Seeing him, I craned out my head as far as possible, and sang out to him.
“Ned! Ned, old man!” I shouted. “Let me come along with you!”
He appeared never to have heard me. I noticed his face, just before he shut down the trap above him. The expression was fixed and peculiar. It had the uncomfortable remoteness of a sleep-walker.
“Confound it!” I muttered, and after that I said nothing; for it hurt my dignity to supplicate before the men.
From the interior of the boat I heard Barlow’s voice, muffled. Immediately four oars were passed out through the holes in the sides while from slots in the front and rear of the superstructure were thrust a couple of oars with wooden chocks nailed to the blades.
These, I guessed, were intended to assist in steering the boat, that in the bow being primarily for pressing down the weed before the boat, so as to allow her to surmount it the more easily.
Another muffled order came from the interior of the queer-looking craft, and immediately the four oars dipped, and the boat shot towards the weed, the rope trailing out astern as it was paid out from the deck above me.
The board-assisted bow of the lifeboat took the weed with a sort of squashy surge, rose up, and the whole craft appeared to leap from the water down in among the quaking mass.
I saw now the reason why the oar-holes had been placed so high. For of the boat itself nothing could be seen, only the upper portion of the superstructure wallowing amid the weed. Had the holes been lower, there would have been no handling the oars.
I settled myself to watch. There was the probability of a prodigious spectacle, and as I could not help, I would, at least, use my eyes.
Five minutes passed, during which nothing happened, and the boat made slow progress towards the derelict. She had accomplished perhaps some twenty or thirty yards, when suddenly from the Graiken there reached my ears a hoarse shout.
My glance leapt from the boat to the derelict. I saw that the people aboard had the sliding part of the screen to one side, and were waving their arms frantically, as though motioning the boat back.
Amongst them I could see the girlish figure that had attracted my attention the previous evening. For a moment I stared, then my gaze travelled back to the boat. All was quiet.
The boat had now covered a quarter of the distance, and I began to persuade myself that she would get across without being attacked.
Then, as I gazed anxiously, from a point in the weed a little ahead of the boat there came a sudden quaking ripple that shivered through the weed in a sort of queer tremor. The next instant, like a shot from a gun, a huge mass drove up clear through the tangled weed, hurling it in all directions, and almost capsizing the boat.
The creature had driven up rear foremost. It fell back with a mighty splash, and in the same moment its monstrous arms were reached out to the boat. They grasped it, enfolding themselves about it horribly. It was apparently attempting to drag the boat under.
From the boat came a regular volley of revolver shots. Yet, though the brute writhed, it did not relinquish its hold. The shots closed, and I saw the dull flash of cutlass blades. The men were attempting to hack at the thing through the oar-holes, but evidently with little effect.
All at once the enormous creature seemed to make an effort to overturn the boat. I saw the half submerged boat go over to one side, until it seemed to me that nothing could right it, and at the sight I went mad with excitement to help them.
I pulled my head in from the port, and glanced round the cabin. I wanted to break down the door, but there was nothing with which to do this.
“Then my sight fell upon my bunkboard, which fitted into a sliding groove. It was made of teak wood, and very solid and heavy. I lifted it out, and charged the door with the end of it.
The panels split from top to bottom, for I am a heavy man. Again I struck, and drove the two portions of the door apart. I hove down the bunkboard and rushed through.
There was no one on guard; evidently they had gone on deck to view the rescue. The gunroom door was to my right, and I had the key in my pocket.
In an instant, I had it open, and was lifting down from its rack a heavy elephant gun. Seizing a box of cartridges, I tore off the lid, and emptied the lot into my pocket; then I leapt up the companionway on the deck.
The steward was standing near. He turned at my step; his face was white, and he took a couple of paces towards me doubtfully.
“They’re—they’re—” he began; but I never let him finish.
“Get out of my way!” I roared and swept him to one side. I ran forward.
“Haul in on that rope!” I shouted. “Tail on to it! Are you going to stand there like a lot of owls and see them drown!”
The men only wanted a leader to show them what to do, and, without showing any thought of insubordination, they tacked on to the rope that was fastened to the stern of the boat, and hauled her back across the weed—cuttle-fish and all.
The strain on the rope had thrown her on an even keel again, so that she took the water safely, though that foul thing was sproddled all across her.
“ ’Vast hauling!” I shouted. “Get the doc’s cleavers, some of you—anything that’ll cut!”
“This is the sort, Sir!” cried the bo’sun; from somewhere he had got hold of a formidable doublebladed whale lance.
The boat, still under the impetus given by our pull, struck the side of the yacht immediately beneath where I was waiting with the gun. Astern of it towed the body of the monster, its two eyes—monstrous orbs of the Profound—staring out vilely from behind its arms.
I leant my elbows on the rail and aimed full at the right eye. As I pulled on the trigger one of the great arms detached itself from the boat, and swirled up towards me. There was a thunderous bang as the heavy charge drove its way through that vast eye, and at the same instant something swept over my head.
There came a cry from behind: “Look out, Sir!” A flame of steel before my eyes, and a truncated something fell upon my shoulder, and thence to the deck.
Down below, the water was being churned to a froth, and three more arms sprang into the air, and then down among us.
One grasped the bo’sun, lifting him like a child. Two cleavers gleamed, and he fell to the deck from a height of some twelve feet, along with the severed portion of the limb.
I had my weapons reloaded again by now, and ran forward along the deck somewhat, to be clear of the flying arms that flailed on the rails and deck.
I fired again into the hulk of the brute, and then again. At the second shot, the murderous din of the creature ceased, and, with an ineffectual flicker of its remaining tentacles, it sank out of sight beneath the water.
A minute later we had the hatch in the roof of the superstructure open, and the men out, my chum coming last. They had been mightily shaken, but otherwise were none the worse.
As Barlow came over the gangway, I stepped up to him and gripped his shoulder. I was strangely muddled in my feelings. I felt that I had no sure position aboard my own yacht. Yet all I said was:
“Thank God, you’re safe, old man!” And I meant it from my heart.
He looked at me in a doubtful, puzzled sort of manner, and passed his hand across his forehead. “Yes,” he replied; but his voice was strangely toneless, save that some puzzledness seemed to have crept into it. For a couple of moments he stared at me in an unseeing way, and once more I was struck by the immobile, tensed-up expression of his features. Immediately afterwards he turned away—having shown neither friendliness nor enmity—and commenced to clamber back over the side into the boat.
“Come up, Ned!” I cried. “It’s no good. You’ll never manage it that way. Look!” and I stretched out my arm, pointing. Instead of looking, he passed his hand once more across his forehead, with that gesture of puzzled doubt. Then, to my relief, he caught at the rope ladder, and commenced to make his way slowly up the side.
Reaching the deck, he stood for nearly a minute without saying a word
, his back turned to the derelict. Then, still wordless, he walked slowly across to the opposite side, and leant his elbows upon the rail, as though looking back along the way the yacht had come.
For my part, I said nothing, dividing my attention between him and the men with occasional glances at the quaking weed and the—apparently—hopelessly surrounded Graiken.
The men were quiet, occasionally turning towards Barlow, as though for some further order. Of me they appeared to take little notice. In this wise, perhaps a quarter of an hour went by; then abruptly Barlow stood upright, waving his arms and shouting:
“It comes! It comes!” He turned towards us, and his face seemed transfigured, his eyes gleaming almost maniacally.
I ran across the deck to his side, and looked away to port, and now I saw what it was that had excited him. The weed-barrier through which we had come on our inward journey was divided, a slowly broadening river of oily water showing clean across it.
Even as I watched it grew broader, the immense masses of weed being moved by some unseen impulsion.
I was still staring, amazed, when a sudden cry went up from some of the men to starboard. Turning quickly, I saw that the yawning movement was being continued to the mass of weed that lay between us and the Graiken.
Slowly, the weed was divided, surely as though an invisible wedge were being driven through it. The gulf of weed-clear water reached the derelict, and passed beyond. And now there was no longer anything to stop our rescue of the crew of the derelict.
VII
It was Barlow’s voice that gave the order for the mooring ropes to be cast off, and then, as the light wind was right against us, a boat was out ahead, and the yacht was towed towards the ship, whilst a dozen of the men stood ready with their rifles on the fo’c’s’le head.
As we drew nearer, I began to distinguish the features of the crew, the men strangely grizzled and old looking. And among them, white-faced with emotion, was my chum’s lost sweetheart. I never expect to know a more extraordinary moment.
I looked at Barlow; he was staring at the whitefaced girl with an extraordinary fixidity of expression that was scarcely the look of a sane man.
The next minute we were alongside, crushing to a pulp between our steel sides one of those remaining monsters of the deep that had continued to cling steadfastly to the Graiken.
Yet of that I was scarcely aware, for I had turned again to look at Ned Barlow. He was swaying slowly to his feet, and just as the two vessels closed he reached up both his hands to his head, and fell like a log.
Brandy was brought, and later Barlow carried to his cabin; yet we had won clear of that hideous weed-world before he recovered consciousness.
During his illness I learned from his sweetheart how, on a terrible night a long year previously, the Graiken had been caught in a tremendous storm and dismasted, and how, helpless and driven by the gale, they at last found themselves surrounded by the great banks of floating weed, and finally held fast in the remorseless grip of the dread Sargasso.
She told me of their attempts to free the ship from the weed, and of the attacks of the cuttlefish. And later of various other matters; for all of which I have no room in this story.
In return I told her of our voyage, and her lover’s strange behavior. How he had wanted to undertake the navigation of the yacht, and had talked of a great world of weed. How I had—believing him unhinged—refused to listen to him. How he had taken matters into his own hands, without which she would most certainly have ended her days surrounded by the quaking weed and those great beasts of the deep waters.
She listened with an evergrowing seriousness, so that I had, time and again, to assure her that I bore my old chum no ill, but rather held myself to be in the wrong. At which she shook her head, but seemed mightily relieved.
It was during Barlow’s recovery that I made the astonishing discovery that he remembered no detail of his imprisoning of me.
I am convinced now that for days and weeks he must have lived in a sort of dream in a hyper state, in which I can only imagine that he had possibly been sensitive to more subtle understandings than normal bodily and mental health allows.
One other thing there is in closing. I found that the Captain and the two Mates had been confined to their cabins by Barlow. The Captain was suffering from a pistol-shot in the arm, due to his having attempted to resist Barlow’s assumption of authority. When I released him he vowed vengeance. Yet Ned Barlow being my chum, I found means to slake both the Captain’s and the two Mates’ thirst for vengeance, and the slaking, thereof is—well, another story.
The Call In the Dawn
To those who have cast doubt upon the reality of the great Sargasso Sea, asserting that the romantic features of this remarkable sea of weed have been greatly exaggerated, I would point out that this mass of weed lurking in the central parts of the Atlantic Ocean is a fluctuating quantity, not confined strictly to an area, but moving bodily for many hundred of miles according to storms and prevailing winds, though always within certain limits.
Thus it may be that those who have gone in search of it, and not having found it where they expected, have therefore foolishly considered it to be little more than a myth built around those odd patches and small conglomerations of the weed which they may have chanced across. And all the time somewhere to the North or South, East or West, the great shifting bulk of the weed has lain quiet and lonesome and impassable—a cemetery of lost ships and wrack and forgotten things. And so my story will prove to all who read.
I was, at the time of this happening, a passenger in a large barque of eight hundred and ninety tons, bound down to the Barbadoes. We had very fine, light weather for the first twenty days out with the wind variable, giving the men a great deal of work with the yards.
On the twenty-first day, however, we ran into strong weather, and at night-fall Captain Johnson shortened sail right down to the main topsail, and hove the vessel to.
I questioned him concerning his reason for doing this as the wind was not extraordinarily heavy. He took me down into the saloon, and there by the aid of diagrams, showed me that we were within the Eastern fringe of a great cyclone which was coming up Northward from the vicinity of the Line, but trending constantly Westward in its progress. By heaving the vessel to as he had done, he allowed the cyclone to continue its Westward journey, leaving us free. If, however, he had continued to run the ship on, then he would have ended by running us right into the heart of the storm, where we might have been very easily dismasted or even sunk; for the fury of these storms is prodigious if one comes truly within their scope.
The Captain gave me his opinion and reasons for supposing that this storm, of which we felt no more than the fringe, as it were, was a cyclone of quite unusual violence and extent. He assured me also that when daylight came on the morrow there would most probably be a certain proof of this, in the great masses of floating weed and wrack that we should be likely to encounter when once more he put the vessel on her course to the Southward. These weed masses, he informed me, were torn from the great Eddy of the Atlantic Ocean, where enormous quantities of it were gathered, extending—broken and unbroken—for many hundreds of miles. A place to be avoided by all reasonable navigators.
Now, it all turned out as the Captain had foretold. The storm eased hourly through the night as the cyclone drew off into the Westward sea; so that ere the dawn had come, we lay upon water somewhat broken by the swell of the departed storm, yet almost lacking even a light breath of wind.
At midnight I went below for sleep; but was again on deck in a few hours, being restless. I found Captain Johnson there walking with the Mate, and after greeting him I went over to the lee rail to watch the coming of the dawn which even then made some lightness in the Eastward sky. It came with no more than moderate quickness, for we had not yet come into the tropics, and I watched very earnestly because the dawn-light has always held for me a strange attraction.
There grew first in the East a pale shimmering o
f light, very solemn, coming so quietly into the sky it might have been a ghostlight spying secretly upon the sleeping world. And then, even as I took account of this thing, there went a spreading of gentle rose hues to the Northward, and upon this a dull orange light in the mid-sky. Presently there was a great loom of greenness, most wondrous, in the upper sky, and from this green and aerial splendour of utter quietness there dropped curtains of lemon that enticed the sight to peer through their mystery into the lost distance, so that my thoughts were all very far from this world.
And the lights grew and strengthened as if they had a great pulse, and the wonder of the dawn-lights beat steadily upon the eye, in an ever-continuing brightness, until all the Eastward sky was full of a pale and translucent lemon, flaked athwart with clouds of transparent greyness and gentle silver. And in the end there came a little light upon the sea, very solemn and dreary, making all that vast ocean but a greater mystery.
And surely, as I looked outward upon the sea, there was something that broke the faint looming of light upon the waters, but what it was I could not at first see. Out of the mists of the lost horizon there climbed, presently, a little golden glory, so that I knew the sun had near come out of the dark. And the golden light made a halo in that part of the far world, sending a ray across the mystery of the dark waters. Then I saw somewhat more plainly the thing that had lain upon the sea, between me and the far lights of the dawn. It was a great, low-seeming island in the midst of the loneliness of the ocean. Yet, as I knew well from the charts, there was no proper island in these parts; and I conceived therefore that this thing must be an island of the weed, of which the Captain had spoken the previous day.
“Captain Johnson,” I called to him, softly, because there seemed so great a quietness beyond the ship, “Captain Johnson. Bring the glasses.” And presently we were spying across the vanishing dark at this floating land of the storm.
Now as we looked earnestly across all that quiet greyness of the sea at the dim seen island, I became doubly filled with the mystery and utter hush of the dawn-time, and of the lights and of the lesson of the morning which is told silently at each dawn over the world. I seemed to hear newly and with great plainness each sound and vague noise that was about me; so that the gentle creaking of the masts and gear was as a harsh calling across that quiet, while the sea made hollow and dank sounds against the wet sides of the ship, and the noise of one walking on the fo’cas’le was a thing that made all the vessel seem to resound emptily.
Boats of the Glen Carrig and Other Nautical Adventures Page 27