The fourth day I felt I was in a hot fever, and so weak I could scarce crawl. Rowing was now out of the question, and Rumbold and I lay staring at the sky, and at each other, in the stern sheets. We had suffered very little from hunger, but the thirst was terrible. The night before I had dreamed troubled visions of wells and cool clear pools, and, starting up, I had much ado to refrain from flinging myself in my agony into the sea. Towards the afternoon Rumbold said, with a sad smile—
‘Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, drank dissolved pearls. Pity we have not the means to make the beverage here?’
By sundown he was raving again.
The fifth day the morning breeze was long of coming, and we watched it, with longing eyes, ruffling the water astern. Rumbold lay silent, as if worn out; his eyes had a glassy, fixed look, and there were black rings under them. As the forenoon wore on, he pointed to the water around, and I saw the black fins of sharks moving along with the boat.
‘They know when death is coming,’ he said.
The sixth day Rumbold was alive, and that was all. He took my hand in both of his, and whispered hoarsely, ‘I have no wife—and no child—no one who will grieve—that is a great comfort at a time like this.’
Presently black clouds arose out of the sea to windward, and began to spread over the whole firmament. I pointed them out, and besought Rumbold to take heart. ‘Rain is coming,’ I said, ‘we will live to reach the land yet.’ He shook his head, and his eyes grew more and more fixed and glazed. ‘I told you—I made you my—legatee,’ he muttered, with great difficulty; ‘think sometimes of the Peralta who helped you from the Spaniards, or of the Rumbold who died with you in the boat at sea.’ All this time the black clouds became heavier, but still no rain fell. The air was like an oven, and the rude linen sail drooped motionless about the mast. I took Rumbold’s head on my lap; he was past speaking, but he looked up from time to time in my eyes. At length I felt his heart flutter, and presently the beating stopped. No change whatever took place upon his face, except that it assumed that thin pinched look to which men’s features shrink when death lays its hand upon them. He was dead—probably for some time before I was certain of it. When I knew that it was so, I laid the corpse gently down in the stern sheets. In half an hour the windows of Heaven were opened, and the rain poured down in bucketfuls. Oh, those blessed, blessed drops! I knelt, and with my mouth agape swallowed them. I wrung the dripping sail above my wet lips. I licked the water as it trinkled in large drops down the mast. I lapped it up as it accumulated in the little inequalities and hollows in the thafts of the boat. I had soon drunk my fill. The rain gave me fresh strength, fresh spirits, fresh soul. But as for Rumbold, the cool sweet water pattered upon his rigid face—the blessed rain drenched his hair, and great drops ran down his hollow cheeks—but it was of no avail. The manna fell not soon enough, and there lay the corpse, with its white wet face staring starkly up to the sky!
Towards night the rain-clouds broke up, and the sun came slanting in golden bursts down upon the leaden-coloured sea. The breeze also began to blow again—the well-drenched sail caught the first faint puffs of the wind, and we moved forward—the living and the dead, upon our dreary path. It was very terrible, all that long night, to sit alone beside the corpse. The moon rose in all her glory, and the ocean gleamed like molten silver about me. The white sail showed before me like a pale phantom, and at my side lay the stark dead man, with his damp pallid skin glistening in the moonlight. A dozen times I made up my mind to fling the corpse overboard, but I saw those horrible triangular fins, how they glided all round the boat, and my heart failed me. At length, I stripped off Rumbold’s doublet and covered his face with the cloth.
The blackness of night faded at length—then came the grey dawn and the red bright sunrise—the seventh I had seen since the ‘Saucy Susan’ went down. I must have been in a half torpid state, for I lay listlessly, with my face turned to the east, waiting for the breeze to blow, and the morning was already becoming hot, when looking languidly to see if the sail was properly set, I bounded forwards from the stern-sheets, as though all the strength they ever possessed had suddenly come back to my muscles.
Land! yes—land! right ahead—not a mile from me—rocks, with the surf white upon them—sandy beaches glistening in the sun—knolls all green and bushy, and slopes carpeted with Bahama grass. Here and there a feathery palmetta tree rising from the underwood, and clouds of gulls and plovers, ducks and flamingos, pelicans and man-of-war birds, sporting or resting in the air, on the water, or the land. I was close to, as near as I could judge, a group of islets, the principal one being surrounded by many smaller,—some of them indeed mere rocks,—but rocks as I saw teeming with food, and brimming, as I did not doubt, in all their crevices, with fresh, sweet water, from last night’s rain.