Death, which ends all in Sargasso, as elsewhere, was so familiar to these people that tokens of sorrow were never worn. They met it fearlessly and without protest, believing that when their bodies were committed to their beloved mother, the Sea, the joys of eternal rest began. Children were taught that mermaids met the sinking bodies and tenderly bore them to coral grottoes, where they rested forever in peace under the watchful guardianship of the Greatest of all Kantoons, who rules the universe as he does the Sargasso Sea, and who never more would summon them to duty or to care.
Of course, the Sargassons knew not care, but thought they did.
CHAPTER X.
COOKING FOR ALL.
Day by day the Kantoon’s heart softened toward me. The performance of my executive duties about the ship occupied my mind, and assisted greatly in reconciling me to my enforced absence from my native land. The presence of Fidette had much more than all things else to do with my contentment of mind. One of the pleasantest of my daily tasks was to keep guard over her while she took her morning swim. Armed with a long pole, at the end of which was fixed a very large knife, ground to sharpness of both sides, I swung over the side of the ship upon a broad board, suspended much as is a painter’s scaffolding. Upon this I walked back and forth, with the heavy spear poised in such a way that I could hurl it at a shark and prevent the endangering of my pretty sweetheart’s life. A section of the sod twenty feet square had been hewn away at the side of the ship, disclosing beneath the clear, warm water of the mid-Atlantic. Into this bottomless tank Fidette would dive from the window of her stateroom. She usually spent an hour at her bath, and then, seizing a knotted rope, she would climb back into the vessel, and into the same window from which she had emerged.
Thus, for weeks, the monotonous routine of my life continued. I passed as much of my time in Fidette’s company as possible. The Kantoon’s threat had not been carried out. On several occasions we had dined together, and, after the pretty Sargasson fashion, she had fed me with her own fingers from a bowl of seaweed pudding.
An incident of importance about this time was my visit to the great floating kitchen, to which I have heretofore referred. It is needless to say that I was not trusted to make this journey until I had shown by my conduct that I was wholly reconciled to my Sargasson surroundings. The distance was not great, and, having learned in my boyhood to wield the paddle with cleverness, I found no difficulty in performing my share of the work.
Armed with a formal requisition from our Kantoon for the week’s supply of cooked food for the cantonment of the Happy Shark, we set out. This demand was inscribed upon a tarpon’s scale with a shark’s tooth. The character and the amounts of the supplies were to me undecipherable, because of the peculiar hieroglyphics in which they were written. We occupied the leading boat, being accompanied by ten others, fully manned, in which the week’s supply of provisions would be brought back.
We set out at sunrise and pulled steadily along the Grand Canal for two hours. This was a trip of great interest to me. For the first time I enjoyed the opportunity of seeing the other ships of the floating community close at hand, and of studying the faces of their inhabitants.
I had decided before we had passed a dozen ships that our crew was in many ways superior to most of the others, and that, if I had to spend the rest of my days among the Sargassons, I had been quite fortunate in landing upon the Happy Shark.