_A Burning Trireme_
[Sidenote: The Solitary Voyager]
Never was man more indifferent to the result than the solitary voyager of
the burning trireme. What had life for me? I gazed round me. The element
of fire reigned supreme. The shore—mountain, vale, and sand—was bright
as day from the blaze of the tents and the floating fragments of the
galleys. The heavens were an arch of angry splendor—every stooping cloud
swept along reddened with the various dyes of the conflagration below.
The sea was a rolling abyss of the fiercest color of slaughter. The
blazing vessels, loosened from the shore, rushed madly before the storm,
sheet and shroud shaking loose abroad like vast wings of flame.
At length all disappeared. The shore faded far into a dim line of light;
the galleys sank or were consumed; the sea grew dark again. But the
trireme, strongly built and of immense size, still fed the flame, and
still shot on through the tempest, that fell on her the more furiously
as she lost the cover of the land. The waves rose to a height that often
baffled the wind, and left me floating in a strange calm between two
black walls of water reaching to the clouds, and on whose smooth sides
the image of the burning vessel was reflected as strongly as in a mirror.
But the ascent to the summit of those fearful barriers again let in the
storm in its rage. The tops of the billows were whirled off in sheets of
foam; the wind tore mast and sail away, and the vessel was dashed forward
like a stone discharged from an engine. I stood on the poop, which the
spray and the wind kept clear of flame, and contemplated, with some
feeling of the fierce grandeur of the spectacle, the fire rolling over
the forward part of the vessel in a thousand shapes and folds.
While I was thus careering along, like the genius of fire upon his
throne, I caught a glimpse of sails scattering in every direction before
me—I had rushed into the middle of one of those small trading-fleets
that coasted annually between the Euxine and the Nile. They flew, as if
pursued by a fiend. But the same wind that bore them, bore me; and their
screams, as the trireme bounded from billow to billow on their track,
were audible even through the roarings of the storm. They gradually
succeeded in spreading themselves so far that the contact with the flame
must be partial. But on one, the largest and most crowded, the trireme
bore inevitably down. The hunted ship tried every mode of escape in vain;
it maneuvered with extraordinary skill; but the pursuer, lightened of
every burden, rushed on like a messenger of vengeance.
[Sidenote: The Sound of a Voice]
I could distinctly see the confusion and misery of the crowd that covered
the deck; men and women kneeling, weeping, fainting, or, in the fierce
riot of despair, struggling for some wretched spoil that a few moments
more must tear from all alike. But among the fearful mingling of sounds,
one voice I suddenly heard that struck to my soul. It alone roused me
from my stern scorn of human suffering. I no longer looked upon those
beings as upon insects, that must be crushed in the revolution of the
great wheel of fate. The heart, the living human heart, palpitated
within me. I rushed to the side of the trireme, and with voice and hand
made signals to the crew to take me on board. But at my call a cry of
agony rang through the vessel. All fled to its farther part, but a few,
who, unable to move, were seen on their knees, and in the attitudes of
preternatural fear, imploring every power of heaven. Shocked by the
consciousness that, even in the hour when mutual hazard softens the heart
of man, I was an object of horror, I shrank back. I heard the voice once
more, and once more resolving to get on board, flung a burning fragment
over the side to help me through the waves.
[Illustration: “The solitary voyager of the burning trireme.”
[_see page 317._
Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]
But the time was past. The fragment had scarcely touched the foam when a
sheet of lightning wrapped sea and sky; the flying vessel was gone. My
eye looked but upon the wilderness of waters. The flash was fatal. It had
struck the hold of my trireme, in which was stowed a large freightage
of the bitumen and niter of the desert. A column of flame, white as
silver, rose straight and steadily up to the clouds; and the huge ship,
disparting timber by timber, reeled, heaved, and plunged headlong into
the bosom of the ocean.
[Sidenote: In a Whirlpool]
I rose to the surface from a prodigious depth. I was nearly breathless.
My limbs were wasted with famine and fatigue; but the tossing of the
surges sustained and swept me on. The chill at last benumbed me, and my
limbs were heavy as iron, when a broken mast rolling by entangled me in
its cordage. It drove toward a point of land, round which the current
swept. Strongly netted in the wreck, I was dragged along, sometimes above
the billow, sometimes below. But a violent shock released me, and with a
new terror I felt myself go down. I was engulfed in the whirlpool!
Every sensation was horribly vivid. I had the full consciousness of life
and of the unfathomable depth into which I was descending. I heard the
roar and rushing of the waters round me; the holding of my breath was
torture; I strained, struggled, tossed out my arms, and grasped madly
around, as if to catch something that might retard my hideous descent.
My eyes were open. I never was less stunned by shock or fear. The solid
darkness, the suffocation, the furious whirl of the eddy that spun me
round its huge circle like an atom of sand—every sense of drowning—passed
through my shattered frame with an individual and successive pang. I at
last touched something, whether living or dead, fish or stone, I know
not; but the impulse changed my direction, and I was darted up to the
surface in a little bay sheltered by hills.
The storm had gone with the rapidity of the south. The sun burned bright
and broad above my head; the pleasant breath of groves and flowery
perfumes came on the waters; a distant sound of sweet voices lingered on
the air. Like one roused from a frightful dream, I could scarcely believe
that this was reality. But the rolling waters behind gave me sudden
evidence. A billow, the last messenger of the storm, burst into the
little bay, filled it to the brim with foam, and tossed me far forward.
It rolled back, dragging with it the sedge and pebbles of the beach. I
grasped the trunk of an olive, rough and firm as the rock itself. The
retiring waves left me; I felt my way some paces among the trees, cast
myself down, and, worn out with fatigue, had scarcely reached their shade
when I fainted.
[Sidenote: A Quiet Spot]
I awoke in the decline of the day, as I could perceive by the yellow and
orange hues that colored the thick branches above me. I was lying in a
delicious recess, crowded with fruit-trees; my bed was the turf, but it
was soft as down; a solitary nightingale above my head was sending forth
snatches of that melody which night prolongs into the very voice of
sweetness and sorrow; and a balmy air from the wild thyme and blossoms of
the rose breathed soothingly even to the mind.
I had been thrown on one of the little isles that lie off Anthædon, a
portion of the Philistine territory before it was won by our hero the
Maccabee. The commerce which once filled the arm of the sea near Gaza had
perished in the change of masters, and silence and seclusion reigned in a
spot formerly echoing with the tumult of merchant and mariner. The little
isle, the favorite retreat of the opulent Greek and Syrian traders in the
overpowering heats of summer, and cultivated with the lavish expenditure
of commercial wealth, now gave no proof of its ever having felt the foot
of man, but in the spontaneous exuberance of flowers, once brought from
every region of the East and West, and the exquisite fruits that still
glowed on its slopes and dells.
[Sidenote: A Refuge]
In all things else Nature had resumed her rights; the gilded pavilions,
the temples of Parian and Numidian stone, were in ruins, and buried under
a carpet of roses and myrtles. The statues left but here and there a
remnant of themselves, a lovely relic, wreathed over in fantastic spirals
by the clematis and other climbing plants. The sculptured fountain let
its waters loose over the ground, and the guardian genius that hung in
marble beauty over the spring had long since resigned his charge and lay
mutilated and discolored with the air and the dew. But the spring still
gushed, bounding bright between the gray fissures of the cliff, and
marking its course through the plain by the richer mazes of green.
To me, who was as weary of existence as ever was galley-slave, this spot
of quiet loveliness had a tenfold power. My mind, like my body, longed
for rest.
Through life I had walked in a thorny path; my ambition had winged
a tempestuous atmosphere. Useless hazards, wild projects, bitter
sufferings, were my portion. Those feelings in which alone I could be
said to live had all been made inlets of pain. The love which nature and
justice won from me to my family was perpetually thwarted by a chain of
circumstances that made me a wretched, helpless, and solitary man. What
then could I do better than abandon the idle hope of finding happiness
among mankind; break off the trial, which must be prolonged only to my
evil; and elude the fate that destined me to be an exile in the world?
Yes, I would no longer be a man of suffering, in the presence of its
happiness; a wretch stripped of an actual purpose, or a solid hope, in
the midst of its activity and triumph; the abhorred example of a career
miserable with defeated pursuit, and tantalized with expectations vain as
the ripple on the stream!
In this stern resolve, gathering courage from despair—as the criminal
on the scaffold scoffs at the world that rejects him—I determined to
exclude recollection. The spot round me was henceforth to fill up the
whole measure of my thoughts. Wife, children, friends, country, to me
must exist no more. I imaged them in the tomb; I talked with them as
shadows, as the graceful and lovely existences of ages past,—as hallowed
memorials; but labored to divest them of the individual features that
cling to the soul.
[Sidenote: On the Shores of the Mediterranean]
Lest this mystic repose should be disturbed by any of the sights of
living man, I withdrew deeper into the shades which first sheltered me.
It was enough for me that there was a canopy of leaves above to shield
my limbs from the casual visitations of a sky whose sapphire looked
scarcely capable of a stain, and that the turf was soft for my couch.
Fruits sufficient to tempt the most luxurious taste were falling round
me, and the waters of the bright rivulet, scooped in the rind of citron
and orange, were a draft that the epicure might envy. I was still utterly
ignorant on what shore of the Mediterranean I was thrown, further than
that the sun rose behind my bower and threw his western luster on the
waveless expanse of sea that spread before it to the round horizon.