"Is there any good spot for careening on the coast, east of the Cape?" said I, eager to gather all I could touching the practices and inner life of this wondrous ship without appearing inquisitive.
He answered, "Yes, there is one good place, 'tis in a bay; I cannot name it, but it is to be found by the peculiar shape of the mountains at its back. If ever you should be in these seas and need to careen, choose that place, for besides that you may refresh your crew with, and lay in a good store of—when in season—oranges, plums, wild apricot, lemons, plantains, and other fruits, with abundance of such fish as cod, hake, and mullet, and comforts and dainties such as plovers, partridges, guinea-fowl, and bustards; you will there find a salt spring, the water of which, on boiling, yields salt enough for any quantity of curing, and what should not be less useful to you as a mariner to know is, that about the shore you find scattered a kind of munjack which, when boiled with sand and tempered with oil, is as good as pitch for paying your seams with."
So, thought I, and thither, then, is it that you are led when your ship needs to be overhauled or when your provisions run low. With oakum worked from such ropes as he would find on abandoned ships, and the munjack he spoke about, he would have no trouble in keeping the frame of the vessel tight, more especially as the supernatural quality that was in his own life was in that of his ship likewise, so that the timber stood as did his skin, albeit the one would often need repairs just as the body of the other was sustained by meat and drink.
"I thank you for your information, captain," said I.
"If," he continued, "you let the plantain dry it will crush into an excellent flour. The cakes we had at breakfast were formed of plantain-flour."
"It is wonderful," said I, "how the mariner forces the sea and the land that skirts it to supply his needs."
"Ay," he exclaimed. "It is as you say. But no sailors surpass the Dutch in this particular direction."
It seemed as if he would go on speaking, but, looking, that I might attend to his words, I observed that the whole man, with amazing suddenness, appeared to undergo a change. He stood motionless, gazing at the leeward sea, his features fixed, not the faintest working in them, and nothing stirring but his beard. He was like one in a fit, save for the frightful vitality he got from the glare in his eyes, which were rooted as though they beheld a phantom. I drew away from him with a shudder, for his aspect now was the most terrible revelation of his monstrous and unearthly existence that had been made to me. The change was of the violence of a catalepsy, and this quick transition from the intelligent, if death-like, looks of a man, speaking of homely matters to a mute, petrified figure, to which the fire of the eyes imparted an inexpressible element of horror, so terrified me that I felt the sweat-drops in the palms of my hands. As to reasoning on this condition of his, why, I could make nothing of it. It looked as if the death that was in his flesh and bones, finding his spirit, or whatever it was that informed him, languid, as the senses became through grief or sickness, asserted its powers till it was driven into its hiding-place again by the re-quickening of the supernatural element that possessed him. It was also apparent that this unnatural gift of life did but give vitality to a corpse; and that even as a disinterred body that still wears the very tint of life, as though but just dead, falls into dust on the air of Heaven touching it, so do I strictly believe that Vanderdecken and his crew would instantly crumble into ashes, which the wind would disperse, were the power that keeps them intelligent and capable of moving suspended. By which I mean that they would not decay slowly, as the dead in Nature do, but that they would dissolve into dust as men who deceased a hundred years ago.
These thoughts are not gay. But what think you of the reality? Never could I so fully compass all the horror of the Curse as now, when I turned my gaze from the figure at my side, majestic in his marble motionlessness and alive in the eyes only, to the strained, grey, streaming ancient ship, tossing her forking bowsprit to the sullen gloom on high, bringing her aged, patched and dingy courses, groaning at their tacks, with a sulky thunder against the screaming gale, as though their hollows dimly reverberated yet the cannonading of the vanished fleets of Blake and Tromp; washed by seas which fled in snow-storms over her forward decks, heavily and dismally rolling broadside to the wind that was blowing her with diabolic stubbornness back along the liquid path that she had so lately sailed over! Think of such a life as this, never-ending! Great Mercy! Would not even a year of such a struggle prove to us distracting. Oh, 'tis a merciful provision indeed that these poor wretches should have had all sense of time killed in them, and that their punishment should lie in a perpetual cheating of hope too short-lived as a remembrance to break their hearts. Yet there were now two persons in this Death Ship to whom such solace as was permitted to the accurst crew would not be granted, and who, if they could not get away from the vessel, would have to lead a more terrible life than even that of the Dutch mariners, unless they destroyed themselves as Captain Skevington had. And for some time I could think of nothing but how I was to rescue Miss Dudley and make my own escape, for one thing I had already resolved: never to leave the girl alone in this ship.