CHAPTER XL

_A Burning Trireme_

[Sidenote: The Solitary Voyager]

Never was man more indifferent to the result than the solitary voyager of the burning trireme. What had life for me? I gazed round me. The element of fire reigned supreme. The shore—mountain, vale, and sand—was bright as day from the blaze of the tents and the floating fragments of the galleys. The heavens were an arch of angry splendor—every stooping cloud swept along reddened with the various dyes of the conflagration below. The sea was a rolling abyss of the fiercest color of slaughter. The blazing vessels, loosened from the shore, rushed madly before the storm, sheet and shroud shaking loose abroad like vast wings of flame.

At length all disappeared. The shore faded far into a dim line of light; the galleys sank or were consumed; the sea grew dark again. But the trireme, strongly built and of immense size, still fed the flame, and still shot on through the tempest, that fell on her the more furiously as she lost the cover of the land. The waves rose to a height that often baffled the wind, and left me floating in a strange calm between two black walls of water reaching to the clouds, and on whose smooth sides the image of the burning vessel was reflected as strongly as in a mirror. But the ascent to the summit of those fearful barriers again let in the storm in its rage. The tops of the billows were whirled off in sheets of foam; the wind tore mast and sail away, and the vessel was dashed forward like a stone discharged from an engine. I stood on the poop, which the spray and the wind kept clear of flame, and contemplated, with some feeling of the fierce grandeur of the spectacle, the fire rolling over the forward part of the vessel in a thousand shapes and folds.

While I was thus careering along, like the genius of fire upon his throne, I caught a glimpse of sails scattering in every direction before me—I had rushed into the middle of one of those small trading-fleets that coasted annually between the Euxine and the Nile. They flew, as if pursued by a fiend. But the same wind that bore them, bore me; and their screams, as the trireme bounded from billow to billow on their track, were audible even through the roarings of the storm. They gradually succeeded in spreading themselves so far that the contact with the flame must be partial. But on one, the largest and most crowded, the trireme bore inevitably down. The hunted ship tried every mode of escape in vain; it maneuvered with extraordinary skill; but the pursuer, lightened of every burden, rushed on like a messenger of vengeance.

[Sidenote: The Sound of a Voice]

I could distinctly see the confusion and misery of the crowd that covered the deck; men and women kneeling, weeping, fainting, or, in the fierce riot of despair, struggling for some wretched spoil that a few moments more must tear from all alike. But among the fearful mingling of sounds, one voice I suddenly heard that struck to my soul. It alone roused me from my stern scorn of human suffering. I no longer looked upon those beings as upon insects, that must be crushed in the revolution of the great wheel of fate. The heart, the living human heart, palpitated within me. I rushed to the side of the trireme, and with voice and hand made signals to the crew to take me on board. But at my call a cry of agony rang through the vessel. All fled to its farther part, but a few, who, unable to move, were seen on their knees, and in the attitudes of preternatural fear, imploring every power of heaven. Shocked by the consciousness that, even in the hour when mutual hazard softens the heart of man, I was an object of horror, I shrank back. I heard the voice once more, and once more resolving to get on board, flung a burning fragment over the side to help me through the waves.

But the time was past. The fragment had scarcely touched the foam when a sheet of lightning wrapped sea and sky; the flying vessel was gone. My eye looked but upon the wilderness of waters. The flash was fatal. It had struck the hold of my trireme, in which was stowed a large freightage of the bitumen and niter of the desert. A column of flame, white as silver, rose straight and steadily up to the clouds; and the huge ship, disparting timber by timber, reeled, heaved, and plunged headlong into the bosom of the ocean.

[Sidenote: In a Whirlpool]

I rose to the surface from a prodigious depth. I was nearly breathless. My limbs were wasted with famine and fatigue; but the tossing of the surges sustained and swept me on. The chill at last benumbed me, and my limbs were heavy as iron, when a broken mast rolling by entangled me in its cordage. It drove toward a point of land, round which the current swept. Strongly netted in the wreck, I was dragged along, sometimes above the billow, sometimes below. But a violent shock released me, and with a new terror I felt myself go down. I was engulfed in the whirlpool!

Every sensation was horribly vivid. I had the full consciousness of life and of the unfathomable depth into which I was descending. I heard the roar and rushing of the waters round me; the holding of my breath was torture; I strained, struggled, tossed out my arms, and grasped madly around, as if to catch something that might retard my hideous descent. My eyes were open. I never was less stunned by shock or fear. The solid darkness, the suffocation, the furious whirl of the eddy that spun me round its huge circle like an atom of sand—every sense of drowning—passed through my shattered frame with an individual and successive pang. I at last touched something, whether living or dead, fish or stone, I know not; but the impulse changed my direction, and I was darted up to the surface in a little bay sheltered by hills.

The storm had gone with the rapidity of the south. The sun burned bright and broad above my head; the pleasant breath of groves and flowery perfumes came on the waters; a distant sound of sweet voices lingered on the air. Like one roused from a frightful dream, I could scarcely believe that this was reality. But the rolling waters behind gave me sudden evidence. A billow, the last messenger of the storm, burst into the little bay, filled it to the brim with foam, and tossed me far forward. It rolled back, dragging with it the sedge and pebbles of the beach. I grasped the trunk of an olive, rough and firm as the rock itself. The retiring waves left me; I felt my way some paces among the trees, cast myself down, and, worn out with fatigue, had scarcely reached their shade when I fainted.

[Sidenote: A Quiet Spot]

I awoke in the decline of the day, as I could perceive by the yellow and orange hues that colored the thick branches above me. I was lying in a delicious recess, crowded with fruit-trees; my bed was the turf, but it was soft as down; a solitary nightingale above my head was sending forth snatches of that melody which night prolongs into the very voice of sweetness and sorrow; and a balmy air from the wild thyme and blossoms of the rose breathed soothingly even to the mind.

I had been thrown on one of the little isles that lie off Anthædon, a portion of the Philistine territory before it was won by our hero the Maccabee. The commerce which once filled the arm of the sea near Gaza had perished in the change of masters, and silence and seclusion reigned in a spot formerly echoing with the tumult of merchant and mariner. The little isle, the favorite retreat of the opulent Greek and Syrian traders in the overpowering heats of summer, and cultivated with the lavish expenditure of commercial wealth, now gave no proof of its ever having felt the foot of man, but in the spontaneous exuberance of flowers, once brought from every region of the East and West, and the exquisite fruits that still glowed on its slopes and dells.

[Sidenote: A Refuge]

In all things else Nature had resumed her rights; the gilded pavilions, the temples of Parian and Numidian stone, were in ruins, and buried under a carpet of roses and myrtles. The statues left but here and there a remnant of themselves, a lovely relic, wreathed over in fantastic spirals by the clematis and other climbing plants. The sculptured fountain let its waters loose over the ground, and the guardian genius that hung in marble beauty over the spring had long since resigned his charge and lay mutilated and discolored with the air and the dew. But the spring still gushed, bounding bright between the gray fissures of the cliff, and marking its course through the plain by the richer mazes of green.

To me, who was as weary of existence as ever was galley-slave, this spot of quiet loveliness had a tenfold power. My mind, like my body, longed for rest.

Through life I had walked in a thorny path; my ambition had winged a tempestuous atmosphere. Useless hazards, wild projects, bitter sufferings, were my portion. Those feelings in which alone I could be said to live had all been made inlets of pain. The love which nature and justice won from me to my family was perpetually thwarted by a chain of circumstances that made me a wretched, helpless, and solitary man. What then could I do better than abandon the idle hope of finding happiness among mankind; break off the trial, which must be prolonged only to my evil; and elude the fate that destined me to be an exile in the world? Yes, I would no longer be a man of suffering, in the presence of its happiness; a wretch stripped of an actual purpose, or a solid hope, in the midst of its activity and triumph; the abhorred example of a career miserable with defeated pursuit, and tantalized with expectations vain as the ripple on the stream!

In this stern resolve, gathering courage from despair—as the criminal on the scaffold scoffs at the world that rejects him—I determined to exclude recollection. The spot round me was henceforth to fill up the whole measure of my thoughts. Wife, children, friends, country, to me must exist no more. I imaged them in the tomb; I talked with them as shadows, as the graceful and lovely existences of ages past,—as hallowed memorials; but labored to divest them of the individual features that cling to the soul.

[Sidenote: On the Shores of the Mediterranean]

Lest this mystic repose should be disturbed by any of the sights of living man, I withdrew deeper into the shades which first sheltered me. It was enough for me that there was a canopy of leaves above to shield my limbs from the casual visitations of a sky whose sapphire looked scarcely capable of a stain, and that the turf was soft for my couch. Fruits sufficient to tempt the most luxurious taste were falling round me, and the waters of the bright rivulet, scooped in the rind of citron and orange, were a draft that the epicure might envy. I was still utterly ignorant on what shore of the Mediterranean I was thrown, further than that the sun rose behind my bower and threw his western luster on the waveless expanse of sea that spread before it to the round horizon.