Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

He set off over the headland of the gully under the clump of pines whose blackness he had seen from the mud. It was soft but firm going on the pine-needles; the trees over his head made a sighing which merged as he ran into the sterner sighing of the water on the beach. At the foot of the spur over which he had run, he came to the outcrops of the springs all overgrown with azaleas. They ran all along the foot of the spur, so thick with blossoms that they looked like an unbursting wave which was yet foaming at the crest. Over all the foam of blossom the fireflies glowed and went out, now as many as stars, now few, now like sparks, but always beautiful. Just beyond them was the broad sea-beach, with the breakers only fifty yards away. The sea was coming in, as it will in a shallow bay, in half-a-dozen long lines, each glowing with mild fire, shining as it neared the sand, then flashing like the moonlight, as the wave burst, then gleaming greenish, and showing the globes of the stars, as it wasted and died out upon the sand.

Sard burst through the azaleas to the sands, which stretched along for a great distance right and left. To his right (seemingly quite near) was a shining, which he knew to be the river near Los Xicales; beyond it, in the darkness of trees, was the house of his dream with one light burning. All a vast expanse of night, the sea-beach, the forest, and muttering water lay behind him. He rushed down to the sea and let three breakers go over him to cleanse him from the swamp and the leeches.

“Now, Sard Harker,” he said, “come on, port main, up with her!” He broke into a steady run facing to the Los Xicales light. The pine trees on the spit shut away a view of the anchorage so that he could not see the Pathfinder; he could only hope and put his best leg foremost. “Upon them that hope,” he thought, “is His mercy.” He ran at his steady pace which, as he knew, he could keep for miles.

Though it seemed so near, that shining on the sands, which he knew to be the river, was a full half-mile away. Before he had gone three hundred yards of it, he saw that the sand just ahead of him was darker and shinier than the sand under his feet. A memory of another dangerous sand, far away on an English sea-coast, shot into his mind on the instant, but the footing failed before he could stop. The sand gave beneath the one foot and let in the other: ooze of water shot up to the surface: he flung himself backwards violently, and got out, but fell, and saw, or thought that he saw, the surface of the sand shaking as though it were laughing at him. He rolled himself clear, then rose and looked at it. “That’s a pretty bad quicksand,” he said. “I might get through, but from the pull on that foot, I think that it would pull me down. Probably I can get round the shoreward end of it.”

He tried, but failed: the shoreward end of the quicksand was tropical bog.

“Very well,” he said, “I’ll swim round the seaward end. It is only a hundred yards. I need not go far out. It will be something to have the swamp washed off me again.” He went knee-deep into the sea, with some misgivings, for the shallows of all that coast are haunted with sand sharks, which come right in to have the warmth of the sand. He splashed as he went, to scare them. He had gone about thigh deep into the water and was just settling down to swim, when there came suddenly an agonising pain in his left foot.

His first thought was, “I’m on a thorn,” then, “I’m on a snake”; then, as the pain ran in a long, hot, stabbing streamer up his leg, he knew the truth, that he had trodden on a sting-ray. He hopped out of the water to the shore, feeling all the blood in his foot turn to vitriol and come surging along, as vitriol, to his heart. Most excruciating agony made him fling himself down. He tried to hold out his leg, but that was unendurable torment. He tried to kneel upon it, while he put a ligature above the knee, but the pain made him so sick that he could not bear it. He tried to lie down, but that was unbearable. He rolled over and over, moaning: then staggered up, and hopped and hopped, gasping with pain, until he fell. He had never known any pain in his life, except the bangs and knocks of his profession, but now he tasted a full measure.

Although he fell, the pain did not stop, it hit him when he was down, it grew worse. The cold, deadly, flat thing in the sand had emptied his horn into him. He buried his face in the sand: he dug his hands into the sand. Then the poison seemed to swing him round and double him up. It seemed to burn every vein and shrivel every muscle and make every nerve a message of agony.

He managed to cast loose the wrapping from the foot. The foot no longer looked like a foot, but like something that would burst. In his deadly sickness he thought that his foot was a pollard willow tree growing to the left of the road. He wondered why he was not on his bicycle. He said that his foot was dead, that it had died of the gout, and would drop from his body and never grow again.

All the venom came in pain on to his abdominal muscles; then he felt it come swimming along like little fiery rats round the carcase of his heart. He saw his heart for a moment or two like a black pig caught in a bog; the rats came all round it together, from every side, they closed in on it and bit it, bit it, bit it.