Gallions Reach (11 page)

“That's where she lives,” confided Sinclair. “Circe waits for me there, but alone. No leopards. And especially no swine. Only jars of wine.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“On my first voyage. Yes, I think I saw her. Just a glimpse.”

“But that line of white along the shore. That'll be the bones of sailors.”

“Served 'em right. I'm the man. One day I shall land, and then she'll come down to the beach. No good looking today. You won't see her. She knows I'm passing the place. Not the time yet to stop. Farewell, Circe, my love!” Sinclair kissed his hand to the mirage.

Their ship touched earth again at Port Said. That was a solid abode of men, with the assured smells of historical contamination and well-established intercourse. No doubt
about Port Said. It was an area of understandable life, noisy and lusty. It was ramshackle, insistent, predatory, and raucous. Goats reclined in its gutterways. Its crowds hinted indifference or hostility. Vendors of obscenities, purveyors of cosmopolitan lesions, enticed with the smirking confidence that the desires of their own species were well known to them. It swarmed with flies. Its Canal was a lucky way of escape.

But by Suez, one daybreak, Colet sat up in his bunk from sleep with the instant waking certainty that something was going to happen. The ship, too, he could feel, was waiting for it. She was still and reconciled. She was anchored. The cabin was as close and quiet as a crypt. A crypt; this might be the breathless resurrection day. There was no sign. It had not begun yet. The book he had been reading late into the night was just discernible, open on the floor, where it had fallen from his bunk. Something in his favour. It was the Bible. The book looked up at him. It counselled him nothing from that distance below. The ship, he thought, was abandoned; he was left aboard, to make the best of it on his own.

Colet glanced out of the cabin port. There he saw, though not without doubt, what must have been the usual stanchion. A loose rope was beside it hanging from above. The rope was as still as the iron. That appearance of waiting in resignation was more than strange. It was a warning. The queer thing was that London seemed of less consequence to him now than that book on the floor. Reading that book had been his last act. The bare shadow of London moved but once in his thought, as he sat up; but Billiter Avenue had gone. Of no importance. What was important now? Through the port, beyond the stanchion, the distance deepened as he looked. Light was coming. Land formed under it.

Syria, very likely. Somewhere hereabouts Moses used to roam with his aboriginal mob and his first laws done in stone. Perhaps this was the chosen region of earth, whenever it was decided to vouchsafe a new light. That silence and brooding
obscurity would make a man contrite and willing to learn. Out there, something would soon begin. The eastern sky seemed to be indicating the dread judgment to come, but no sign was under it of the works of men. Or else all that work was in hiding. Men and their work guessed what was coming. They had crawled under the film of sin and night which the past had left on the earth. But the upstanding ship would be terribly conspicuous.

That stanchion was already plain. A level flush of reddish gold beyond made the earth shrink into a deeper dark, but the elevated iron of the ship from London, unable to escape, was brightly caught. Without the sound of a trumpet the eye of Heaven suddenly lifted and blazed. Bones and opinions were like glass. The earth was prostrate under that unremitting celestial stare.

And every man at breakfast that morning was dressed in white. Immaculate linen for a transcendent day, when the old things had passed! Colet surveyed his messmates in surprise. Were they all confident they would be approved, and had anticipated it in pure raiment? Captain Hale waved aside the bloater and bacon. No more grease. There was a stifling suggestion that furnace doors were somewhere open. “Not now,” he said to the steward with the dishes. “This Gulf is the easier for a little fasting,” he explained to his colleagues at the table.

“Man, never give in to the Red Sea,” said Gillespie. “How would you care for yon engine-room now?” he asked Sinclair.

The chief officer was glum. He wiped his wet face. He glared malignantly at old Gillespie. “Engine-room! This is about the place where all that began, isn't it? Civilisation and engines. God seems to be savage about it now. On the bridge you'd think He was trying to burn out a mistake.”

“It's no right. That's no the way to talk. Sun and rock and no wind. What would ye expect?”

“I tell you he is sorry he let us start it. This place is being paid out. That's what makes it so damned hot.”

“Och. Get away, man!”

“It's your cursed engines and science, that's my idea, Mr. Engineer.”

The captain smiled; he was not at breakfast; he was waiting for a message from the shore. “Don't let it worry you. We can't alter it. It's not Gillespie's fault.”

“I think so, sir. If it wasn't for engines, we shouldn't be here.”

“An' where would ye be? Piddling aroun' south with a bit canvas. I tell ye. The engineers are the men. Ye couldna do withoot them.”

“I think,” said Hale, “Sinclair is not really annoyed with the engines. He must find them handy at times. Perhaps he is is only thinking of the uses to which we put our knowledge. Is that it, Mr Sinclair?”

The chief officer had not seen this turn to his petulance. “Well, sir. No. I don't know. I was only hot.”

The engineer presently left, still argumentative. “Hot! I never heard the like of it.” The captain shook his head in amusement at his lieutenant. “Be careful, Mister. If you must get peevish, don't blaspheme science. Nobody will mind if you round on God. But leave the engines alone. They're sacred.”

Sinclair looked round at the master in a little surprise. That elderly man was sitting with his eyes cast down, but he looked up in a friendly way at his junior. “You'll find it so,” he said. “It's no good getting annoyed with the way of things. We might as well argue with the seasons. They change, when the turn comes. Some day—perhaps—even engines may not be sacred.” He went out of the saloon, but came back to put his head in the door, “We get going in half an hour.”

They went on. The ship came to sullen life, grumbling and stuffy, breathing cinders heavily all over them from a languid bulge of smoke. She had entered another region of
earth, and was committed to another existence. Europe was far off, and out of mind; they were beset by another order, and must make the best of it with the little they knew. The shores near to them on either beam showed that Sinclair was right in one thing. Those coasts were burnt out. There the earth had finished with men. There was no more darkness in the high bergs of Africa. They were masses of radiant bronze and brass. The very sea was lumpish and resentful of the intrusion of keels. It did not want them to pass. At sunset it was a level of heavy lava, polished and opaque, where their ship was fixed centrally in a glow between fulgent metallic shores. Sounds had gone from that world, for no men were there, no rain, and no wind.

Off the island of Socotra they found some air, and their ship began to sway. They had crossed over; they were involved now in the hazard of a new probation. The waters opened to the East, to a legend that was fabulous in ancient cities when London was sedge and mud.

“It doesn't look as if the monsoon had broken, sir,” said Sinclair to the captain. They were on the bridge. Socotra, a serrated confusion of the horizon, was far to starboard.

“No,” said Hale. “I wish it had. We should know what to expect. The weather looks oily. I think we will have those hatch covers secured. Never know when it may break.”

But Colet was trying to puzzle out Socotra from an obscurity of cloud, sea glint, and shadow. That presence, to him, was more insistent than a monsoon which was not there.

“I've heard of it often enough, and there it is. Have you ever been there, captain?”

Sinclair frowned to starboard as if that shape had no right on the seas. Hale took Colet's arm, and surveyed Socotra, with a smile.

“No, and I've never met a man who has. But there it always is, somehow. If you want to know about some of the things here, you'll get it from Sinbad.”

At the saloon mess-table the guardians of the ship were allusive about her welfare. The set of a current had been adverse; she was seven miles astern of her estimated position. The signs in the heavens induced respectful references to the habits of the Arabian Gulf. The glass was briefly indicated; Colet surmised, while taking another piece of toast, that it was not happy in its divination. The high-pressure cylinder had taken to blowing through its packing; it was wheezy. “Man, yon's a sad waste o' power.” And one of the deckhands was sick. Fever, very likely, it was suggested.

“Or Rotterdam,” Sinclair baldly hinted.

“Aye, the heat will bring it out,” confirmed Gillespie, with luscious gravity. Then he exhibited some startling instances from the store of a long familiarity with sin. He indulged in illustrative cases with composure and fond irrelevance.

“I'll see this man,” announced Hale, hastily rising while still the boding symptoms of another exemplary case were unfulfilled. Gillespie shook his paw in appreciative warning over sin.

Colet accompanied the captain on his way to the forecastle, and he noticed, because the master paused to inspect them, that the fore-hatches were laced over with cordage. The master disappeared within the dark aperture of the forecastle. Colet mounted the ladder to its deck. That was a noble outlook at the beginning of the day. It was dry and red-crusted, weather-stained, isolated as a vantage exposed to an immensity of light. It was solitude. It might have been
as old as the sea itself, by the look of it. It was hoar with salt.

And the ship's head was alive. It was massive but buoyant. It seemed to inflate and to mount quickly and easily with enormous intakes of air; then, sighing through its hawse-pipes, it declined into the friendly rollers. If you looked overside and down, the cutwater of the ship was deep and plain in the blue transparency, coming along with unvarying confidence like the brown nose of an exploring monster. When the ship's head plunged over a slope an acre of blinding foam spread around and swept astern, melting and sibilant.

Companies of flying-fish were surprised by that iron nose, and got up. They skittered obliquely over the bright polish of the inclines, and plumped abruptly into smooth slopes which opposed them. A family of four dolphins were there that morning. They were set in the clear glass just before the cutwater. They did not fly from it. Their bodies but revolved leisurely before it. The crescent valves in their heads could be seen sleepily opening and closing when they touched the surface, with the luxury of life in the cool fathoms. One after another idly they rolled belly up; they were merely revolving without progress, yet the fast-pursuing iron nose never reached them. It was always just behind the family, which wove a lazy and gliding dance before the ship. Artfully leading them on, these familiars of the deep?

It was a fair world into which they were being led. It reposed in an eternal radiant tranquillity. The Indian Ocean was as inviting as its name. There were clouds ahead, but they were fast to the skyline; they were as remote as the ghostly mountains and steeps of a land no man would ever reach. This world of the tropics was but an apparition of splendour. It was there by the chance of good fortune. It was seen only by the desiring mind. It was like the import of great music, for which there is no word. If you stood looking at it long enough, the bright dream would draw you out of your body.

The ship's head fell sideways into a deeper hollow, and Colet returned without warning to an iron deck. He was swung around on his handhold. The rail he struck was hard. Steady! Solid fountains burst loudly through the hawse-pipes. There was impetuosity in the lift of the ship's head. She got out of the smother in a hurry. By the look of it, more was coming. The rollers had seemed to be growing heavier. It was getting wet up there. Colet retreated. When he was mounting the ladder amidships a sharp lurch of the ship left him dangling by his hands. The boyish third officer on the deck above respectfully watched him while his feet sought the ladder again.

“A beam sea setting in, Mr. Colet. Makes her roll.”

It was making her roll. But it was very agreeable. It shook off the weight of the heat. These were the first seas worth the lively name since the voyage began. It was like the real thing to see the decks getting wet, to be caught at a corner by a dollop of rollicking brine. Hullo, Sinclair! Colet mentioned this novelty as they met by the engine-room entrance. He spoke of it lightly, wiping some spray from his eyes. Sinclair showed amusement, but his gaze was elsewhere. They had to steady themselves, in their pause, by gripping the ironwork. The movements of the ship, to Colet's surprise, were exhilarating. They shifted him from an old centre of thought. The rhythm of the ship's compensations was the measure of easy and solid courage.

“I don't know,” mused Colet, “but once, just once, I think I'd like to see all this when it was not play.”

“Play?” exclaimed the sailor. “Play? If anybody else had said that, I'd tell him not to be a fool.”

Colet made a dramatic appeal to the listening and jealous gods to forget his childish indiscretion. It was only his ignorance. It was born of his trust in his company. He reposed in the faith that the
Altair
was a sound old dear.

Sinclair grinned. “Perhaps you didn't catch what the old
man was mumbling at breakfast?” He poked his companion in the ribs. “You're coming along, my son. A bit too confident, that's all. When you're a sailor, you'll cross yourself if you hear some one talk as you did.”

“I'm sure of it. What was it the captain said at breakfast?”

“Oh, nothing. He's a cautious old boy, I think. Wanted me to believe he doesn't like the look of it. But I can't smell anything in the wind. Seems all right. I don't see anything in this.”