And, throwing up his poor, lean, shrivelled hands toward the cloudless sky, with a gesture eloquent of frantic, despairing appeal, the poor, tortured creature suddenly collapsed and fell senseless athwart the gunwale of the boat, with his arms hanging down into the water. We dragged him quickly inboard again, but we were not a second too soon, for we had scarcely done so when the remaining shark was alongside, glaring up at us with a look of fell longing in those cruel goggle eyes of his, that seemed to say he intended to have his prey sooner or later, although we had baulked him of it for the present.
The dreadful exhaustion of reaction from the late excitement now seized upon the rest of us, and one by one we wearily sank down again into our respective places in the boat. Then I told the men by what means I had obtained temporary relief during the night, advising them to try the same method, and presently we were all sitting in our wet clothes, ravenously chewing away upon strips of our shoe leather. But nobody thought of again having recourse to the oars; indeed our strength had now so completely melted away that I doubt very much whether a single man in the whole of that boat’s company—saving, perhaps, myself—could have laid out an oar unaided.
The blazing hot, breathless day lagged slowly along, every hour seeming to spin itself out to a more intolerable length than the last, and with every moment our suffering grew more nearly unbearable, until toward evening I seemed to be going mad, for the most fantastic ideas went crowding through my whirling brain, and I now and then caught myself muttering the most utter nonsense, now laughing, now weeping and moaning like a child. Anon I found myself kneeling in the stern-sheets and supporting my body upon one arm as I gesticulated with the other while apostrophising that demon shark—or were there two of them again, or three? I remember laughing to myself uproariously, noticing at the same time, with a sort of wonder, what a wild, eldritch, gibbering laugh it was, at the thought of how those sharks—yes, there were three; I was certain of it—would jostle and hustle each other, in their greedy haste to get at me, were I to simply stand up and topple over the gunwale into the water. And how easily—how ridiculously easily—I might do it too. I laughed again at the absurdity of taking so much trouble and enduring such frightful extremity of suffering to preserve a life that might be so readily got rid of, and wondered dully why I had been so foolish as to go through it all when it might be put an end to in a single moment. Why, I asked myself, should I remain any longer in the boat with that great, red, flaming eye staring so mercilessly down upon me out of that brazen sky, when the laughing blue water smiled so temptingly up into my eyes and wooed me to its cool embrace? There would be no more hunger and thirst down there, no relentless sun to torment me century after century by darting his fiery beams down upon my uncovered head and through my hissing, seething brain. A plunge, and all my miseries would be at an end. I would make that plunge; I would seek those cool, cerulean depths; I would—Ah! I had forgotten you, you devils! What! are you waiting for me? Are you growing impatient? How many of you are there? One, two, three, four—stop, stop. I cannot count you if you swarm around the boat in that unseemly fashion! Why, there are hundreds of you, thousands, millions! The sea is black with you! Your waving fins cover the ocean to the farthest confines of the horizon! And you are all waiting for me! Very well, then, I shall disappoint you. I shall—
When I recovered from my delirium it was night. The stars were shining brightly, and the air was deliciously cool after the scorching heat of the day. Strange to say, I no longer felt hungry. The craving for food was gone, but its place was more than supplied by an increased agony of thirst which seared my vitals as with fire. My lips were dry and cracked; my tongue felt shrivelled and hard in my mouth. I tried to speak to Dumaresq, who was lying in the bottom of the boat with his glazed eyes turned up at the stars, but I could give utterance only to a husky, hissing sound. There was no movement on the part of any of the forms that were dimly discernable, huddled up in the bottom of the boat. Whether they were dead or only asleep I knew not, nor cared. Life and everything connected with it had lost all interest for me I was dying. I knew it, and longed only for the end to come that I might be delivered out of my misery. With inexpressible pain I raised myself to my knees to take one more last look round, lest peradventure a sail should by some miraculous interposition of Providence have drifted within our ken, but there was nothing. There could be nothing while that murderous calm lasted. I felt the old delirium returning upon me; it was rioting within my brain. Strange forms and hideous shapes floated around me. The dead steward climbed in over the gunwale and stood in the eyes of the boat, denouncing us as murderers and calling curses down upon us. Then the scene changed. A glorious light shone round about us; soft strains of sweetest music came floating to us across the placid waters; delicious perfumes filled the air. There was a gentle murmuring sound as of a soft wind among trees and a gentle tinkling as of a running stream. Then my brain seemed to burst. I was dimly conscious that I was falling backward, and I knew no more.
Chapter Sixteen.
Captain Renouf.
Where was I? What was this darksome, foul, and evil-smelling place? Who was that forbidding-looking individual sitting there smoking under that swaying, smoky, dimly-burning, miserable apology for a lamp? And, finally, what had happened that my limbs should feel heavy as lead, and that I should be too weak to turn upon my cruelly-hard, box-like pallet?
Such were the questions that slowly and laboriously formed themselves within my mind when I at length awoke from that state of blessed unconsciousness which I had believed to be death. For some time I lay painfully revolving these questions in my mind, groping about for information in a sort of dim, mental twilight, so obscure that I was not even certain of my own identity. Gradually, however—very gradually,—the twilight brightened with returning life and reason, and I found myself beginning to identify my surroundings. I became conscious of a rhythmical rising and falling and swaying movement, accompanied by a creaking, grinding sound, and the wash and gurgle of water outside the planking that formed two of the three walls of the triangular apartment in which I found myself, and I somehow recognised these movements and sounds as familiar. Then I heard a voice at some distance, shouting something that I could not distinguish, answered by two or three voices almost immediately overhead. There was a noise of ropes being thrown down upon planking, and a further outcry of voices, accompanied by a creaking sound and the flapping of canvas. And then it suddenly dawned upon me that I was lying in a bunk in a ship’s forecastle, and that the forbidding-looking stranger must be one of the crew.