We were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when a quick scream from my companion broke fearfully upon the night. “See! see!” cried he, shrieking in my ears, “Almighty God! see! see!” As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship of, perhaps, four thousand tons. Although upreared upon the summit of a wave more than a hundred times her own altitude, her apparent size exceeded that of any ship of the line or East Indiaman in existence. Her huge hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the customary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass cannon protruded from her open ports, and dashed from their polished surfaces the fires of innumerable battle-lanterns which swung to and fro about her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane. When we first discovered her, her bows were alone to be seen, as she rose slowly from the dim and horrible gulf beyond her. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled, and tottered, and-came down.
At this instant, I know not what sudden self-possession came over my spirit. Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea. The shock of the descending mass struck her, consequently, in that portion of her frame which was already under water, and the inevitable result was to hurl me, with irresistible violence, upon the rigging of the stranger.
As I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about; and to the confusion ensuing I attributed my escape from the notice of the crew. With little difficulty I made my way unperceived to the main hatchway, which was partially open, and soon found an opportunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so I can hardly tell. An indefinite sense of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the ship had taken hold of my mind, was perhaps the principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to trust myself with a race of people who had offered, to the cursory glance I had taken, so many points of vague novelty, doubt, and apprehension. I therefore thought proper to contrive a hiding-place in the hold. This I did by removing a small portion of the shifting-boards, in such a manner as to afford me a convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the ship.
I had scarcely completed my work, when a footstep in the hold forced me to make use of it. A man passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait. I could not see his face, but had an opportunity of observing his general appearance. There was about it an evidence of great age and infirmity. His knees tottered beneath a load of years, and his entire frame quivered under the burthen. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of navigation. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more.
A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul-a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never-I know that I shall never-be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense-a new entity is added to my soul.
It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus. Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. It is but just now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate; it was no long while ago that I ventured into the captain’s own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall from time to time continue this journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endeavor. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.
An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned chance? I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails, in the bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word DISCOVERY.
I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive; what she is, I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago.
I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat overcurious, but this would have every characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by any unnatural means.
In reading the above sentence, a curious apothegm of an old weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. “It is as sure,” he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of his veracity, “as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.”
About an hour ago, I made bold to trust myself among a group of the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction.
I mentioned, some time ago, the bending of a studding-sail. From that period, the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has continued her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvas packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail booms, and rolling every moment her top-gallant yard-arms into the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind of man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy seagull; and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of
the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats, and forbidden to destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only natural cause which can account for such effect. I must suppose the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or impetuous undertow.
I have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin-but, as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or less than man, still, a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In stature, he is nearly my own height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkably otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon the face-it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense-a sentiment ineffable. His forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the stamp of a myriad of years. His gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery, unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself-as did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold-some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue; and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile.
The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.
When I look around me, I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any idea of which, the words tornado and simoom are trivial and ineffective? All in the immediate vicinity of the ship, is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.
As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current-if that appellation can properly be given to a tide, which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.
To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge-some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor.
The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of hope than of the apathy of despair.
In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a crowd of canvas, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the sea! Oh, horror upon horror!-the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small-we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool-and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and-going down!
In a Strange City: Baltimore and the Poe Toaster BY LAURA LIPPMAN
Lo, Death has reared itself a throne In a strange city, lying alone.
– EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE CITY BY THE SEA”
I admit, the name is regrettable: the Poe Toaster. Can anyone say it without first picturing that old screen saver, the one with winged toasters shuttling through the cosmos, only this time adorned with little mustaches and those famously melancholy eyes? But the first thing you need to know is that the Poe Toaster is not an appliance but a person, one charged with a sacred duty: the annual visit to Poe’s grave in the Westminster Burying Ground.
Admittedly, many of Baltimore ’s tributes to Poe seem just a little… off. His original grave site was unmarked for years. Then we have the Ravens, the NFL team that my hometown stole from Cleveland. There is the long-shuttered Telltale Hearth, a decent pizza joint in its day, and Edgar’s Club, a billiards joint on the Baltimore Skywalk, which is everything one might expect in a billiards joint on the Baltimore Skywalk. There is the omnipresent squad car parked outside the Poe House, in case a tourist loses his way. There are the Poe Homes, a housing project, where the tourists are on their own. There is the fact that we’ve torn down the hospital where Poe died, failing to salvage a single item. And then there is the memorial erected to Poe in 1875, almost thirty years after his death. On it, the date of Poe’s birthday is wrong, off by a day.
The Poe Toaster does not come to this site. That’s the second thing you need to know. The Poe Toaster visits the original grave, at the rear of the old cemetery in downtown Baltimore. He arrives between midnight and 6:00 A. M. on January 19-for the Poe Toaster is not confused about the date of Poe’s birth-and leaves three red roses and a half bottle of cognac. Cognac -a toast, hence the Poe Toaster. Yet no one, except the Poe Toaster, knows why he does this, the precise significance of those items, or even how many people have assumed the mantle of Poe Toaster since the custom began in 1949, precisely one hundred years after Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore.
A man in a nursing home came forward in the summer of 2007, claiming that he started the whole thing, but his version of events was so full of holes and inconsistencies that it would have been more polite to ignore him entirely. (If only the local newspaper had shared that opinion.) This is what we know: The visits started in 1949. A note was left in 1999, suggesting the torch had been passed at least once, if not twice. In 2001 another note was left, but this one was silly, exhorting the New York Giants to a Super Bowl win over the Ravens. Hmmm. I have always found that one a little dubious.
But in 2000 I was there, and I can describe very precisely what happened. Only-I won’t. Because that is part of the promise I made to Jeff Jerome, the Poe House curator, who granted me entry to the annual watch party, an invitation he controls because the church is now a concert hall owned by the University of Maryland. Oh, anyone can go to the corner of Fayette and Greene and wait, in what is usually a frigid night, for a glimpse of the visitor. Go ahead, hang out on a corner in Baltimore at 2:00 A. M. I dare you. If you do, you will find that the sight lines from the street are compromised, especially since the construction of a new building behind the graveyard. You can see Poe’s second grave easily enough from outside the gates, but not the original one.
In 2000 I was the one who saw the Poe Toaster first. That’s the way I remember it, but I bet everyone who was there that night thinks they had the first glimpse. I was in the right location, though, a second-story window that afforded a wide-open view of the graveyard. It was a dreamlike moment, watching him approach, for he really did seem to appear out of thin air. His clothing, his aspect, how he moved, the route by which he left-I could probably share those things without breaking my promise to Jerome. Again, I won’t. They belong to me, and the others who were there.
I suppose there are people who think it would be great sport to unmask the Toaster. Just as there are probably people who think it would be fun to tell young
children that there is no Santa Claus and, by the way, you’re not going to grow up to be a fireman or a ballerina either. All I can say is that I’ve never known of a true Baltimorean-outside of an elderly man in a nursing home-who wants to unmask the visitor. The mystery is what makes it special. Every January 20, I awake with a queasy sensation. Did he come? Is it over? So far, so good.
In The Shadow Of The Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe Page 10