each officer be prepared to get his division ashore when I give the word. There will be no piping abandon ship, no calling out or excitement, just a plain going ashore in due order.'
For nearly an hour longer the swell grew without a breath of wind, and the great solemn crash came echoing back from the rocks; and towards the end of this hour the ship first began to shift on her bed. Jack had already given the word and little by little the ship had emptied until now there were only four men of the final boat-load still aboard, the Captain, his steward, the sentry guarding the spirit-room and a hand who was not quite right in the head. The purple had spread over half the sky, the coppery light over almost all the rest, reaching the far horizon here and there. From the darkness far astern there was a low constant thunder and the reflexion of lightning all along the eastern sky. Then with a howl the wind came racing across the sea in a white squall: one moment the air was calm and the next the full blast was on them, flying shattered water cutting their breath and blurring their sight. The launch, crammed with its last cargo, was hooked on to the forechains, only just holding, and Fielding roared with all his might, 'Come on, sir. For God's sake come on.'
Jack was at the break of the quarterdeck with the others. 'Get along forward,' he said to them and darted into the cabin to check: nobody. A last look and he raced along to the ship's head and strode into the boat as it rose to the level of the rail. The moment Bonden and the bowman let go the boat shot away, flying before the terrible wind, rising and falling enormously; and away ahead Jack saw the large cutter pooped by a breaker, turn and roll over and over in the killing surf. But before the launch was half way to the shore the wind brought rain, a great black hurtling mass of warm rain; and now they were in the very midst of the thunder, stunning, ear-splitting thunder just overhead and lightning all about them.
'Back water all,' roared Bonden above the uproar, poising the launch on the back of a towering wave. 'Give way, oh Christ give way.'
The heavy boat rose, rose, and sped for the beach, grounding high in a smother of foam. The whole crew was lining the shore and those who could find a hold ran her up the streaming sand and then by skids far up beyond the highest tide mark, close to the remaining cutter. The skiff was nowhere to be seen.
Jack had often noticed, and now he noticed it again, that in time of extreme emergency men often seemed to go beyond dread, pain and fatigue; and for noise, danger and the overturning of all natural order this was as extreme as a great fleet-action fought yardarm to yardarm. As they waded up the yielding slope and through the unbelievable rain, carrying their burdens, a line of trees on the edge of the forest blazed blue-green, and the lightning leapt back from them into the sky with a hiss. He bent to shout into a quartermaster's ear, 'Look after Charlie,' for the half-wit was crying, his knuckles to his eyes, and it looked as though he might lose his senses altogether. 'Aye aye, sir,' replied the quartermaster, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, 'I'll change him directly we're under cover.'
They made their way up, and the enormous force of the wind diminished, for they came into the lee of the trees, the roaring trees; and through what light there was - for it was still day - they saw that the tents were standing. Welby's ditches were gushing a thick muddy stream, tearing up the sward below their outlet, but the camp was not waterlogged and when Jack reached his quarters he found the ground quite firm. Not that he took notice of this not even the shelter from rain for some time: there was Fielding's report of seventeen hands lost in the cutter and six much injured; four lost in the skiff; one hand struck by lightning, and Edwards had to be told that there was not the least hope for the pinnace: it was not until an indefinite period of time had passed and that he was sitting there with Stephen, with the tremendous beating of rain grown habitual and only the more extravagant crashes of thunder or strokes of lightning close at hand exciting attention, that he perceived the dryness of the ground underfoot, the presence of his sea-chest and other possessions laid on trestles, and his chronometers and their case enclosed in a bladder.
Now that there was no longer the stimulus of action, now that there was in fact nothing to be done, they both felt numbed by the mass of events, by their own exertions and by the enormous and continuing noise, which made even common interchange a matter of more effort than they could afford; they sat there companionably enough however, nodding to one another occasionally, at some outrageous thunder-clap or the crash of a forest tree nearby; but beneath it all Jack's ear strained to make out the horrible sound of his ship hammering on the reef.
This he was spared: the general uproar was too great for even a broadside to pierce through from the distance; and from time to time he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and slept. Waking at about three in the morning he noticed a new strain in the universal and all-pervading sound: a tearing, rushing noise like a torrent in spate. And when he had been listening to this for some time, while the lightning flashed overhead, giving an almost continuous light in the tent, sometimes so bright and prolonged that he could see Stephen telling his beads, there came another: not a continuous sound this time but a long deep roar lasting four or five minutes.
'What was that?' he cried.
'A landslide, my dear.'
Torpor again; extreme weariness. But during this stretch of the perpetually roaring, flashing night Stephen did not really sleep; and although at times his mind wandered off to something not far from waking dream it often came back to dwell on the Prabang treaty: Edwards's copy was now lying in Dr Maturin's particular metal-lined medicine-chest, as the safest, driest place in the camp. Its accompanying letter was much what Stephen had expected, except that it was longer, more vehement and less able by far; and its animosity against young Edwards surprised him. Yet since it did not betray his own role even by implication - the envoy made no mention of any source of intelligence whatsoever - the letter would have to go as it stood. At times, when his mind clouded over with fatigue, he was tempted to make it ludicrous for Edwards's sake by adding still another name or two to those who had plotted to lessen the envoy's consequence, to make his task even more difficult and to take away from the merit of what had been accomplished. But in this context such a thing would not do at all; and even if it had been possible it would be pointless, for clearer reflection showed him that the list was already so long that it defeated its own end - the product of a mind unhinged.
The typhoon passed over somewhat after dawn, the rain moving westward and leaving a clear sky, so that Jack waking thought for a moment that this was an immensely-prolonged lightning-flash. The wind was much less, yet the volume of noise was even greater, partly because the tremendous surf was no
longer tempered by the downpour but even more because the raging torrent that poured out of the forest and down what had been the grassy triangle was checked by Stephen's landslide, so that it made a series of cataracts. The mass of sward, trees and earth had partly diverted the stream from the encampment, which had lost only its south-east corner, but had turned it full upon the grassy slope above the landing-place. The grassy slope was gone; the landing-place was wholly overlaid; the launch had been shattered and swept out to sea, though the small cutter and some of the spars were still there, caught in the tangle of uprooted trees and bushes on either side of the torrent's mouth.
Jack stepped quietly out of the tent, for Stephen had dropped off in his turn; he looked up at the clean, washed sky and then over the white water to the reef. No ship, of course; but his eye travelled along the line to the island's westward point, where the anchor might possibly have brought her up if she had been heaved over into the deep water without too much damage: a vain hope, only very faintly held.
Several people were moving about the camp, talking in low voices or not at all: Jack had the impression that they were stunned, but glad to be alive. Fielding and Warren were among them, looking to the westward with a little pocketglass.
'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said. 'What do you see?'
'Good morning, sir,' said Fielding, flattening his hair with one hand. 'We believe it may be a substantial piece of wreck.' He passed the glass, and Jack, having peered for a while, said, 'Let us go and see.'
Down the ravaged slope, now steaming in the sun, across the torrent by the tangle of fallen trees with their treasure of boat and spars, and out along a firm, hammered low-tidc strand, littered with coconuts, presumably from Borneo, and with many drowned ring-tailed apes, certainly from here. Several people joined them: Richardson, the bosun, the carpenter, all the midshipmen and many foremast hands. The Captain and the first lieutenant walked ahead and Fielding said in a low voice, 'I am sorry to have to tell you, sir, that the tent which carried away in the south-east corner was the powder-store.'
The Thirteen Gun Salute Page 33