CHAPTER IV.ADVENTURE.
How I got there, this chapter will tell.
The calm of that passage of the Indian Ocean!—the days of sunlight, a little too ardent, perhaps; the nights of moons—the calm of the spirit, I mean, profounder than the calm of waters. A ship is either a heaven or a hell; and when it is a heaven, why not let that one suffice? The world empty, and no papers—no daily report from the sick bed of civilisation. Who could want more, or less?
Ceylon, with its new faces and its shipman’s bustle, hardly ruffled our repose, and when it did, I shut my eyes. At the Philippines, it was much the same. Both are fully described in the Gazetteers.
Then it was hey! for the next long lap to the Horn, with only a call for water or forwild-fowl, here and there. We were in the Pacific now, for all its bursts of temper how finely named! Should not all oceans, boreal or equinoctial, have the same generic title, for, spite of storm and reef and waterspout, surely their message is peace? Such stretches of proud, self-sufficing silence in between the gusts, such comforting assurance, in deepest whispers, of the final rest! Here, on salt water only, can we set compass for the land voyage. Now and again it thundered, and the rain crashed down like falling walls of water, but always my soul was still. If the worst happened, we should still reach the deepest bottom at last, and find a soft bed in the ooze.
There was magnetic disturbance of a kind, however, in that Italian skipper. He was not too well acquainted with the course, and he was subject to scares about cannibals. He feared that the natives of these parts might prefer him to his macaroni. He had an old Genoese edition of Cook, and he read it as if it were a deliverance of yesterday. Whenever we touched at an island, existence seemed hardly worth having at his price of precaution—scouts, and rear-guard, and main body, allto effect a positive life insurance against some old woman squatting on a mat. Poisoned arrows, again, were his peculiar aversion, and, to keep out of reach of them, he usually directed landing operations through a trumpet from the ship’s side. In vain I argued that one fear ought to preclude the other, and that, if they poisoned him, he would certainly never be fit to eat. Sometimes I tried to reassure him by landing alone, and returning with an escort of friendly natives, and a store of yams. The lesson was lost on him; he attributed my safety to the fact that my joints offered no temptation to the critical eye.
One glorious afternoon, sailing from the south we saw a peak rising sheer from the ocean and huge, for it still might be about thirty miles off. It seemed to taper from a broad and solid base, like the summit of a cathedral. He said, ‘St. Peter’s.’ I said, ‘St. Paul’s.’ As we got nearer, we made out a small island of solid rock, with sharp precipitous sides, plumped down in the blue, and with no neighbours in sight. Add Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park, and you might haveits total area. It was covered with verdure and stately trees; but a fringe of white at the water’s edge showed that, in spite of the perfectly calm weather, the surf was boiling against its awful shores.
It looked fruity, though desolate, and I insisted on going ashore for guavas, much to the disgust of the skipper. He offered me dried plums, in dissuasion, from a box fringed with paper lace, but the sight of them only increased my craving for the fresh fruit. At last he let me put off alone, crossing himself as I left the ship’s side; but he had done this so often that it made no particular impression on me. I promised to be back in three hours at the outside, while he stood off and on. There was no anchorage for us, even if there had been time to let go.
The little place grew in beauty as I neared it, but in grimness, too. Below the verdure, it was all great fangs of rock, biting into the sea at the sharpest angles. The surf was more terrible than ever on a closer view. The water was flaked with the fury of its strife with the iron-bound shore. I thought of turning back, but I am very fond of guavas.Besides, I had seen something of the management of boats in surf, and I fancied it was easier than it looked. The knack is to mount the crest of a wave, and shoot in with it into a soft place. There was one soft place here, in the angle of a little bay, with earth and wild plants sloping to the water’s edge, and for this I made. I thought I was doing it very nicely, until I felt a heavy blow on the head, and, just before my eyes closed in a dead faint, saw the boat, bottom upwards, floating out to sea. I had missed by a hair’s-breadth, and brushed a boulder half hidden in the grass.
The moon was up when I came to. I must have lain there some hours, wedged comfortably in the brushwood that clung to the stone, high, and nearly dry again, though at the outset I was, of course, wet through. It was a mercy rather than a judgment, after all. The sea had shot me out of its own reach, and no one could have been more considerately stunned. There was a slight flesh wound on my forehead, but no bone broken anywhere. I sat up, and brought my thoughts back to life; then slowly found my feet, and went to look for my hat. In afew moments I became aware that there were other things missing, namely, the boat and the ship.
All were gone. The great stretch of sea was without a speck. I was alone, abandoned to starvation or other miserable death. I threw myself on the ground and sobbed.
What had become of the ship? Alas! my theory of probabilities was only too easy to form. They had found the upturned boat, and perhaps the hat, had jumped to the conclusion that it was all over with me, and made off, pursued no doubt, in fancy, by a fleet of cannibal canoes. And here was I, a second Robinson, on a lonely shore, without so much as a wreck to start me in housekeeping.
The rock sloped at this place, as I have said, and I easily climbed to the summit, and looked around. I meant to sit down there, and form plans. But I forgot all about the morrow, as soon as I saw what nature had sent me that night. It was the full moon; and to know what moonlight is you must come to these Southern seas. I had no print to read, but I could trace the lines in my palm, and I was consoled by the observation that my lineof life was a long one. Behind me were the massive shadows of higher hills, before, a tableland of grass and wild trees, bathed in the soothing light, and beyond, the molten silver of the sea fringed with the everlasting surf. The only landward sound was the soft ‘click, click’ of some native bird. It was impossible to feel sad; it was a place to die in, if not to live in, come what might.
The night was warm, I felt no chill, and I sat down and thought the thoughts one thinks in the moonlight. The pity of it that one should ever take the trouble to be less than one’s best in this passing flash of life! What matters the pain for the purchase of this certain joy—the only joy that is sure, so why not make the most of it in valour, honour, fortitude, without waiting for aught sweeter in the dim beatitudes beyond? So to live as, at this moment, thou couldst cease to live! It is the moon’s message, delivered with unfailing regularity once a month, and her main business is to deliver it, not to suck up tides. The shilling almanacs will never contain everything till they devote a line to this interesting fact. When the moon gets that message into the soul,all else must make way for it. Stockbroking seems a pity, in her mildly searching light, with most other modes of getting on; and no wonder there is a tradition in Bayswater families that this kind of natural illumination is bad for the eyes.
I, too, was not unmindful of a domestic tradition on the subject; and, when I felt sleepy, I sought the shade of a hill. I made my bed of brushwood, and sank down. I ought to have felt cold, and caught cold, but I did neither—perhaps the very dews were pickled by the sea air.
The sun called me betimes next morning, and I rose at once, painfully hungry, but in perfect serenity of mind. Now that I saw more of my new home, I could not think of it as my grave. Before me, to the north east, rose the tremendous peak we had sighted from the sea. The hills into which it sank at its base stretched right across the island, forming a ridge at right angles to the other previously seen from the ship. I was thus shut in a corner, and I could see nothing of what lay beyond. I might have seen more by mounting the hill, but I seemed to dreadto do it. I thought I would follow the coast line, from a vague idea that it would be safer to have the sea at hand. There was no sign of human life, but the air was alive with myriads of sea birds, wheeling about the rock. The fly catchers, darting through the air for breakfast, added to the animation of the scene, but, of course, made me feel hungrier than ever. There was a distant prospect of a meal, however, in the wild goats looking down on me from the hills—in grave wonder, I hoped, at their first sight of a man. Early as it was, tiny lizards darted about at my feet in evident distress of mind.
Always skirting the rock, I came soon to another peak, lower than the one first seen, but still awful in its sheer fall of six or seven hundred feet right into the sea. I lay down, to peep over the almost perpendicular wall, and rose again with a sense that I and my island were going to be very cosy together, and all to ourselves. Then, lifting my eyes to the highest summit beyond me, to measure the breadth of our domain, I saw a human shape, standing clean and clear and quiet on the verge, against the cloudless sky.