It had been a busy day, it was still a busy time; but never throughout the hours, if I save the occasional cursing of the mate, the captain's few questions, his command trumpetted to the wreck, my talk with Imogene, had human voice been heard. It was not so noticeable a thing, this silence of the ghostly crew, in the broad blaze of sunshine and amid an exhibition of labour that was like sound to the eye, as now, in the darkness, with the wind freshening, sail to be made and much to be done—much of the kind that forces merchant seamen into singing out and bawling as they drag and pull and jump aloft. The wreck was a mere lump of blackness tumbling out to windward upon the dusky frothing welter, and I thought of the dead sentinel at the helm. What in the name of the saints was there in that figure to put into the sea the enormous solitude I found in the vast surface glimmering to where it melted in shadow against the low stars? What was there in that poor corpse to fling a bleakness into the night wind, to draw an echo as chilling as a madman's cry out of the gusty moaning aloft, to sadden the very star-beams into dull and spectral twinklings? The canvas shook as the silent sailors sheeted it home and voicelessly mastheaded the yards. At three bells in the first watch the Death Ship had been wore to bring her starboard tacks aboard, and under all the canvas she had she was leaning before a small gale with her head to the southward and westward, her sides and decks alive with the twistings of the mystic fires which darkness kindled in her ancient timbers, and her round weather-bow driving the rude black surge back into boiling whiteness.
CHAPTER XIV.
MY LIFE IS ATTEMPTED.
Heading out to sea afresh! Once again pointing the ship's beak for the solitude of the ocean, and starting as it might be on a new struggle that was to end in storm and defeat, in the heavy belabouring of the groaning structure by giant surges, and in a sickening helpless drift of God alone knew how many leagues, ere the sky brightened into blueness once more!
Never had I so strongly felt the horror and misery of the fate which Vanderdecken's hellish impiety had brought down upon his ship and her company of mariners as now, when I saw the yards braced up on the starboard tack, and the vessel laid with her head to the south and west. The fresh wind seemed to shriek the word "Forever!" in her rigging, and the echo was drowned in the wild sobbing sounds that rose out of each long, yearning wash of the sea along her dimly shining bends.
How was I to escape? How deliver Imogene?
I was a sailor, and whilst the ocean found me business, whilst it defined the periods of its detentions of me, I loved it! The freedom of it was dear to my heart; it was my home; it was a glass in which was mirrored the image of the Creator I worshipped. But the prospect of continuously sailing upon it in the Death Ship, of fighting its subtle winds and furious storms to no purpose, converted it into a melancholy waste—a liquid plain of desolation—a mere Hell of waters upon whose sandy floor Hope, with tempest-torn wings, would speedily lie drowned, whilst its surface should grow maddening with the reflected icy sparkling of that Starry Crux, which shone but as a symbol of despair when the eye sought it from these accursed decks and beheld the quick light of its jewels trembling over the yard-arms of the Death Ship.
Shortly after midnight the wind freshened, and it came on to blow with some weight. I had been in my cabin an hour, lying there broad awake, being rendered extraordinarily uneasy by my thoughts. The sea had grown hollow, and the ship plunged quickly and sharply with a heavy thunderous noise of spurned and foaming waters all about her. It was sheer misery lying intensely wakeful in that desolate cabin, that would have been as pitchy black as any ancient castle dungeon but for the glimmering lights, which were so much more terrible than the profoundest shade of blackness could be, that had there been any hole in the ship where the phosphor did not glow, I would cheerfully have carried my bed to it, ay, even if it had been in the bottom of the fore-peak or in the thickest of the midnight of the hold. The rats squeaked, the bulkheads and ceilings seemed alive with crawling glow-worms, groans as of dying, cries as of wounded men sounded out of the interior in which lay stowed the pepper, mace, spices and other Indian commodities of a freight that was hard upon an hundred and fifty years old!
I suspected from the motions of the ship and the hollow, muffled roarings outside, that a gale of wind was brewing, and I resolved to go on deck and take a look at the weather since I could not sleep, for if the wind was north west it would give us such a further drift to the eastwards as would set the African coast at a fearful distance for our round-bowed sea-wagon to come at. On the other hand, the gale might have veered to a quarter favourable to heading for Cape Agulhas. Should this happen, how would the Curse operate? Would the ship be permitted to near the Cape before being blown back? But I suspected the operation of no fixed laws in this doom. To suffer the Death Ship to draw close, to fill the minds of the crew with triumphant assurance of their weathering the Cape of Storms, would be a mere hideous tantalising of them that could surely form no part of the sentence which obliterated from their minds the recollection of past failures. For, let the readers of my narrative bear this steadfastly in view: that if Vanderdecken and his men knew of a surety that they were never to pass the cape into the South Atlantic Ocean, then, as beings capable of thinking and acting, they would long ago have desisted from the attempt and sought rest—if they could not procure death for themselves—haply in that same island of Java from which they had sailed.