Book 16 - The Wine-Dark Sea

by Patrick O'Brian

'With all my heart,' said Maturin. It had become increasingly evident to him that there was a whole series of pieties active in Eduardo's breast which had nothing to do with those of Christianity as it was ordinarily understood. Furthermore he was much attached to the young man; and he had not seen him so moved before, even when he received the message from Cuzco.

  They sat on, noting the passing birds, watching those farther off with their telescopes, comparing observations; and they were talking about the remarkable sense of the ominous or of impending change in animals—earthquake, eruption, eclipse (even lunar eclipses in certain bats)—when a flock of huachua geese flew straight at them at an extraordinary speed, passing just over their heads and with so great a rush of wings that for a moment their words were lost. The geese all wheeled together, returned at the same height and speed, rose and then pitched on the water, tearing the surface and throwing it wide: they sat in a tight-packed group, their heads stretched up; and high over them the lake gulls turned, screaming, screaming.

  Another minute passed and a prodigious noise between a great thunder-clap and a broadside made both men start up, part the tall reeds and look behind them. They saw the snow of the two peaks on either side of the pass streaming out to leeward, streamers a mile long and more: then peaks and the pass itself vanished in a white turmoil.

  'It may not last,' cried Eduardo, catching up his gun. Stephen followed him as he went fast through the reeds to the place where they had left the llama. And indeed for some minutes it seemed that this one clap might be the end; but while Eduardo was fastening their belongings to the llama's pack-saddle, Stephen looked at the water. There was scarcely a creature left on it now, and all along the edge birds were pushing in among the reeds.

  Moving at that quick familiar short-paced Indian trot Eduardo and the llama set off over the powdering of snow for the true snowline and the pass. There was still enough day and enough light to cross it, going even at a moderate pace.

  A second thunder-clap, a triple roar several times repeated, and first the wind and then the snow engulfed them. Stephen, who weighed no great matter, was thrust first forward, then violently back, then plucked bodily up and flung against a rock. For a while he could see nothing, and crouched there shielding his face so that he should not breathe the flying powdered snow. Eduardo, who like the llama had thrown himself down at the first blast, found him, passed the tether round his waist and told him to hold on and keep moving for the love of God—Eduardo knew the path perfectly well—they would reach the snow-line and move on bent low—much easier up there—no hard falling—and the top of the pass would be blown clear.

  But it was not. When at last they had beaten their slow, gasping way up through the roaring, uneven wind in the increasing darkness they found that hitherto they had been in the relatively sheltered lee of the topmost ridge and that the pass itself received not only the full force of the blast but of that blast concentrated and magnified by the two converging sides of rock. The space between was a racing downward torrent of air and snow that now partook more and more of the cutting icy crust from the snowfields far to windward. It was quite impassable. The sun had vanished in a white blur at some forgotten or unnoticed point but by the grace of God a four-day moon gleaming at odd moments through breaks in the clouds of flying snow enabled Eduardo to reach a cleft in the rock-face. It just allowed them to shelter from the direct buffeting of the wind if not from its shattering noise, and to some degree from the rapidly increasing and mortal cold.

  It was a triangular cleft, the outer part filled with powdered snow. Eduardo kicked it into the mainstream, where it vanished instantly, thrust Stephen right into the sharp apex, followed him, dragging the llama into the opening where it lay on the remaining snow, and squatted between the two. The llama tried to heave itself farther in, but this could not be: after a struggle Eduardo managed to shackle one bent knee and the poor beast gave up, lowering its long neck across them, with its head on Stephen's knee.

  Gradually, as they recovered from the immense exertion of the last hundred yards or so, and as their ears grew more accustomed to the wind's countless voices, all different, all enormously loud and oppressive in this shrieking pass, they exchanged a few words. Eduardo begged pardon for leading don Esteban into this—he should have known—there were signs—Tupec had told him it was a haunted, unlucky day—but these winds died with the midnight stars or at least with the rising sun. Would the Doctor like a ball of coca-leaves?

  Stephen had been so very near death from a racing heart, an inability to breathe at such a height and physical exhaustion that he had almost forgotten his pouch; and at this point he did not possess the bodily strength or the spiritual resolution to grope for it under his clothes. He accepted gratefully, fumbling across the llama's neck for the proffered quid.

  It had not been in his cheek five minutes before the extremity, the almost mortal extremity of fatigue died away. In ten minutes he was perfectly capable of reaching his own supply of leaves and ash, and of rearranging himself with what small degree of physical comfort the space allowed. He also felt a certain grateful warmth from the llama's head; but quite apart from that, mental comfort and a sense of divorce from time and immediate contingencies were already settling in his mind.

  They talked a little, or rather shouted, about the desirability of a thick drift of snow across the entrance. Yet the steadily increasing cold made the effort of shouting too great and each relapsed into a meditative silence, carefully spreading what clothes they had over the whole of their persons, particularly ears, noses, fingers. What passed for time or at least a kind of duration no doubt went on. Sleep in these circumstances seemed wholly out of the question, even if it had not been for the effect of coca-leaves, stronger by far than any coffee known to man, above all in the present heavy and steadily repeated doses.

  Yet at some remote given point Stephen's waking mind distinctly perceived the minute voice of the watch deep in his bosom striking five and then the half. 'Can this be?' he asked, and feeling deep within his bosom he pressed the repeating knob. Five said the watch again, and then the shriller half: at the same moment he realized that the wind had stopped; that the llama's head and neck were cold, the creature already stiff; that Eduardo was breathing deep; that his own leg, no longer covered by the poncho these many hours, had no sensibility whatsoever; and that the mouth of the cleft, now almost entirely closed by a great deal of fresh snow, had a line of light at the top.

  'Eduardo,' he called, when he had digested all these things and arranged them in order, 'Eduardo, God and Mary be with you: it is dawn, and the cold is less.'

  Eduardo woke at once and with a clearer mind by far. He blessed God, gathered himself, writhed round the dead llama, pushed the loose-packed snow away and called back, 'The pass is now swept quite clear, and there is Tupec coming down, with two other men.' He pulled the poor beast away. Light came flooding in and Stephen looked at his morbid leg.

  'Eduardo, my dear,' he said hesitantly, after a careful examination, 'I grieve to tell you that my leg is deeply frostbitten. If I am fortunate I may lose no more than some toes; but even in that case I cannot do more than creep. Pray pass me a handful of snow.'

  As he chafed the pallid leg and the ominously blueing foot with snow Eduardo agreed. 'But,' he said, 'pray do not take it to heart. Many of us have lost toes on the puna without great harm; and as for your reaching Arica, why, never concern yourself at all. You shall have a Peruvian chair. I shall send down to the village and you will travel like Pachacutic Inca himself, cross the bridge, the hills and the valleys in a Peruvian chair.'

  Chapter Ten

  At seven bells in the forenoon watch the Surprise, under topsails alone, heaved to: the officers began to assemble on the quarterdeck, the midshipmen on the gangway, all carrying their quadrants or sextants, for the sun was approaching the meridian, and they were to take his altitude at the moment he crossed it, thereby finding just how far south of the equator they were at noon. To the landsman, to
the mere superficial observer, this might have seemed a work of supererogation, since clear on her larboard bow rose the headland of Punta Angeles, the western extremity of Valparaiso bay, whose position had been laid down with the utmost accuracy time out of mind, while in the brilliantly clear air miles of the great Cordillera could be seen, the peak of Aconcagua a perfect compass-bearing to the north-east; but as far as Jack Aubrey was concerned this was neither here nor there. He liked to run a man-of-war as men-of-war had always been run, with the ship's day beginning at noon; and this was a particularly important day, the last of the month and the first on which he could hope to find Stephen Maturin in Valparaiso. He therefore wished nothing to be done that might break the established pattern or bring ill-luck. It was true that a few years ago some wild enthusiast, a Whiggish civilian no doubt, had decreed that day should start at midnight; but Jack, though a scientific, forward-looking officer, agreed with many of his fellow-captains in giving this foolish innovation no countenance whatsoever: besides, it had taken him years to persuade Stephen that nautical days really did start at noon, and he did not want his imperfect conviction to be shaken in any way at all. Then again, once this last day of the month had in fact begun, he meant to carry out some physical measurements for his friend the polymath Alexander Humboldt, in whose penguin-filled cold northern current the ship was now swimming.

  Silence fore and aft: anxious peering through many an eyepiece. Jack brought his own sun down three times to the fine firm horizon, and on the third it was a trifle below the second, which had been the true altitude. He noted the angle, and turning he found Tom Pullings, who in this anomalous ship played many parts as well as that of first lieutenant, standing there bare-headed beside him. 'Noon and thirty-three degrees south, sir, if you please,' said Tom.

  'Very good, Captain Pullings,' replied Jack. 'Make it twelve.'

  Pullings turned to Norton, the mate of the watch, and said, 'Make it twelve,' in a strong, hieratic voice. Norton, with equal gravity, hailed the quartermaster, not three feet away, 'Strike eight bells and turn the glass.' The four double strokes rang out, and with the last still in the air, Pullings, directing his words to the bosun, roared, 'Pipe to dinner.'

  The lions at the Tower of London made a prodigious and indeed a shocking din on being fed, but theirs was a kittenish mewling compared with that of the Surprise; besides, the lions were rarely provided with mess-kids upon which the seamen beat with such zeal, this being Thursday, a salt-pork day, and one upon which an extraordinary plum-duff was to be served out in honour of the birthday of Lord Melville, the brother of Captain Aubrey's particular friend Heneage Dundas and First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of Jack's reinstatement.

  The roaring was so usual that Jack barely noticed it, but the ensuing quietness did strike his mind. The Surprise was not one of those discontented spit-and-polish ships in which men were not allowed to speak on duty, for not only would this have been abhorrent to Jack Aubrey's feelings and dead contrary to his idea of command ('a happy ship is your only right hard-fighting ship') but with such a ship's company it would not have answered for a moment, and except at times of strong activity there was always a steady low hum of talk on deck. At present the temporary silence made the almost deserted deck seem still more empty; and Jack, addressing Adams, his clerk and factotum in the intellectual line, lowered his voice. 'Mr Adams,' he said, 'when we have taken the temperatures and the salinity, we might try a sounding. With the two headlands we have a capital triangle, and I should like to know what the bottom is like at this point, if our line can reach it. Once that is done we will take the ship a little farther in and you can carry on in the cutter, just as though you were calling for mail or the like. I will give you the addresses where the Doctor may be found, and if he is at either you will bring him off directly. But with the utmost discretion, Mr Adams. The utmost discretion, too, in asking the way. The utmost discretion is called for in this case: that is why I do not take her in and lie in the road or the port itself. Things may come to that or to some system of signalling; but how charming it would be if we could pluck him off the shore right away.'—lowering his voice still farther—'You will not repeat it, but there appears to be some question of a high-placed very furious husband—legal proceedings—every kind of unpleasantness, you understand me.'

  The quietness lasted throughout the scientific observations and during the time the hands ate their dinner and drank their grog, a time during which Reade laid out the coils of deep-sea line at given intervals from the forecastle to the mizzen chains so that the men could let them go in succession. He had not retired to the midshipmen's berth, because he had been invited to dine in the cabin—invited to eat a much better dinner than he could hope to find in the berth, but to eat it more than two hours later than his usual time; and now, by way of distracting his ravenous, ever-increasing hunger, he indulged in capers unworthy of his rank or age, such as thumping the deep-sea lead against the frigate's side. The rhythmic noise broke in on Jack's calculations and he called out, 'Mr Reade. Mr Reade, there. Pray attend to your duty.'

  His duty materialized in the next two minutes, when the afternoon watch came on deck and those hands who had been told off for the sounding took up their stations, each with a coil of the stout waterlaid line in his hand. Reade walked out on the larboard cat-head swinging the twenty-eight pound lead in his one hand, watched with infinite anxiety by the seamen lining the side, dropped it into the water, calling, 'Lead's away,' and walked back without a stumble. From forward aft each man holding twenty fathoms in his hand, sang out, 'Watch, there, watch,' as he let the last coils go. Each of the ten repeated the call, except for the last, in the mizzen chains, who held the fag-end tight—no coils left at all—looked up at Reade, smiled and shook his head: 'No bottom with this line, sir.'

  Reade crossed the quarterdeck, took off his hat, reported to Captain Aubrey, 'No bottom with this line, sir'; and seeing that Jack was no longer vexed with him he went on, 'Oh sir, I do wish you would look out over the larboard beam. There is as odd a craft as you can possibly imagine, a balsa, I think, sailing in the strangest way. It has been brought by the lee three times in the last five minutes, and the poor soul seems to be entangled in his sheet. He is a brave fellow to come on, but he has no more notion of handling a boat than the Doctor.'

  Jack glanced at the boat. He covered his poor eye and stared fixedly with the other before crying, 'Mr Norton, jump into the top with this glass. Look at that balsa with the purple sail and tell me what you see. Mr Wilkins, let the red cutter be lowered down at once.'

  'On deck, there,' hailed Norton, his voice squeaking with emotion. 'On deck, sir. It is the Doctor—he is overboard—no, he is back again—I believe his tiller has come unshipped.'

  The balsa, though wildly overloaded, was by definition unsinkable, and they brought him aboard to the heartiest cheers, helped him up the side with so zealous a welcome that he would have been pitched into the waist if Jack had not clasped him with both hands. 'Welcome aboard, Doctor,' he cried, and the ship's company called out, 'Welcome aboard—aye, aye—hear him—welcome aboard—huzzay, huzzay!' in defiance of all good order and discipline.

  As soon as he was in the cabin, and even while Killick and Padeen were taking away his wet clothes and bringing dry, even while a pot of coffee was being brewed, Stephen examined Jack Aubrey's wounds: the leg he passed—an ugly scar, no more—and the eye he gazed at without much comment, only saying that he would need a better light. Then, as they sat down to their fragrant cup, he went on, 'Before I ask you how the ship sails along, how you have done, and how all our people are, will I tell you why I came out to meet you in this precipitate and I might almost say temerarious manner?'

  'If you please.'

  'I had reasons for not wishing to call any official attention to the Surprise, but the chief cause for my haste was that I have some information that you might wish to act upon without the loss of a minute.'

  'Oh, indeed?' cried Jack, his good eye ligh
ting with its old predatory gleam.

  'As I was leaving Peru because of the unjustified suspicions of a military man who misunderstood my examination of his wife—a deeply stupid but very powerful and bloody-minded military man—' This was an explanation for some of Stephen's more bizarre movements that both of them understood perfectly: it was calculated, and very well calculated, to satisfy the minds of the seamen, who for a great while had looked upon the Doctor's licentious capers ashore with an indulgent comprehension. '—a confidential friend came to see me by night, and knowing that I belonged to a British privateer he gave me an account of three American China ships sailing in company from Boston. This document he gave me as a parting present, together with details of their insurance, their ports of call and their estimated progress, in the hope that we might be able to intercept them. At that time and for some hundreds of miles after I paid no great attention to the matter, knowing the uncertainty of sea-voyages: and indeed of my own, by land. Yet no sooner had I reached Valparaiso than I received word from my friend's correspondent in the Argentine: the ships had cleared from Buenos Aires on Candlemas Day; they meant to traverse the Straits le Maire and to carry on, skirting south of Diego Ramirez by the end of the present month and then heading north-east for Canton. I looked at the Abbot's map, and it occurred to me that by spreading every sail and straining every nerve we might get there in time.'

  'So we might,' said Jack, after a moment's calculation; and he left the cabin. Returning he cried, 'Oh Stephen, what are we to do with the balsa and all those innumerable boxes, chests and vile bundles that fill it to what would be the gunwale of a Christian boat?'

  'Pray let them be brought aboard with the utmost care. As for the boat itself, let it be tossed off with a round turn, if you please, the cantankerous beast, though it is the clear loss of half a crown and eighteen pence for the sail, almost new. It came from the same yard and the same model as that which goes out on Thursdays for the monastery's fish, and the Abbot assured me that one had but to pull a given rope, the escota, towards the back to make it go faster: but this was not the case. Though possibly I may have pulled the wrong rope. There were so many boxes on the floor . . . indeed, there was so little room for me that I almost fell into the sea, at times.'