A Desperate Voyage

by E. F. Knight

And he had been forced to look; not a detail of the horror was spared him. The surroundings of the scene, the weird black rocks, the gaunt dead trees, everything about the accursed spot entered into his brain. He even noticed with what callous indifference Nature seemed to contemplate the hideous evidences of the crime. Quite heedless, the huge crabs dragged their clumsy bodies slowly over the stones. The sea-birds fought noisily with each other for morsels of fish among the skeleton branches of the trees, careless of those ghastly relics of poor humanity beneath them. He felt how fitting a scene for such a tragedy was this doleful corner of the earth, this island that a malevolent fiend might have created, where Nature had no beauty, no love, no pity, and where, like some foul witch, she could only conceive forms of life cruel and repulsive, and become a mother of monsters.

* * * * * *

The sun was low in the heaven, and Carew woke out of a profound slumber, weak, parched with thirst, his mind dazed. He raised himself on his elbow, and, looking round him, he found that he was lying on a beach of beautiful golden sand that fringed an extensive bay. From the sands there sloped up to a great height domes of loose stones of red volcanic formation, of all shapes and sizes, the débris of shattered mountains, and from the summits of these slopes there rose what the earthquakes had still left of the solid hills—dark red pinnacles: some squared like gigantic towers, others pointed like pyramids. The bay was enclosed by two huge buttresses of rock that stretched as rugged promontories far out into the ocean. There was no vegetation, not even a blade of grass, visible anywhere on this savage coast. Looking seawards he saw that a vast number of black rocks, among which raged a furious surf, bordered the shore. Beyond these were the outer reefs on which the sea broke heavily. And still farther out, on the horizon, rose three rocky islands of considerable size, glowing red as the sun's rays fell full upon them.

Carew could not imagine where he was and how he had reached this place. He tried to think. By degrees he called to mind the dreadful sight he had seen in the ravine; but he could remember nothing that had occurred since then. As the sun was to the back of the hills, he fancied that it was still early in the forenoon, and that he had wandered a short distance only from South West Bay; though the presence of the distant islands and the different character of the coast perplexed him.

But he could think of nothing at that moment except the satisfaction of the fearful thirst that was tormenting him.

He rose to his feet, eager to reach the cascade as soon as possible. He felt that he should die if he could not procure water soon.

But in which direction had he to go—to the left or to the right? He could not tell.

Then he saw his footprints on the soft sand, showing the way that he had come. He had but to follow them.

Dizzy and faint, and often stumbling, he wearily retraced his steps. The footprints led him along the shore to that extremity of the bay which would have been on the left hand of one looking seaward. Reaching the promontory of rock he clambered to the summit of it; and then, to his dismay, he looked down upon another extensive bay, at the farther end of which was a mountain of square shape falling perpendicularly into the surf, and preventing all further progress in that direction. An ocean current must be perpetually setting into this bay, for he perceived that the shore was strewn with a prodigious quantity of wreckage. The spars and barrels were heaped up together in places. There were vessels lying crushed among the sharp rocks; others were sunk in the sand, their skeleton ribs alone showing; there were vessels of all sizes, and some of very antique construction—relics of disaster that had been collecting gradually on this desert coast unvisited by man through all the ages since European keels first clove the southern seas: a melancholy record of much suffering and the loss of many gallant men.