'I will go alone; but why will you not come?' and went to my cabin for more wraps.
She was ready before I was, and we clasped hands, and holding on carefully likewise, stopping always for that sudden recovery of the deck which would happen out of its slant with the rush of a cannon ball slung by a line and let go at an angle, so ungovernable were the motions of the dismasted hull, we gained the companion ladder, and crawled to the head of the steps, where we stood in the companion itself, with our heads above the hood.
I shrieked on looking! Let my imaginations have been what they would, here was the reality! I could not credit my sight. All three masts were gone! nothing of the lower-masts remained saving a height of two or three feet of jagged and splintered trunk-sheaves of barbed milk-white wood on the main and quarter decks, and about ten to fifteen feet of the foremast. On the right or starboard side, lengths of the bulwark were crushed flat. The decks were littered with gear, ropes' ends were swimming overboard in the leaden swell like huge eels and sea-snakes making from the wreck. On one side, dangling between the irons, was the keel of a quarter-boat—all that remained of her; the opposite davits were empty.
But what idea can such talk as this give you of that wonderful dismal picture of shipwreck, that spectacle of decks covered with snow, of rails like an armoury with their bristling pendants of bayonet-blue icicles? The galley was partly wrecked; the bowsprit stood soaring and sinking upon the leaping waters, but the jibbooms were gone. I did not know the hull. She looked shrunk to half her former size. The sky stooped to the sea with its burden of vapour, but a break right overhead hovered in a colour of sulphur. No wind stirred. Never was there a deader stagnation in the atmosphere under the height of the Line. Yet you were sensible of the presence of the spirit of this wild, desolate part of the world even in such pauses as this, when you watched the sullen motion of that troubled breast of deep, hurling its glassy folds in comminglings which ran in silent warring to the horizon. Far astern was a shape of white, a gleam in the sallow air there, like that of a sail; but my eye was now experienced, and since that dash of radiance was too big to be a ship, it must needs be ice. I saw a collection of white tips on the starboard quarter when the swell threw us high, and some points or shafts faint and bluish over the bows. Otherwise the ocean line swept clear.
CHAPTER X THE JURY-MAST
All the remaining hands of the ship's company were at work forward. A number of spare booms were stowed on top of the galley and had probably saved the long-boat from being crushed when the masts fell. The sailors had rigged up a triangle of booms with blocks and tackle dangling, and even as Mrs. Burke and I stood in the companion way, they broke into song as they hoisted a huge spar that was to serve as a mast. Their hearty chorus was frequently interrupted by sharp, eager shouts from Captain Burke or the boatswain Wall.
The break overhead thinned out yet and made more light. A strange dim dye of sulphur went sifting down to the horizon, and the sea in places worked against it dark as bottle glass. About two miles off some whales were blowing; their vast bulks showed in a black wet gleam amid the swell; but even then such was the blending of their curved forms with the confused running, that, but for their fountains, the eye had missed them.
We stood watching in the shelter of the companion way. The longer I looked, the stranger, the more forlorn, the more lamentable the scene showed, the more perilous and hopeless our situation seemed. What sort of cloths were they going to spread upon such a height of boom as they were chorusing at? I thought of the spacious concavities which had risen to the stars, and to the blue heavens of our voyage, those symmetric breasts of lustrous canvas which, when trimmed, snatched an impulse for our clipper keel, from the antagonism of the head wind itself; I saw the ship robed in the beauty of her sails, lifting her star-saluting royals to the very path of the flying scud with jibs and staysails yearning from bowsprit and jibboom towards some deeper ocean solitude past the horizon; and then I looked at the naked boom the men were hoisting at the triangle or shears.