In the Sargasso Sea by Thomas A. Janvier (smart books to read .TXT) 📖

feeling in my belly after it

was down. For my breakfast I should eat what was left; and after that,

unless I found fresh supplies quickly, I was in a fair way to lie down

beside my bag of jewels and die of starvation—like the veriest

beggar that ever was. But I did hope a little all the same; and when I

went on again the next morning, though my last scrap of food was

eaten, my spirits kept up pretty well—for I was sure from the look of

the wrecks which I traversed that the dead ancient centre of my

continent at last was behind me, and that its living outer fringe

could not be very far away.

 

All that day I pressed forward steadily, helped by my little

flickering flame of hope—which burned low because sanguine

expectation does not consort well with an empty stomach, yet which

kept alive because the wreck-pack had more and more of a modern look

about it as I went on. But the faintness that I felt coming over me as

the day waned gave me warning that the rope by which I held my life

was a short one; and as the sun dropped down into the mist—at once

thinning it, so that I could see farther, and giving it a ruddy tone

which sent red streams of brightness gleaming over the tangle of

wreckage far down into the west—I felt that the rope must come to an

end altogether, and that I must stop still and let death overtake me,

by the sunset of one day more.

 

And then it was, just as the sun was sinking, that I saw clearly—far

away to the westward—the funnel of a steamer standing out black and

sharp against the blood-red ball that in another minute went down

into the sea. And with that glimpse—which made me sure that I was

close to the edge of the wreck-pack, and so close to food again—a

strong warm rush of hope swept through me that outcast finally my

despair.

XXIX

I GET INTO A SEA CHARNEL-HOUSE

 

That I should get to the steamer that night I knew was clean

impossible, for she lay a long way off from me, and that I had seen

her funnel at all was due to the mere happy accident of its standing

for that single minute directly between me and the setting sun. I did

hope, though, that by pressing hard toward her I might fetch aboard of

some vessel not long wrecked on which I would find eatable food; yet

in this I was disappointed, the shadows coming down on me so fast that

I was forced in a little while to pull up short—stopping while still

a little daylight remained so that I might stow myself the more

comfortably for the night.

 

As to looking for provender on the little old ship that I settled to

camp on, I knew that it was useless. From her build I fixed her as

belonging to the beginning of the present century, and from her depth

in the wreck-pack she probably had met her death-storm not less than

threescore years before; and so what provisions she had carried long

since had wasted away. Yet there was a chance that I might find some

spirits aboard of her—which would be a poor substitute for food, but

better than nothing—and I hurried to have a look in her cabin before

darkness settled down.

 

The cabin hatch was closed, and as it was both locked and swelled with

moisture I could not budge it; but two or three kicks sent the doors

beneath the hatch flying and so opened an entrance for me—that I was

slow to make use of because of a heavy musty stench which poured out

from that shut up place and made me turn a little sick, as I got my

first strong whiff of it. Indeed, I was so faint and so hungry that I

was in no condition to stand up against that curiously vile smell. To

lessen it, by getting a current of air into the cabin, I smashed in

the little skylight—over which some ropes were stretched and still

held the remnant of a tarpaulin, that must have been set in place

while the storm was blowing which sent the ship to her account; and

this so far improved matters that presently I was able to go down the

companionway, though the stench still was horridly strong.

 

At the bottom of the stair, the light being faint, I tripped over

something; and looking down saw bones lying there with a sort of

fungus partly covering them, and to the skull there still clung a mat

of woolly hair plaited here and there into little braids: by which,

and by the size of the bones, it seemed that a negro woman must have

been left fastened into the cabin to die there after the crew had

been washed overboard or had taken to the boats. But even then the

business in which the ship had been engaged did not occur to me; and

after hesitating for a moment I went on into the cabin, and looked

about me as well as I could in the twilight for the case of bottles

that I hoped to find.

 

The case was there, as I was pretty certain that it would be, such

provision rarely being absent from old-time vessels, but all the

bottles had been taken from it except an empty one—which looked as

though the cabin had been opened at the last moment to fetch out

supplies for the boats, and then deliberately locked fast again with

the poor woman inside: an act so barbarous that it did not seem

possible unless a crew of out and out devils had been in charge of the

ancient craft. However, the matter which just then most concerned me

was the liquor that I was in search of, that I might a little stay my

stomach with it against the hunger that was tormenting me; and so I

ransacked the lockers that ran across the stern of the ship and across

a part of the bulkhead forward, in the faint hope that I might come

upon another supply—but my search was a vain one, two of the lockers

having only some mouldy clothing in them, and all the rest being

filled with arms. The stock of muskets and pistols and cutlasses was

so large, so far beyond any honest traders needs, that I could not at

all account for it: until the thought occurred to me that the vessel

I had come aboard of had been a pirate—and that notion seemed to fit

in pretty well with her crew having gone off and left the poor woman

locked up in the cabin to starve. However, as I found out a little

later, while my guess was a close one it still was wrong.

 

The four bunks, two on each side, were not enclosed, and the only door

opening from the cabin was in the bulkhead forward—and worth trying

because it might lead to a storeroom, I thought. It was a very

stout-looking door, and across it, resting in strong iron catches,

were two heavy wooden bars. These puzzled me a good deal, there being

no sense in barring the outside of a storeroom door in that fashion,

since the door did not seem to be locked and anybody could lift the

bars away. However, I got them out of their sockets without much

difficulty; and after a good deal of tugging at a ring made fast in it

I got the door open too—and instantly I was thrust back from the

opening by an outpouring of the same vile heavy musty stench that had

come up from the cabin when I staved in the hatch, only this was still

ranker and more vile. And I found that the door did not lead into a

little storeroom, as I had fancied, but right through from the cabin

to the ship’s main-deck—that stretched away forward in a gloomy

tunnel, as black as a cellar on a rainy night, into which I could

see only for four or five yards. Indeed, but for the way that the ship

chanced to be lying—with her stern toward the west, so that a good

deal of light came in through the broken skylight from the ruddy

sunset—I could not have seen into it at all.

 

But I saw far enough, and more than far enough—and the sight that I

looked on sent all over me a creeping chill. Wherever the light went,

skeletons were lying—with a fungus growth on the bones that gave a

horrid effect of scraps of flesh still clinging to them, and the

loose-lying skulls (of which a couple were close by the doorway) were

covered still with a matting of woolly hair. And I could tell from the

tangle that the skeletons were in—though also lying in some sort of

orderly rows, because of the chains which held them fast—that the

poor wretches to whom they had belonged had writhed and struggled over

each other in their agony: and I could fancy what a hell that black

place must have been while death was doing his work among them, they

all squirming together like worms in a pot; and it seemed to me that I

could hear their yells and howls—at first loud and terrible, and then

growing fainter and fainter until they came to be but low groans of

misery that at last ended softly in dying sighs.

 

The horror of it all came home to me so sharply, after I had stood

there at the doorway for a moment or two held fast by a sort of

ghastly fascination, that I gave a yell myself as keen and as loud as

any which the poor blacks had uttered; and with that I turned about

and dashed up the companionway to the deck as hard as I could go. Nor

could I bear to abide on the slave-ship, nor even near her, for the

night. Very little light was left to me, but I made the most of it and

went scrambling from hulk to hulk until I had put a good distance

behind me—so that I not only could not see her but could not tell

certainly, having twisted and turned a dozen times in my scurrying

flight, in which direction she lay. And being thus rid of her, I

fairly dropped—so weak and so wearied was I—on the deck of the

vessel that I had come to, and lay there for a while resting, with my

breath coming and going in panting sobs.

 

What sort of a craft I had fetched aboard of I did not dare to try to

find out. Going any farther then was impossible, the twilight having

slipped away almost into darkness, and whatever she might be I had to

make the best of her for the night. And so I settled myself into a

corner well up in her bows—that I might be as far away as possible

from any grisly things that might be hid in her cabin—and did my best

to go to sleep. But it was a long while, utterly weary though I was,

before sleep would come to me. My stomach, being pretty well

reconciled by that time to emptiness, did not bother me much; but my

frightened rush away from that sickening charnel-house had left me

greatly tormented by thirst, and my mind was so fevered by the horror

of what I had seen that for a long while I could not stop making

pictures to myself of the black wretches, chained and imprisoned,

writhing under the torture of starvation and at last dying desperate

in the dark. And when sleep did come to me I still had the