The Ship of Coral

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

The silence here was terrible, the silence of Nineveh, the silence of the Nothing, which is at the heart of things. Finotte and Lys; the corrossole sellers; the merchants and traffickers; the coloured crowd; the little children—nothing spoke of them here.

And, still, far above him went the mountain of ashes, the broken streets, walls that had once been houses, charred stumps that had once been palm trees. And still he climbed. He had cast off his coat, never thinking of the treasure in its pocket, he had forgotten all that, even Marie had become vague as a ghost in his mind. One thing only stood clearly before him, half-mesmerised as he was by exhaustion, heat, and the ruin around him—the beach of Grande Anse. The soot-black beach and the green curling waves where a man might find oblivion. He did not know in the least that it was the vision of Marie that was calling him to the cliffs, where he had first truly met her face to face.

At noon, broken, dazed, grimed with dust, having a dozen times escaped by a miracle from death, he reached the summit of the ruins of St. Pierre, and the path of ashes that had once been the road to Morne Rouge. Gazing from here, and not glancing at the ruined city, nothing had altered. The sea lay the same as of old, and Dominica shewed ghostly and haze-blue on the far sea line, gulls were flying over the bay. Eternal summer sat by the ruined city, voiceless, and lost in eternal sleep. Though the silence of the Rue Victor Hugo had been broken by no sound, up here, could be heard a faint breathing from the sea. The requiem of the ocean whose tide was now flooding into the bay.

“Ah, the palms, the coloured houses, the old sea-steps I used to wash—the voices of the canotiers, the tall ships I brought thee, where are they?” Vaguely, like a voice heard in a dream came the whispered lament of the sea.

Gaspard did not hear it. He paused only to rest and breathe, he had slipped and fallen many times in his ascent; coatless, his arms were clay-coloured with sweat-caked volcanic dust; his face was frightful; grimed and seamed—it looked as though spat upon by Ruin. In a few short hours his eyes had become sunken, his cheeks had fallen in; his lips baked and parched, and caked with dust were inhuman, the lips of a tragic mask of antiquity. A frightful thirst filled him, obliterating all other feelings. Beneath him lay the city, formless and bulked out with cinders and dust, exactly as the ship of coral had once lain beneath him bulked out with coral in the still lagoon.

Ah, that night when he had turned with Yves from the vision of the sunken ship, feeling that what he had seen was evil; could he but have seen this greater vision! This greater story of man’s futility and the fate of the imaginers of vain things!

He turned, seeing nothing of it all but the great white sheet of light that leapt from the horizon half-way to the zenith, and the dazzle of the sea.

He came along the path of cinders that had once been a road set with grenadillas and palms; merry with mule bells and songs of the cane-cutters by day, drifted over by fireflies at night. The volcanic dust, the sun, the terrible climb amidst the ruins had called up the thirst which is known only in the desert. He walked scarcely knowing where he went, casting his eyes from side to side of the way in search of water. He had forgotten the black beach at Grande Anse and his desire for the oblivion of the sea; he had only one immediate desire, to drink.

Thirst in its acutest form like this is quite divorced from the sensation which civilisation knows as thirst. It is a passion far stronger than hatred or desire, it affects the soul no less than the body, it drives all other feelings before it and reigns supreme. The physical pangs are nothing compared to the mental desire which drives all other desires away.

As he turned the shoulder of Pelée, the ashes ceased on the road giving place to volcanic dust, for only St. Pierre and the western portion of the island had been exposed to the full blast of the eruption. The road became a road again, and, had he possessed eyes to see, hope might have come to him.