CHAPTER IX.
I LOSE MY BOAT.
I lingered, I daresay, above twenty minutes contemplating this singularcrystal fossil of a ship, and considering whether I should go down toher and ransack her for whatever might answer my turn. But she looked sodarkly secret under her white garb, and there was something so terriblein the aspect of the motionless snow-clad sentinel who leaned upon therail, that my heart failed me, and I very easily persuaded myself tobelieve that, first, it would take me longer to penetrate and search herthan it was proper I should be away from the boat; that, second, it wasscarce to be supposed her crew had left any provisions in her, or that,if stores there were, they would be fit to eat; and that, finally, myboat was so small it would be rash to put into her any the most triflingmatter that was not essential to the preservation of my life.
So, concluding to have nothing to do with the ghostly sparkling fabric,I started for the body under the rock, and with some pain andstaggering, the ice being very jagged, lumpish, and deceitful to thetread, arrived at it.
Nothing but the desire to possess the fine warm cloak could have temptedme to handle or even to cast my eye upon the dead man again. I foundmyself more scared by him now than at first. His attitude was solifelike that, though I knew him to be a corpse, had he risen on asudden the surprise of it could hardly have shocked me more than theastonishment his posture raised. As a skeleton he could not have sochilled and awed me; but so well preserved was his flesh by the cold,that it was hard to persuade myself he was not breathing, and that,though he feigned to be gazing downwards, he was not secretly observingme.
His beard was frozen as hard as a bush, and it crackled unpleasantly tothe movement of my hands, which I was obliged to force under it tounhook the silver chain that confined the cloak about his neck. I feltlike a thief, and stole a glance over either shoulder as though,forsooth, some strangely clad companion of his should be creeping uponme unawares. Then, thought I, since I have the cloak I may as well takethe watch, flask, and tobacco-box, as I had before resolved; and so Idipped my hand into his pockets, and without another glance at hisfierce still face made for the boat.
I now noticed for the first time, so overwhelmingly had my discoveriesoccupied my attention, that the wind had freshened and was blowingbriskly and piercingly. When I had first started upon the ascent of theslope, the wind had merely wrinkled the swell as the large bodies ran;but those wrinkles had become little seas, which flashed into foam aftera short race, and the whole surface of the ocean was a brilliant bluetremble. I came to a halt to view the north-east sky before the brow ofthe rocks hid it, and saw that clouds were congregating there, and someof them blowing up to where the sun hung, these resembling in shape andcolour the compact puff of the first discharge of a cannon before thesmoke spreads on the air. What should I do? I sank into a miserableperplexity. If it was going to blow what good could attend my departurefrom this island? It was an adverse wind, and when it freshened I couldnot choose but run before it, and that would drive me clean away fromthe direction I required to steer in. Yet if I was to wait upon theweather, for how long should I be kept a prisoner in this horrid place?True, a southerly wind might spring up to-morrow, but it might beotherwise, or come in a hard gale; and if I faltered now I might go onhesitating, and then my provisions would give out, and God alone knowshow it would end with me. Besides, the presence of the two bodies madethe island fearful to my imagination, and nature clamoured in me to begone, a summons my judgment could not resist, for reason often misleads,but instincts never.
I fell again to my downward march and looked towards my boat--that is tosay, I looked towards the part of the ice where the little haven inwhich she lay had been, and I found both boat and haven gone!
I rubbed my eyes and stared again. Tush, thought I, I am deceived by theice. I glanced at the slope behind to keep me to my bearings, and oncemore sought the haven; but the rock that had formed it was gone, theblue swell rolled brimming past the line of shore there, and my eyefollowing the swing of a fold, I saw the boat about three cables lengthdistant out upon the water, swinging steadily away into the south, andshowing and disappearing with the heave.
The dead man's cloak fell from my arm; I uttered a cry of anguish; Iclasped my hands and lifted them to God, and looked up to Him. I was forkicking off my boots and plunging into the water, but, mad as I was, Iwas not so mad as that; and mad I should have been to attempt it, for Icould not swim twenty strokes, and had I been the stoutest swimmer thatever breasted the salt spray, the cold must speedily put an end to mymisery.
What was to be done? Nothing! I could only look idly at the recedingboat with reeling brain. The full blast of the wind was upon her, andhelping the driving action of the billows. I perceived that she wasirrecoverable, and yet I stood watching, watching, watching! my headburning with the surgings of twenty impracticable schemes. I cast myselfdown and wept, stood up afresh and looked at the boat, then cried to Godfor help and mercy, bringing my hands to my throbbing temples, and inthat posture straining my eyes at the fast vanishing structure. She wasthe only hope I had--my sole chance. My little stock of provisions wasin her--oh, what was I to do?
Though I was at some distance from the place where what I have called myhaven had been, there was no need for me to approach it to understandhow my misfortune had come about. It was likely enough that the verycrevice in which I had jammed the mast to secure the boat by was a deepcrack that the increased swell had wholly split, so that the mast hadtumbled when the rock floated away and liberated the boat.
The horror that this white and frightful scene of desolation had at thebeginning filled me with was renewed with such violence when I saw thatmy boat was lost, and I was to be a prisoner on the death-haunted waste,that I fell down in a sort of swoon, like one partly stunned, and hadany person come along and seen me he would have thought me as dead asthe body on the hill or the corpse that kept its dismal look-out fromthe deck of the schooner.
My senses presently returning, I got up, and the rock upon which I stoodbeing level, I fell to pacing it with my hands locked behind me, my headsunk, lost in thought. The wind was steadily freshening; it split with ahowling noise upon the ice-crags and unequal surfaces, and spun with ahollow note past my ear; and the thunder of the breakers on the otherside of the island was deepening its tone. The sea was lifting andwhitening; something of mistiness had grown up over the horizon thatmade a blue dulness of the junction of the elements there; but though afew clouds out of the collection of vapour in the north-east had floatedto the zenith and were sailing down the south-west heaven, the azureremained pure and the sun very frostily white and sparkling.
I am writing a strange story with the utmost candour, and trust that thereader will not judge me severely for my confession of weakness, orconsider me as wanting in the stuff out of which the hardy seaman ismade for owning to having shed tears and been stunned by the loss of mylittle boat and slender stock of food. You will say, "It is not in thepower of the dead to hurt a man; what more pitiful and harmless than apoor unburied corpse?" I answer, "True," and declare that of the twobodies, as dead men, I was not afraid; but this mass of frozen solitudewas about them, and they took a frightful character from it; theycommunicated an element of death to the desolation of the snow-cladisland; their presence made a principality of it for the souls of deadsailors, and into their lifelike stillness it put its own supernaturalspirit of loneliness; so that to my imagination, disordered by sufferingand exposure, this melancholy region appeared a scene without parallelon the face of the globe, a place of doom and madness, as dreadful andwild as the highest mood of the poet could reach up to.
By this time the boat was out of sight. I looked and looked, but she wasgone. Then came my good angel to my help and put some courage into me."After all," thought I, "what do I dread? Death! it can but come tothat. It is not long ago that Captain Rosy cried to me, "_A man can diebut once. He'll not perish the quicker for contemplating his end with astout heart._" He that so spoke is dead. The
worst is over for him. Werehe a babe resting upon his mother's breast he could not sleep moresoundly, be more tenderly lulled, nor be freer from such anguish as nowafflicts me who cling to life, as if this--this," I cried, lookingaround me, "were a paradise of warmth and beauty. I must be a man, askGod for courage to meet whatever may betide, and stoutly endure whatcannot be evaded."
Do not smile at the simple thoughts of a poor castaway sailor. I holdthem still to be good reasoning, and had my flesh been as strong as myspirit they had availed, I don't doubt. But I was chilled to the marrow;the mere knowing that there was nothing to eat sharpened my appetite,and I felt as if I had not tasted food for a week; and here then werephysical conditions which broke ruinously into philosophy and staggeredreligious trust.
My mind went to the schooner, yet I felt an extraordinary recoil withinme when I thought of seeking an asylum in her. I had the figure of herbefore my fancy, viewed the form of the man on her deck, and the idea ofpenetrating her dark interior and seeking shelter in a fabric that timeand frost and death had wrought into a black mystery was dreadful to me.Nor was this all. It seemed like the very last expression of despair toboard that stirless frame; to make a dwelling-place, without prospect ofdeliverance, in that hollow of ice; to become in one sense as dead asher lonely mariner, yet preserve all the sensibility of the living to acondition he was as unconscious of as the ice that enclosed him.
It must be done nevertheless, thought I; I shall certainly perish fromexposure if I linger here; besides, how do I know but that I maydiscover in that ship some means of escaping from the island? Assuredlythere was plenty of material in her for the building of a boat, if Icould meet with tools. Or possibly I might find a boat under hatches,for it was common for vessels of her class and in her time to stow theirpinnaces in the hold, and, when the necessity for using them arose, tohoist them out and tow them astern.
These reflections somewhat heartened me, and also let me add that thesteady mounting of the wind into a small gale served to reconcile me,not indeed to the loss of my boat, but to my detention; for though theremight be a miserable languishing end for me here, I could not butbelieve that there was certain death, too, out there in that high swelland in those sharpening peaks of water off whose foaming heads the windwas blowing the spray. By which I mean the boat could not have plyed insuch a wind; she must have run, and by running have carried me into thestormier regions of the south, where, even if she had lived, I mustspeedily have starved for victuals and perished of cold.
Hope lives like a spark amid the very blackest embers of despondency.Twenty minutes before I had awakened from a sort of swoon and wasoverwhelmed with misery; and now here was I taking a collected view ofmy situation, even to the extent of being willing to believe that on thewhole it was perhaps as well that I should have been hindered fromputting to sea in my little eggshell. So at every step we rebel at theshadowy conducting of the hand of God; yet from every stage we arrive atwe look back and know the road we have travelled to be the right onethough we start afresh mutinously. Lord, what patience hast Thou!
I turned my back upon the clamorous ocean and started to ascend theslope once more. When I reached the brow of the cliffs I observed thatthe clouds had lost their fleeciness and taken a slatish tinge, weremoving fast and crowding up the sky, insomuch that the sun was leapingfrom one edge to another and darting a keen and frosty light upon thescene. The wind was bitterly cold, and screamed shrilly in my ears whenI met the full tide of it. The change was sudden, but it did notsurprise me. I knew these seas, and that our English April is not morecapricious than the weather in them, only that here the sunny smile,though sparkling, is frostier than the kiss of death, and brief as theflight of a musket-ball, whilst the frowns are black, savage, andlasting.
I bore the dead man's cloak on my arm and helped myself along with theoar, and presently arrived at the brink of the slope in whose hollow laythe ship as in a cup. The wind made a noisy howling in her rigging, butthe tackling was frozen so iron hard that not a rope stirred, and thevane at the masthead was as motionless as any of the adjacent steeplesor pillars of ice. My heart was dismayed again by the figure of the man.He was more dreadful than the other because of the size to which thefrozen snow upon his head, trunk, and limbs had swelled him; and thehalf-rise of his face was particularly startling, as if he were in thevery act of running his gaze softly upwards. That he should have died inthat easy leaning posture was strange; however, I supposed, and no doubtrightly, that he had been seized with a sudden faintness, and had leanedupon the rail and so expired. The cold would quickly make him rigid andlikewise preserve him, and thus he might have been leaning,contemplating the ice of the cliffs, for years and years!
A wild and dreadful thing for one in my condition to light on and beforced to think of.
My heart, as I have said, sank in me again at the sight of him, andfear and awe and superstition so worked upon my spirits that I stoodirresolute, and would have gone back had there been any place to returnto. I plucked up after a little, and, rolling up the cloak into acompact bundle, flung it with all my strength to the vessel, and it fellcleverly just within the rail. Then gripping the oar I started on thedescent.
The depth was not great nor the declivity sharp; but the surface wasformed of blocks of ice, like the collections of big stones yousometimes encounter on the sides of mountains near the base; and I hadagain and again to fetch a compass so as to gain a smaller block downwhich to drop, till I was close to the vessel, and here the snow hadpiled and frozen into a smooth face.
The ship lay with a list or inclination to larboard. I had come down toher on her starboard side. She had small channels with long plates, buther list, on my side, hove them somewhat high, beyond my reach, and Iperceived that to get aboard I must seek an entrance on the larboardhand. This was not hard to arrive at; indeed, I had but to walk roundher, under her bows. She was so coated with hard snow I could seenothing of her timbers, and was therefore unable to guess at thecondition of the hull. She had a most absurd swelling bilge, and herbuttocks, viewed on a line with her rudder, doubtless presented theexact appearance of an apple. She was sunk in snow to some planks abovethe garboard-streak, but her lines forward were fine, making her almostwedge-shaped, though the flair of her bows was great, so that sheswelled up like a balloon to the catheads. She had something of the lookof the barca-longas of half a century ago--that is, half a century agofrom the date of my adventure; but that which, in sober truth, a manwould have taken her to be was a vessel formed of snow, sparred andrigged with glass-like frosted ice, the artistic caprice of the geniusor spirit of this white and melancholy scene, who, to complete themocking illusion, had fashioned the figure of a man to stand on deckwith a human face toughened into an idle eternal contemplation.
On the larboard hand the ice pressed close against the vessel's side,some pieces rising to the height of her wash-streak. The face of thehollow was precipitous here, full of cracks and flaws and sharpprojections. Indeed, had the breadth of the island been as it was at theextremity I might have counted upon the first violent commotion of thesea snapping this part of the ice, and converting the northern part ofthe body into a separate berg.
I climbed without difficulty into the fore-chains, the snow being sohard that my feet and hands made not the least impression on it, andsomewhat warily--feeling the government of a peculiar awe, mounting intoa sort of terror indeed--stood awhile peering over the rail of thebulwarks; then entered the ship. I ran my eyes swiftly here and there,for indeed I did not know what might steal or leap into view. Let it beremembered that I was a sailor, with the superstitious feelings of mycalling in me, and though I do not know that I actually believed inghosts and apparitions and spectrums, yet I felt as if I did;particularly upon the deck of this silent ship, rendered spirit-like bythe grave of ice in which she lay and by the long years (as I could notdoubt) during which she had thus rested. Hence, when I slipped off thebulwark on to the deck and viewed the ghastly, white, lonely scene, Ifelt for the moment as i
f this strange discovery of mine was not to beexhausted of its wonders and terrors by the mere existence of theship--in other words, that I must expect something of the supernaturalto enter into this icy sepulchre, and be prepared for sights moremarvellous and terrifying than frozen corpses.
So I stood looking forward and aft, very swiftly, and in a way I daresay that a spectator would have thought laughable enough; nor was myimagination soothed by the clear, harping, ringing sounds of the windseething through the frozen rigging where the masts rose above theshelter of the sides of the hollow.
Presently, getting the better of my perturbation, I walked aft, and,stepping on to the poop-deck, fell to an examination of the companion orcovering of the after-hatch, which, as I have elsewhere said, wascovered with snow.