Part 8

The contours of this predatory fish express extraordinary speed and power, and its armed mouth has been upturned by Providence the better to catch the flying fish as they drop back to sea after an effort to escape from it. But Providence, or evolution, had never taught the coryphene that there are times when the little flying fish, as it falls back exhausted, may be a rag of white shirt and a scrap of bright tin ware with a large hook in its deceptive little belly. So there the dolphin was, glowing and fading with the hues of faery. Its life really illuminating it from within. As its life ebbed, or strove convulsively, its colours waned and pulsed. It was gold when it came on board, and darkened to ultramarine as it thrashed the deck, and its broad dorsal fin showed violet eyes. Its body changed to a pale metallic green; and then its light went out.

Now as I look back upon the "Capella" and her company as they were in that period of our adventure when our place was but somewhere in mid-ocean between Senegambia and Trinidad, I see us but indifferently, for we are mellowed in that haze in which retrospection just discerns those affairs, long since accomplished, that were not altogether wearisome. It is better to go to my log again, for there the matter was noted by the stub of a pencil at the very time, and when, unless a beautiful mist was seen, it had not the remotest chance of being recorded. When I turn to the diary for further evidence of those days of blue and gold in the north-east trades its faithfulness is seen at once.

"_30 Decr._ A grey day. The sun fitful. Wind and seas on the port quarter, and the large following billows occasionally lopping inboard as she rolled. The decks therefore are sloppy again. We had a sharp reminder at six bells that we are not bound to any health resort, as Sandy put it. We were told to go aft, where the doctor would give each of us five grains of quinine. This is to be a daily rite. To encourage the men to take the quinine it is to be given to them in gin. Being foreigners, they did not understand the advice about the quinine, but they caught the word gin quite well, and they were outside the saloon alleyway, a smiling queue, at the stroke of eleven. I went along to see the harsh truth dawn on them. The first man was a big German deckhand. He took the glass from the doctor. His shy and puzzled smile at this unexpected charity from the skipper dissolved instantly when the quinine got behind it. His eyes opened and stared at nothing. To the surprise of his fellows he turned violently to the ship's side, rested his hands on it, and spat; spat carefully, continuously and with grave deliberation.

"Distance run since noon yesterday 230 miles. Actual knots 9,5. Total distance 2072 miles. There was not a living thing in sight to-day; not even a flying fish.

"The night is fine and starlit, the Milky Way a brilliant arch from east to west, under which we are steaming. When Venus rose she was a tiny moon, so refulgent that she gave a faint pallor to a large area of sky, outlined the coast of a cloud, and made a broad shining path on the sea. The moon rose after nine, veiled in filmy air, peeping motionless at the edge of a black curtain.

"The moon later was quite obscured, and the steamer ceased to exist except where in my heated cabin the smoky oil lamp showed me my dismal cubicle. I went in and sat on the mate's sea chest. The mate was on duty. On the washstand was his mug of cocoa, and on top of the mug two thick sandwiches of bread and meat. That food was black with cockroaches. The oil lamp stank but gave little light. The engines were throbbing, and out of the open door I saw the gleam of the wash, and heard its harassing note. I could not read. I loathed the idea of getting into the hot bunk and lying there, stewing, a clear keen, clangour of thoughts making sleep impossible. The mate appeared, drove off the cockroaches cheerfully, examined the sandwiches for inconspicuous deer, opening each to make sure, and then muffled himself with one. My God! I could have killed him with these two hands. What right had he to be cheerful? But he is such a ginger-headed boy, and to break that unconsciously happy smile of his would be sacrilege. Besides, he began to tell me about his sweetheart. Her portrait hangs in our cabin. It is an enlargement. You pay for the frame, and the photographer, overjoyed I suppose, gives you the enlargement. I prefer the second engineer's sweet-hearts, who are in colours, and are Dutch picture postcards and cuttings from French comic papers; and he calls them his recollections of Sundays at home. I listened, patient and kind, to the second mate's reminiscences of rapturous evening walks under the lamps of Swansea with this girl in the picture--no doubt it eased his heart to tell me--till I could have howled aloud, like the dog who hears music at night. Then I broke away, and ran to the chief's cabin for sanctuary.

"The Chief was making an abstract, and was searching through his log for ten tons of coal which were missing. In the hunt for the lost coal I lost myself. I grew excited wherever a thick bush of figures promised the hidden quarry; and in an hour's search found the strayed tons in hiding at the bottom of a column. They had been left there, and not transported into the next. Again the dread of that bunk had to be faced and dealt with. I stood at the chief's door, knocking out my pipe, looking astern into the night, looking to where Ursa-Major, our celestial familiar of home, was low down and preparing to leave us altogether to the strange and perhaps unlucky gods of other skies. O the nights at sea!

"_31 Decr._ Wakened with my heart jumping because of a devastating sound without. In the early morning, Tinker was being thrashed by the Old Man for eating the saloon mats. When at 11.30 the men congregated amidships with their tins for dinner the sun was a near furnace and the breeze a balm. The white of the ship is now a glare, and the sea foam cannot be looked at. Donkey lumbered out of his place where he attends to the minor boiler, his face the colour of putty, and held to a rail, gazing out with dead eyes overside, gasping. He declared he couldn't stick his job. The flying fish are getting up in flights all day long. I saw one fish go a distance of about fifty yards in a semi-circle, making a bight in the direction of the wind. We caught another large coryphene to-day, and had him in steaks for tea. He was much better cooked than the last, which had the texture of white wool; and to increase our happiness the cook had not given us sour bread. At midday we were 17.22 N. and 33.27 W.

"I had a lonely evening with the chief. This is New Year's eve. We talked of the East India Dock Road, and of much else in London Town. At eight bells, when we held up our glasses in the direction of Polaris, the moon was bright and the waters hushed. Then we took each a hurricane lamp, and went about the decks collecting flying fish for breakfast, finding a dozen of them.

"_1 Jan._ The uplifted splendour of these days persists; but the splendour sags now a little at midday with the weight of the heat. The poop deck is now sheltered with an awning; and lying there in lazy chairs, with a wind following and barely overtaking us, idly watching the shadows of the overhead gear move on the bright awning as the ship rolls, is to get caught in the toils of the droning wake, and to sleep before you know you are a prisoner. The wake itself, in these seas, when the sun is on it, a broad road going home straight and white over the hills, the road which is not for us, is one of the good things of the voyage. Straight beneath the rail the wake is an upheaval of gems, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, always instantly melting in the sun, always fusing and fleeting in swift coils of malachite and chrysoprase, but never gone. As you watch that coloured turmoil it draws your mind from your body. You feel your careless gaze snatched in the revolving hues speeding astern, and your consciousness is instantly unwound from your spinning brain, and you are left standing on the ship, an empty spool.

"Under the awning at night, to the Doctor and to me, the first mate played his accordion. He is a little Welshman, this mate, with a childish nose and a brutish moustache, and in his face is blended a girlish innocence of large affairs, and the hirsute nature of the adult male animal, a nature he relieves on the "Capella" with bawdy talk and guffaws. He played 'Come, Birdie, Come,' and things like that, and then told us some Monte Videan stories. As they were true stories about himself and other young sailors they ought really to be included in a faithful diary of a sea voyage, yet as I cannot reproduce the Doctor's antiseptic judgment, of which I know nothing but the glow of his pipe in the unresponding dark at the end of the stories--the last titter of the mate had died away--it is better to leave this matter alone.

"_3 Jan._ The hottest day we have had. I descended at midday to the engines to see Sandy at work with his shining giants. Standing on the middle platform, while he was shouting his greetings to me over the uproar, I felt the heat of the grating through my boot soles, and shifted. The temperature there was 122 deg.. Sandy was but in his drawers and a pair of old boots, and the tongues of the boots, properly, were hanging out. His noble torso was glistening with moisture, and as I talked, energetically vaulting my words above the roar of the crank throws in that hot and oleaginous place, the perspiration began a sudden drop from my own face and hands, and in a copious way which startled me. For a time I had some difficulty in breathing, as though in a vacuum, but gradually forgot this danger of suffocation in the love of the artist Sandy showed while offering me the spectacle of 'his job.' I think I understood him. At first one would see no order in that haze of rioting steel. The massive metal waves of the shaft were walloping and plunging in their pits with an astonishing bird-like alacrity; about fifteen tons of polished steel were moving with swift and somewhat awful desperation. The big room shook and hummed with the vigour of it. But order came as Sandy talked, and presently I found the continuous thunder, that deadening bass of the crank throws, seemed to lessen as we conversed, sitting together on a tool chest. Our voices easily penetrated it. And listening more attentively at length I found what Sandy said was true, that each tossing and circling part of the room-full could be heard contributing its strident or profound note to the chorus, and each became constant and expected, a singing personality which was heard through the others whenever listened for. Above all, at regular intervals, a rod rang clear, like the bell in Parsifal; yet, curiously enough, Sandy declared he could not catch that note, though it tolled clear and resonant enough in my ears. The skylight was so far above us that we got little daylight. Hanging from the gratings in a few places, some black iron pots, shaped like kettles, had cotton rags in their spouts, and were giving us oil flares instead. The terrific unremitting energy of the ponderous arms, moving thunderously, and still with a speed which made tons as aery as flashes of light; and Sandy in the midst of it, quick in nothing but his eyes, moving about his raging but tethered monsters cock-sure and casual, rubbing his hands on a pull of cotton waste, putting his ear down to listen attentively at a bearing, his face turned from a steel fist which flung violently at his head, missed him, and withdrew to shoot at him again, gave me the first distinct feeling that our enterprise had its purpose powerfully energised and cunningly directed. I felt as I watched the dance of the eccentrics and the connecting rods that our ship was getting along famously. I think I detected in Sandy himself a faint contempt for the chap at the upper end of the telegraph. I stayed two hours, and then my shirt was as though I had been overboard; and ascending a greasy and almost perpendicular series of ladders to the upper world, I discovered, from the drag of my feet and the weight of my body, that I had had just as much of an engineer's watch in the tropics as I could stand. There was a burst of cool light. The tumult ceased; and again there was the old "Capella" rocking in the singing seas, for ever under the tranquil clouds. We had stopped again.

"_4 Jan._ A moderate north-east wind and sea, and a bright morning; but far out a dark cloud formed, and drew, and driving towards us, covered us presently with a blue-black canopy. The warm torrent fell with outrageous violence, and for all we could see of our way the "Capella" might have been in a dense fog. The mosquito curtains were served out to-day, and we amused ourselves draping our bunks. Later, the weather cleared. The night was stiflingly hot; and in that reeking bunk, with an iron bulkhead separating me from the engine room, it was like lying on the shelf of an oven. Though wide open on its catch, the door admitted no air, but did allow a miserable tap-tapping as the ship rolled. At eleven o'clock a pale face floated in the black vacancy of the door, and I could see the Doctor peering in to find if I were awake. 'I say, Purser, I can't sleep. Will you come and have a gossip, old dear?' We went aft in our pyjamas, the Doctor cleared away bottles and things from his settee, and we disembarked from the 'Capella,' visiting other and distant stars, returning to our own again not before three next morning.

"_5 Jan._ We seem to have got to a dead end of the trade winds. The heat of the forenoon was oppressively humid and dinner was nearly lost through it. The cook, a fair and plump Dutchman, broke down in the midst of his pans, and was carried out to find his breath again. This poor chef is up at four o'clock every morning coffee making; is working in the galley, which is badly ventilated, all day, getting two hours' rest in the early afternoon. Then he goes on till the saloon tea is over; when he begins to bake bread. He fills in his leisure in peeling potatoes.

"All round the horizon motionless and permanent storm clouds are banked. Their forms do not alter, but their colours change with the hours. They seem to encompass us in a circular lake, a range of precipitous and intricately piled Alps, high and massive. Cleaving those steeps of calamitous rocks--for so they looked, and not in the least like vapour--are chasms full of night, and the upper slopes and summits are lucent in amber and pearl. In the south and east the ranges are indigo dark and threatening, and the water between us and that closed country is opaque and heavy as molten lead. Across the peaks of the mountains rest horizontal strata of mist. Some petrels were about to-day. The evening is cool, with a slight head breeze."

* * * * *

After weeks at sea, imprisoned within the walls of the sky, walls which have not opened once to admit another vessel to give the assurance of communion, you begin to doubt your direction and destination, and the possibility of change. Only the clouds change. The ship is no nearer breaking that rigid circle. She cannot escape from her place under the centre of the dome. The most cheering assurance I had was the pulse of the steamer, felt whenever I rested against her warm body. Purposeful life was there, at least. Though the day may have been brazen, and without a hint of progress, and the sea the same empty wilderness, yet when most disheartened in the blind and melancholy night I felt under me the beatings, energetic and insistent, of her lively heart, some of that vitality was communicated, and I got sleep as a child would in the arms of a strong and wakeful guardian.

Poised between two profundities--though nearer the clouds, cirrus and lofty though they are, than the land straight beneath the keel--and with morning and night the only variety in the round, the days flicker by white and black like a magic lantern working without a story. Tired of watching for the fruits of our enterprise I went to sleep. Old Captain Morgan must have lived a dull life, monotonous with adventure. What is the use of travel, I asked myself. The stars are as near to London as they are to the Spanish main. In their planetary journey through the void the passengers at Peckham see as much as their fellows who peer through the windows in Macassar. The sun rises in the east, and the moon is horned; but some of the passengers on the mudball, strangely enough, take their tea without milk. Yet what of that?

In the chart room some days ago I learned we had 3000 fathoms under us. Well; these waves of the tropics, curling over such abysmal deeps, look much the same as the waves off Land's End. I began to see what I had done. I had changed the murk of winter in London for the discomforts of the dog days. I had come thousands of miles to see the thermometer rise. Where are the Spanish Main, the Guianas, and the Brazils? At last I had discovered them. I found their true bearings. They are in Raleigh's "Golden City of Manoa," in Burney's "Buccaneers of America," with Drake, Humboldt, Bates, and Wallace; and I had left them all at home. We borrow the light of an observant and imaginative traveller, and see the foreign land bright with his aura; and we think it is the country which shines.

* * * * *

At eight this morning we crossed the equator. I paid my footing in whisky, and forgot all about the equator. Soon after that, idling under the poop awning, I picked up the Doctor's book from his vacant chair. I took the essays of Emerson carelessly and read at once--the sage plainly had laid a trap for me--"Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, a house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve as well as all trades and spectacles." So----. At this moment the first mate crossed my light, and presently I heard the sounding machine whirring, and then stop. There was a pause, and then the mate's unimportant voice, "Twenty-five fathoms, sir, grey sand!"

Emerson went sprawling. I stood up. Twenty-five fathoms! Then that grey sand stuck to the tallow of the weight was the first of the Brazils. The circle of waters was still complete about us, but over the bows, at a great distance, were thunder clouds and wild lights. The oceanic swell had decreased to a languid and glassy beat, and the water had become jade green in colour, shot with turquoise gleams. The Skipper, himself interested and almost jolly, announced a pound of tobacco to the first man who spied the coast. We were nearing it at last. Those far clouds canopied the forests of the Amazon. We stood in at slow speed.

I know those forests. I mean I have often navigated their obscure waterways, rafting through the wilds on a map, in my slippers, at night. Now those forests soon were to loom on a veritable skyline. I should see them where they stood, their roots in the unfrequented floods. I should see Santa Maria de Belem, its aerial foliage over its shipping and squalor. It was quite near now. I should see Santarem and Obydos, and Itacoatiara; and then, turning from the King of Rivers to his tributary, the Madeira, follow the Madeira to the San Antonio falls in the heart of the South American continent. We drew over 23 feet, with this "Capella." We were going to try what had never been attempted before by an ocean steamer. This, too, was pioneering. I also was on an adventure, going two thousand miles under those clouds of the equatorial rains, to live for a while in the forests of the Orellana. And our vessel's rigging, so they tell me, sometimes shall drag the foliage in showers on our decks, and where we anchor at night the creatures of the jungle will call.

Our nearness to land stirs up some old dreads in our minds also. We discuss those dreads again, though with more concern than we did at Swansea. Over the bows is now the prelude. We have heard many unsettling legends of yellow fever, malaria, blackwater fever, dysentery, and beri-beri. The mates, looking for land, swear they were fools to come a voyage like this. They ought to have known better. The Doctor, who does not always smile when he is amused, advises us not to buy a white sun umbrella at Para, but a black one; then it will do for the funerals.

"Land O!" That was the Skipper's own perfunctory cry. He had saved his pound of tobacco.

It was two in the afternoon. There was America. I rediscovered it with some difficulty. All I could see was a mere local thickening of the horizon, as though the pen which drew the faint line dividing the world ahead into an upper and a nether opalescence had run a little freely at one point. That thickening of the horizon was the island of Monjui. Soon, though, there was a palpable something athwart our course. The skyline heightened into a bluish barrier, which, as we approached still nearer, broke into sections. The chart showed that a series of low wooded islands skirted the mainland. Yet it was hard to believe we were approaching land again. What showed as land was of too unsubstantial a quality, too thin and broken a rind on that vast area of water to be of any use as a foothold. Where luminous sky was behind an island groups of diminutive palms showed, as tiny and distinct as the forms of mildew under a magnifying glass, delicate black pencillings along the foot of the sky-wall. Often that hairlike tracery seemed to rest upon the sea. The "Capella" continued to stand in, till America was more than a frail and tinted illusion which sometimes faded the more the eye sought it. Presently it cast reflections. The islands grew into cobalt layers, with vistas of silver water between them, giving them body. The course was changed to west, and we cruised along for Atalaia point, towards the pilot station. Over the thin and futile rind of land which topped the sea--it might have undulated on the low swell--ponderous thunder clouds towered, continents of night in the sky, with translucent areas dividing them which were strangely illuminated from the hither side. Curtains as black as bitumen draped to the waters from great heights. Two of these appalling curtains, trailing over America, were a little withdrawn. We could look beyond them to a diminishing array of glowing cloud summits, as if we saw there an accidental revelation of a secret and wonderful region with a sun of its own. And all, gigantic clouds, the sea, the far and frail coast, were serene and still. The air had ceased to breathe. I thought this new lucent world we had found might prove but a lucky dream after all, to be seen but not to be entered, and that some noise would presently shatter it and wake me. But we came alongside the white pilot schooner, and the pilot put off in a boat manned by such a crowd of grinning, ragged, and cinnamon skinned pirates as would have broken the fragile wonder of any spell. Ours, though, did not break, and I was able to believe we had arrived. At sunset the great clouds were full of explosions of electric fire, and there were momentary revelations above us of huge impending shapes. We went slowly over a lower world obscurely lighted by phosphorescent waves.

* * * * *

It was not easy to make out, before sunrise, what it was we had come to. I saw a phantom and indeterminate country; but as though we guessed it was suspicious and observant, and its stillness a device, we moved forward slowly and noiselessly, as a thief at an entrance. Low level cliffs were near to either beam. The cliffs might have been the dense residuum of the night. The night had been precipitated from the sky, which was clearing and brightening. Our steamer was between banks of these iron shades.