HOW WE LANDED ON THE ISLAND.
"Friend Sancho," said the Duke, "the isle I have promised you
can neither stir nor fly. And whether you return to it upon
the flying horse, or trudge back to it in misfortune, a pilgrim
from house to house and from inn to inn, you will always find
your isle just where you left it, and your islanders with the
same good will to welcome you as they ever had."--
_Don Quixote_.
Night fell, and the xebec had made no further motion to attack: but
yet, as the calm held, Captain Pomery continued gloomy; nor did his
gloom lift at all when the enemy, as soon as it was thoroughly dark,
began to burn flares and torches.
"That will be a signal to the shore," said he. "Though, please God,
they are too far for it to reach."
The illumination served us in one way. While it lasted, no boat
could push out from the xebec without our perceiving it. The fires
lasted until after eight bells, when the captain, believing that he
scented a breeze ahead, turned us out into the boat again, to tow the
ketch toward it. For my part, I tugged and sweated, but scented no
breeze. On the contrary, the night seemed intolerably close and
sultry, as though brooding a thunderstorm. When the xebec's fires
died down, darkness settled on us like a cap. The only light came
from the water, where our oars swirled it in pools of briming,[1] or
the tow-rope dropped for a moment and left for another moment a trail
of fire.
Neither Mr. Fett nor Mr. Badcock could pull an oar, and old
Worthyvale had not the strength for it. The rest of us--all but the
captain, who steered and kept what watch he could astern--took the
rowing by hourly relays, pair and pair: Billy Priske and I, my father
and Mike Halliday, Nat and Roger Wearne.
It had come round again to Billy's turn and mine, and the hour was
that darkest one which promises the near daylight. Captain Pomery,
foreboding that dawn would bring with it an instant need of a clear
head, and being by this time overweighted with drowsiness, had
stepped below for forty winks, leaving Wearne in charge of the helm.
My father and Nat had tumbled into their berths. We had left Mr.
Badcock stationed and keeping watch on the larboard side, near the
waist; and now and then, as we tugged, I fancied I could see the dim
figures of Mr. Fett and Mike Halliday standing above us in converse
near the bows.
Of imminent danger--danger close at hand--I had no fear at all,
trusting that the still night would carry any sound of mischief, and,
moreover, that no boat could approach without being signalled, a
hundred yards off, by the briming in the water. So intolerably hot
and breathless had the night become that I spoke to Billy to ease a
stroke while I pulled off my shirt. I had drawn it over my head and
was slipping my arms clear of the sleeves, when I felt, or thought I
felt, a light waft of wind on my right cheek--the first breath of the
gathering thunderstorm--and turned up my face towards it. At that
instant I heard a short warning cry from somewhere by the helm; not a
call of alarm, but just such a gasp as a man will utter when slapped
on the shoulder at unawares from behind; then a patter of naked feet
rushing aft; then a score of outcries blending into one wild yell as
the whole boatload of Moors leapt and swarmed over the starboard
bulwarks.
The tow-rope, tautening under the last stroke of our oars, had drawn
the boat back in its recoil, and she now drifted close under the
_Gauntlet's_ jibboom, which ran out upon a very short bowsprit.
I stood up, and reaching for a grip on the dolphin-striker, swung
myself on to the bobstay and thence to the cap of the bowsprit, where
I sat astride for a moment while Billy followed. We were barefoot
both and naked to the waist. Cautiously as a pair of cats, we worked
along the bowsprit to the foremast stay, at the foot of which the
foresail lay loose and ready for hoisting. With a fold of this I
covered myself and peered along the pitch-dark deck.
No shot had been fired. I could distinguish no sound of struggle, no
English voice in all the din. The ship seemed to be full only of
yellings, rushings to-and-fro of feet, wild hammerings upon timber,
solid and hollow: and these pell-mell noises made the darkness, if
not darker, at least more terribly confusing.
The cries abated a little; the noise of hammering increased, and at
the same time grew persistent and regular, almost methodical. I had
no sooner guessed the meaning of this--that the ruffians were
fastening down the hatches on their prisoners--than one of them, at
the far end of the ship, either fetched or found a lantern, lit it,
and stood it on the after-hatch. Its rays glinted on the white teeth
and eyeballs and dusky shining skins of a whole ring of Moors
gathered around the hatchway and nailing all secure.
Now for the first time it came into my mind that these rovers spared
to kill while there remained a chance of taking their prisoners
alive; that their prey was ever the crew before the cargo; and that,
as for the captured vessel, they usually scuttled and sank her if she
drew too much water for their shallow harbours, or if (like the
_Gauntlet_) she lacked the speed for their trade. The chances were,
then, that my father yet lived. Yet how could I, naked and unarmed,
reach to him or help him?
A sound, almost plumb beneath me, recalled me to more selfish alarms.
The Moors, whether they came from the xebec or, as we agreed later,
more probably from shore, in answer to the xebec's signal-lights--
must have dropped down on us without stroke of oars. It may be that
for the last half a mile or more they had wriggled their boat down to
the attack by means of an oar or sweep shipped in the stern notch: a
device which would avoid all noise and, if they came slowly, all
warning but the ripple of briming off the bows. In any case they had
not failed to observe that the ketch was being towed; and now, having
discharged her boarding-party, their boat pushed forward to capture
ours, which lay beneath us bumping idly against the _Gauntlet's_
stem. I heard some half a dozen of them start to jabber as they
found it empty. I divined--I could not see--the astonishment in
their faces, as they stared up into the darkness.
Just then--perhaps in response to their cries--a comrade on deck ran
forward to the bows and leaned over to hail them, standing so close
to me that his shoulder brushed against the fold of the foresail
within which I cowered. Like me he was bare to the waist, but around
his loins he wore a belt scaled with silver sequins, glimmering
against the ray of the lantern on the after-hatch, and maybe also in
the first weak light of the approaching dawn. . . .
A madness took me at the sight. In a sudden rage I gripped the
forestay with my left hand, lowered my right, and, slipping my
fingers under his belt, lifted him--he was a light man--swung him
outboard and overboard, and dropped him into the sea.
I heard the splash; with an ugly thud, which told me that some part
of him had struck the boat's gunwale. I waited--it seemed that I
waited many seconds--expecting the answering yell, or a shot perhaps.
Still gripping the forestay with my left hand, I bent forward, ready
to leap for deck. But even as I bent, the bowsprit shook under me
like a whip, and the deck before me opened in a yellow sheet of fire.
The whole ship seemed to burst asunder and shut again, the flame of
the explosion went wavering up the rigging, and I found myself
hanging on to the forestay and dangling over emptiness. While I
dangled I heard in the roaring echoes another splash, and knew that
Billy Priske had been thrown from his hold; a splash, and close upon
it a heavy grinding sound, a crash of burst planks, an outcry ending
in a wail as the lifting sea bore back the Moor's boat and our own
together upon the Gauntlet's stem and smashed them like egg-shells.
Then, as the ketch heaved and heaved again in the light of the flames
that ran up the tarry rigging, at one stride the dawn was on us; with
no flush of sunshine, but with a grey, steel-coloured ray that cut
the darkness like a sword. I had managed to hoist myself again to
the bowsprit, and, straddling it, had time in one glance aft to take
in the scene of ruin. Yet in that glance I saw it--the yawning hole,
the upheaved jagged deck-planks, the dark bodies hurled to right and
left into the scuppers--by three separate lights: by the yellow light
of the flames in the rigging, by the steel-grey light of dawn, and by
a sudden white-hot flush as the lightning ripped open the belly of
heaven and let loose the rain. While I blinked in the glare, the
mizzen-mast crashed overside. I cannot tell whether the lightning
struck and split it, or whether, already blasted by the explosion, it
had stood upright for those few seconds until a heave of the swell
snapped the charred stays and released it. Nay, even the dead beat
of the rain may have helped.
In all my life I have never known such rain. Its noise drowned the
thunderclap. It fell in no drops or threads of drops, but in one
solid flood as from a burst bag. It extinguished the blaze in the
rigging as easily as you would blow out a candle. It beat me down
prone upon the bowsprit, and with such force that I felt my ribs
giving upon the timber. It stunned me as a bather is stunned who,
swimming in a pool beneath a waterfall, ventures his head into the
actual cascade. It flooded the deck so that two minutes later, when
I managed to lift my head, I saw the bodies of two Moors washed down
the starboard scuppers and clean through a gap in the broken
bulwarks, their brown legs lifting as they toppled and shot over the
edge.
No wind had preceded the storm. The lightning had leapt out of a
still sky--still, that is, until jarred and set vibrating by the
explosion. But now, as the downpour eased, the wind came on us with
a howl, catching the ship so fierce a cuff, as she rolled with
mainsail set and no way on her, that she careened until the sea ran
in through her lee scuppers, and, for all the loss of her
mizzen-mast, came close to being thrown on her beam ends.
While she righted herself--which she began to do but slowly--I leapt
for the deck and ran aft, avoiding the jagged splinters, in time to
catch sight of my father's head and shoulders emerging through the
burst hatchway.
"Hullo!" he sang out cheerfully, lifting his voice against the wind.
"God be praised, lad! I was fearing we had lost you."
"But what has happened?" I shouted.
Before he could answer a voice hailed us over stern, and we hurried
aft to find Billy Priske dragging himself towards the ship by the
raffle of mizzen-rigging. We hoisted him in over the quarter, and
he dropped upon deck in a sitting posture.
"Is my head on?" he asked, taking it in both hands.
"You are hurt, Billy?"
"Not's I know by," answered Billy, and stared about him.
"What's become o' the brown vermin?"
"They seem to have disappeared," said my father, likewise looking
about him.
"But what on earth has happened?" I persisted, catching him by the
shoulder and shouting in his ear above the roar of a second sudden
squall.
"I--blew up--the ship. Captain wouldn't listen--academical fellows,
these skippers--like every one else brought up in a profession.
So I mutinied and blew--her--up. He's wounded, by the way."
"Tell you what," yelled Billy, staggering up, "we'll be at the bottom
in two shakes if somebody don't handle her in these puffs.
Why, where's the wheel?"
"Gone," answered my father. "Blown away, it appears."
"_And_ she don't right herself!"
"Ballast has shifted. The gunpowder blew it every way. Well,
well--poor old John Worthyvale won't mourn it. I left him below past
praying for."
"Look here, Master Prosper," shouted Billy. "If the ship won't steer
we must get that mains'l in, or we're lost men. Run you and cast off
the peak halliards while I lower! The Lord be praised, here's Mike,
too," he cried, as Mike Halliday appeared at the hatchway, nursing a
badly burnt arm. "Glad to see ye, Mike, and wish I could say the
same to poor Roger. The devils knifed poor Roger, I reckon."
"No, they did not," said my father, in a lull of the wind.
"They knocked him on the back of the head and slid his body down the
after-companion. The noise of him bumping down the ladder was what
first fetched me awake. He's a trifle dazed yet, but recovering."
"'Tis a short life he'll recover to, unless we stir ourselves."
Billy clutched my father's arm. "Look 'ee, master! See what they
heathens be doin'!"
"We have scared 'em," said my father. "They are putting about."
"_Something_ has scared 'em, sure 'nough. But if 'tis from us they
be in any such hurry to get away, why did they take in a reef before
putting the helm over? No, no, master: they know the weather
hereabouts, and we don't. We've been reckonin' this for a
thunderstorm--a short blow and soon over. They know better, seemin'
to me. Else why don't they tack alongside and finish us?"
"I believe you are right," said my father, after a long look to
windward.
"And I'm sure of it," insisted Billy. "What's more, if we can't
right the ballast a bit and get steerage way on her afore the sea
works up, she'll go down under us inside the next two hours.
There's the pumps, too: for if she don't take in water like a basket
I was never born in Wendron parish an' taught blastin'. Why, master,
you must ha' blown the very oakum out of her seams!"
My father frowned thoughtfully. "That's true," said he; "I have been
congratulating myself too soon. Billy, in the absence of Captain
Pomery I appoint you skipper. You have an ugly job to face, but do
your best."
"Skipper, be I? Then right you are!" answered Billy, with a cheerful
smile. "An' the first order is for you and Master Prosper here to
tumble below an' heft ballast for your lives. Be the two specimens
safe?"
"Eh?" It took my father a second, maybe, to fit this description to
Messrs. Badcock and Fett. "Ah, to be sure! Yes, I left them safe
and unhurt."
"What's no good never comes to harm," said Billy. "Send 'em on deck,
then, and I'll put 'em on to the pumps."
We left Billy face to face with a job which indeed looked to be past
hope. The wheel had gone, and with it the binnacle; and where these
had stood, from the stump of the broken mizzen-mast right aft to the
taffrail, there yawned a mighty hole fringed with splintered
deck-planking. The explosion had gutted after-hold, after-cabin,
sail-locker, and laid all bare even to the stern-post. `Twas a
marvel the stern itself had not been blown out: but as a set-off
against this mercy--and the most grievous of all, though as yet we
had not discovered it--we had lost our rudder-head, and the rudder
itself hung by a single pintle.
"Nevertheless," maintained my father, as we toiled together upon the
ballast, "I took the only course, and in like circumstances I would
venture it again. The captain very properly thought first of his
ship: but I preferred to think that we were in a hurry."
"How did you contrive it?" I asked, pausing to ease my back, and
listening for a moment to the sound of hatchets on deck.
(They were cutting away the tangle of the mizzen rigging.)
"Very simply," said he. "There must have been a dozen hammering on
the after-hatch, and I guessed they would have another dozen looking
on and offering advice: so I sent Halliday to fetch a keg of powder,
and poured about half of it on the top stair of the companion.
The rest Halliday took and heaped on a sea-chest raised on a couple
of tables close under the deck. We ran up our trains on a couple of
planks laid aslant, and touched off at a signal. There were two
explosions, but we timed them so prettily that I believe they went
off in one."
"They did," said I.
"My wits must have been pretty clear, then--at the moment.
Afterwards (I don't mind confessing to you) I lay for some minutes
where the explosion flung me. In my hurry I had overdone the dose."
We had been shovelling for an hour and more. Already the ship began
to labour heavily, and my father climbed to the deck to observe the
alteration in her trim. He dropped back and picked up his shovel
again in a chastened silence. In fact, deputy-captain Priske (who
had just accomplished the ticklish task of securing the rudder and
lashing a couple of ropes to its broken head for steering-gear) had
ordered him back to work, using language not unmixed with
objurgation.
For all our efforts the _Gauntlet_ still canted heavily to leeward,
and as the gale grew to its height the little canvas necessary to
heave-to came near to drowning us. Towards midnight our plight grew
so desperate that Billy, consulting no one, determined to risk all--
the unknown dangers of the coast, his complete ignorance of
navigation, the risk of presenting her crazy stern timbers to the
following seas--and run for it. At once we were called up from the
hold and set to relieve the half-dead workers at the pumps.
All that night we ran blindly, and all next day. The gale had
southerned, and we no longer feared a lee-shore: but for forty-eight
hours we lived with the present knowledge that the next stern wave
might engulf us as its predecessor had just missed to do. The waves,
too, in this inland sea, were not the great rollers--the great kindly
giants--of our Atlantic gales, but shorter and more vicious in
impact: and, under Heaven, our only hope against them hung by the two
ropes of Billy's jury steering-gear.
They served us nobly. Towards sunset of the second day, although to
eye and ear the gale had not sensibly abated, and the sea ran by us
as tall as ever, we knew that the worst was over. We could not have
explained our assurance. It was a feeling--no more--but one which
any man will recognize who has outlived a like time of peril on the
sea. We did not hope again, for we were past the effort to hope.
Numb, drenched, our very skins bleached like a washerwoman's hands,
our eyes caked with brine, our limbs so broken with weariness of the
eternal pumping that when our shift was done, where we fell there we
lay, and had to be kicked aside--we had scarcely the spirit to choose
between life and death. Yet all the while we had been fighting for
life like madmen.
Towards the close of the day, too, Roger Wearne had made shift to
crawl on deck and bear a hand. Captain Pomery lay in the huddle of
the forecastle, no man tending him: and old Worthyvale awaited
burial, stretched in the hold upon the ballast.
At whiles, as my fingers cramped themselves around the handle of the
pump, it seemed as though we had been fighting this fight, tholing
this misery, gripping the verge of this precipice for years upon
years, and this nightmare sat heaviest upon me when the third morning
broke and I turned in the sudden blessed sunshine--but we blessed it
not--and saw what age the struggle had written on my father's face.
I passed a hand over my eyes, and at that moment Mr. Fett, who had
been snatching an hour's sleep below--and no man better deserved it--
thrust his head up through the broken hatchway, carolling--
"To all you ladies now at land
We men at sea indite,
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write:
Our paper, pen, and ink and we
Roll up and down our ships at sea,
With a fa-_la_-LA!"
"Catch him!" cried my father, sharply; but he meant not Mr. Fett.
His eyes were on Billy Priske, who, perched on the temporary
platform, where almost without relief he had sat and steered us,
shouting his orders without sign of fatigue, sank forward with the
rudder ropes dragging through, his hands, and dropped into the hold.
For me, I cast myself down on deck with face upturned to the sun, and
slept.
I woke to find my father seated close to me, cross-legged, examining
a sextant.
"The plague of it is," he grumbled, "that even supposing myself to
have mastered this diabolical instrument, we have ne'er a compass on
board."
Glancing aft I saw that Mike Halliday had taken Billy's place at the
helm. At my elbow lay Nat, still sleeping. Mr. Badcock had crawled
to the bulwarks, and leaned there in uncontrollable sea-sickness.
Until the gale was done I believe he had not felt a qualm. Now, on
the top of his nausea, he had to endure the raillery of Mr. Fett,
whose active fancy had already invented a grotesque and wholly
untruthful accusation against his friend--namely, that when assailed
by the Moors, and in the act of being kicked below, he had dropped on
his knees and offered to turn Mohammedan.
That evening we committed old Worthyvale's body to the sea, and my
father, having taken his first observation at noon, carefully entered
the latitude and longitude in his pocket-book. On consulting the
chart we found the alleged bearings somewhere south of Asia-Minor--to
be exact, off the coast of Pamphylia. My father therefore added the
word "approximately" to his entry, and waited for Captain Pomery to
recover.
Though the sea went down even more quickly than it had arisen, the
pumps kept us fairly busy. All that night, under a clear and starry
sky, we steered for the north-east with the wind brisk upon our
starboard quarter.
"I have no chart,
No compass but a heart,"
quoted I in mischief to Nat. But Nat, having passed through a real
gale, had saved not sufficient fondness for his verse to blush, for
it. We should have been mournful for old Worthyvale, but that night
we knew only that it was good, being young, to have escaped death.
Under the stars we made bad jokes on Mr. Badcock's sea-sickness, and
sang in chorus to Mr. Fett's solos--
"With a fa-la, fa-la, fa-la-la!
To all you ladies now at land . . ."
Next morning Captain Pomery (whose hurt was a pretty severe
concussion of the skull, the explosion having flung him into the
panelling of the ship's cabin, and against the knee of a beam)
returned to duty, and professed himself able, with help, to take a
reckoning. He relieved us of another anxiety by producing a
pocket-compass from his fob.
My father held the sextant for him, while Nat, under instructions,
worked out the sum. With a compass, upon a chart spread on the deck,
I pricked out the bearings--with a result that astonished all as I
leapt up and stared across the bows.
"Why, lad, by the look of you we should be running ashore!"
exclaimed my father.
"And so we should be at this moment," said I, "were not the reckoning
out."
Captain Pomery reached out for the paper. "The reckoning is right
enough," said he, after studying it awhile.
"Then on what land, in Heaven's name, are we running?" my father
demanded testily.
"Why, on Corsica," I answered, pointing with my compass's foot as he
bent over the chart. "On Corsica. Where else?"
It wanted between three and four hours of sunset when we made the
landfall and assured ourselves that what appeared so like a low cloud
on the east-north-eastern horizon was indeed the wished-for island.
We fell to discussing our best way to approach it; my father at first
maintaining that the coast would be watched by Genoese vessels, and
therefore we should do wisely to take down sail and wait for
darkness.
Against this, Captain Pomery maintained--
1. That we were carrying a fair wind, and the Lord knew how long
that would hold.
2. That the moon would rise in less than three hours after dark, and
thenceforth we should run almost the same risk of detection as by
daylight.
3. That in any case we could pass for what we really were, an
English trader in ballast, barely escaped from shipwreck, dismasted,
with broken steerage, making for the nearest port.
"Man," said Captain Pomery, looking about him, "we must be a poor set
of liars if we can't pitch a yarn on _this_ evidence!"
My father allowed himself to be persuaded, the more easily as the
argument jumped with his impatience. Accordingly, we stood on for
land, making no concealment; and the wind holding steady on our beam,
and the sun dropping astern of us in a sky without a cloud, 'twas
incredible how soon we began to make out the features of the land.
It rose like a shield to a central boss, which trembled, as it were,
into view and revealed itself a mountain peak, snowcapped and
shining, before ever the purple mist began to slip from the slopes
below it and disclose their true verdure. No sail broke the expanse
of sea between us and the shore; and, as we neared it, no scarp of
cliff, no house or group of houses broke the island's green monotony.
From the water's edge to the high snow-line it might have been built
of moss, so vivid its colour was, yet soft as velvet, and softer and
still more vivid as we approached.
Within two miles of shore, and not long before dark, the wind (as
Captain Pomery had promised) broke off and headed us, blowing cool
and fresh off the land. I was hauling in the foresheet and belaying
when a sudden waft of fragrance fetched me upright, with head thrown
back and nostrils inhaling the breeze.
"Ay," said my father, at my elbow, "there is no scent on earth to
compare with it. You smell the _macchia_, lad. Drink well your
first draught of it, delicious as first love."
"But somewhere--at some time--I have smelt it before," said I.
"The same scent, only fainter. Why does it remind me of home?"
My father considered. "I will tell you," he said. "In the corridor
at home, outside my bedroom door, stands a wardrobe, and in it hang
the clothes I wore, near upon twenty years ago, in Corsica.
They keep the fragrance of the _macchia_ yet; and if, as a child, you
ever opened that wardrobe, you recall it at this moment."
"Yes," said I, "that was the scent."
My father leaned and gazed at the island with dim eyes.
Still no sign of house or habitation greeted us as we worked by short
tacks towards a deep bay which my father, after a prolonged
consultation of the chart, decided to be that of Sagona. A sharp
promontory ran out upon its northern side, and within the shelter of
this Captain Pomery looked to find good anchorage. But the
_Gauntlet_, after all her battering, lay so poorly to the wind that
darkness overtook us a good mile from land, and before we weathered
the point and cast anchor in a little bight within, the moon had
risen. It showed us a steep shore near at hand, with many grey
pinnacles of granite glimmering high over dark masses of forest
trees, and in the farthest angle of the bight its rays travelled in
silver down the waters of a miniature creek.
The hawser ran out into five fathoms of water. We had lost our boat:
but Billy Priske had spent his afternoon in fashioning a raft out of
four empty casks and a dozen broken lengths of deck-planking; and on
this, leaving the seamen on board, the rest of us pushed off for
shore. For paddles we used a couple of spare oars.
The water, smooth as in a lake, gave us our choice to make a landing
where we would. My father, however, who had taken command, chose to
steer straight for the entrance of the little creek. There, between
tall entrance rocks of granite, we passed through it into the shadow
of folding woods where the moon was lost to us. Sounding with our
paddles, we found a good depth of water under the raft, lit a
lantern, and pushed on, my father promising that we should discover a
village or at least a hamlet at the creek-head.
"And you will find the inhabitants--your subjects, Prosper--
hospitable, too. Whatever the island may have been in Seneca's time,
to deserve the abuse he heaped on it in exile, to-day the Corsicans
keep more of the old classical virtues than any nation known to me.
In vendetta they will slay one another, using the worst treachery;
but a stranger may walk the length of the island unarmed--save
against the Genoese--and find a meal at the poorest cottage, and a
bed, however rough, whereon he may sleep untroubled by suspicion."
The raft grated and took ground on a shelving bank of sand, and Nat,
who stood forward holding the lantern, made a motion to step on
shore. My father restrained him.
"Prosper goes first."
I stepped on to the bank. My father, following, stooped, gathered a
handful of the fine granite sand, and holding it in the lantern's
light, let it run through his fingers.
"Hat off, lad! and salute your kingdom!"
"But where," said I, "be my subjects?"
It seemed, as we formed ourselves into marching order, that I was on
the point to be answered. For above the bank we came to a causeway
which our lanterns plainly showed us to be man's handiwork; and
following it round the bend of a valley, where a stream sang its way
down to the creek, came suddenly on a flat meadow swept by the pale
light and rising to a grassy slope, where a score of whitewashed
houses huddled around a tall belfry, all glimmering under the moon.
"In Corsica," repeated my father, leading the way across the meadow,
"every householder is a host."
He halted at the base of the village street.
"It is curious, however, that the dogs have not heard us.
Their barking, as a rule, is something to remember."
He stepped up to the first house to knock. There was no door to
knock upon. The building stood open, desolate. Our lanterns showed
the grass growing on its threshold.
We tried the next and the next. The whole village lay dead,
abandoned. We gathered in the street and shouted, raising our
lanterns aloft. No voice answered us.
[1] Phosphorescence.