Chapter Twenty Seven.
On the Casquettes.
Bob’s hearing was not at fault, this sense of his remaining perfect though his mind was wandering; and so, the unwonted sound that fell upon his ear had got woven amongst his delirious fancies.
It was, without doubt, a real bell, which if it might not summon pious folk to prayer, yet fulfilled almost as sacred a duty, warning, as it did, poor mariners of impending peril and so answering the petition oft put up “for those travelling by sea.”
This ball belonged to the lighthouse-tower erected on the highest peak of the Casquettes, a terrible group of rocks jutting out into the Channel, just off the French coast hard by Alderney, some six miles to the north-west of which island they lie. Rocks that are cruel and relentless as the surges that sweep over them in stormy weather, and which are so quaintly named from their helmet, or “casque”-like resemblance—rocks, concerning which the poet Swinburne has sung in his eloquent verse, that breathes the very spirit of the sea in depicting the strife of the elements:
“From the depths of the waters that lighten and darken,
With change everlasting of life and of death,
Where hardly by morn if the lulled ear hearken
It hears the sea’s as a tired child’s breath,
Where hardly by night, if an eye dare scan it,
The storm lets shipwreck be seen or heard,
As the reefs to the waves and the foam to the granite
Respond one merciless word.
“Sheer seen and far, in the sea’s life heaven,
A sea-mew’s flight from the wild sweet land,
White plumed with foam, if the wind wake, seven
Black helms, as of warriors that stir, not stand,
From the depths that abide and the waves that environ
Seven rocks rear heads that the midnight masks;
And the strokes of the swords of the storm are as iron
On the steel of the wave-worn casques.
“Be night’s dark word as the word of a wizard,
Be the word of dawn as a god’s glad word,
Like heads of the spirits of darkness visored
That see not for ever, nor ever have heard,
These basnets, plumed as for fight or plumeless,
Crowned by the storm and by storm discrowned,
Keep word of the lists where the dead lie tombless
And the tale of them is not found!”
Hither the boat had drifted in the course of the three days that had elapsed since she had been first becalmed off Spithead, or rather between the Nab and Warner lights; for, it was then that the wind had dropped, leaving her at the mercy of the stream, going whither the current willed.
She had pursued a most erratic course, however, to reach this point.