I rushed to the shrouds, and very soon made out a whaler.

Again the same panting agitations, mad rage to be at her, at once

possessed me; I flew to the indicator, turned the lever to full, then

back to give the wheel a spin, then up the main-mast ratlins, waving a

long foot-bandage of vadmel tweed picked up at random, and by the time I

was within five hundred yards of her, had worked myself to such a pitch,

that I was again shouting that futile madness: 'Hullo! Hi! Bravo! _I

have been to the Pole!_'

And those twelve dead that I had in the chart-room there must have heard

me, and the men on the whaler must have heard me, and smiled their

smile.

For, as to that whaler, I should have known better at once, if I had not

been crazy, since she _looked_ like a ship of death, her boom slamming

to port and starboard on the gentle heave of the sea, and her fore-sail

reefed that serene morning. Only when I was quite near her, and hurrying

down to stop the engines, did the real truth, with perfect suddenness,

drench my heated brain; and I almost ran into her, I was so stunned.

However, I stopped the _Boreal_ in time, and later on lowered the kayak,

and boarded the other.

This ship had evidently been stricken silent in the midst of a perfect

drama of activity, for I saw not one of her crew of sixty-two who was

not busy, except one boy. I found her a good-sized thing of 500 odd

tons, ship-rigged, with auxiliary engine of seventy horse-power, and

pretty heavily armour-plated round the bows. There was no part of her

which I did not over-haul, and I could see that they had had a great

time with whales, for a mighty carcass, attached to the outside of the

ship by the powerful cant-purchase tackle, had been in process of

flensing and cutting-in, and on the deck two great blankets of blubber,

looking each a ton-weight, surrounded by twenty-seven men in many

attitudes, some terrifying to see, some disgusting, several grotesque,

all so unhuman, the whale dead, and the men dead, too, and death was

there, and the rank-flourishing germs of Inanity, and a mesmerism, and a

silence, whose dominion was established, and its reign was growing old.

Four of them, who had been removing the gums from a mass of stratified

whalebone at the mizzen-mast foot, were quite imbedded in whale-flesh;

also, in a barrel lashed to the top of the main top-gallant masthead was

visible the head of a man with a long pointed beard, looking steadily

out over the sea to the S.W., which made me notice that five only of the

probable eight or nine boats were on board; and after visiting the

'tween-decks, where I saw considerable quantities of stowed whalebone

plates, and about fifty or sixty iron oil-tanks, and cut-up blubber; and

after visiting cabin, engine-room, fo'cas'le, where I saw a lonely boy

of fourteen with his hand grasping a bottle of rum under all the

turned-up clothes in a chest, he, at the moment of death, being

evidently intent upon hiding it; and after two hours' search of the

ship, I got back to my own, and half an hour later came upon all the

three missing whale-boats about a mile apart, and steered zig-zag near

to each. They contained five men each and a steerer, and one had the

harpoon-gun fired, with the loose line coiled round and round the head

and upper part of the stroke line-manager; and in the others hundreds of

fathoms of coiled rope, with toggle-irons, whale-lances, hand-harpoons,

and dropped heads, and grins, and lazy _abandon_, and eyes that stared,

and eyes that dozed, and eyes that winked.

After this I began to sight ships not infrequently, and used regularly

to have the three lights burning all night. On the 12th July I met one,

on the 15th two, on the 16th one, on the 17th three, on the 18th

two--all Greenlanders, I think: but, of the nine, I boarded only three,

the glass quite clearly showing me, when yet far off, that on the others

was no life; and on the three which I boarded were dead men; so that

that suspicion which I had, and that fear, grew very heavy upon me.

I went on southward, day after day southward, sentinel there at my

wheel; clear sunshine by day, when the calm pale sea sometimes seemed

mixed with regions of milk, and at night the immense desolation of a

world lit by a sun that was long dead, and by a light that was gloom. It

was like Night blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom of

death and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and

limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries

lost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to

utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon

in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon

waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly

grew. But still the _Boreal_ moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless

Eternity: and I reached latitude 72°, not far now from Northern Europe.

And now, as to that blossomy peach-scent--even while some floes were yet

around me--I was just like some fantastic mariner, who, having set out

to search for Eden and the Blessed Islands, finds them, and balmy gales

from their gardens come out, while he is yet afar, to meet him with

their perfumes of almond and champac, cornel and jasmin and lotus. For I

had now reached a zone where the peach-aroma was constant; all the world

seemed embalmed in its spicy fragrance; and I could easily imagine

myself voyaging beyond the world toward some clime of perpetual and

enchanting Spring.

* * * * *

Well, I saw at last what whalers used to call 'the blink of the ice';

that is to say, its bright apparition or reflection in the sky when it

is left behind, or not yet come-to. By this time I was in a region where

a good many craft of various sorts were to be seen; I was continually

meeting them; and not one did I omit to investigate, while many I

boarded in the kayak or the larch-wood pram. Just below latitude 70° I

came upon a good large fleet of what I supposed to be Lafoden cod and

herring fishers, which must have drifted somewhat on a northward

current. They had had a great season, for the boats were well laden with

curing fish. I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, they

being widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon. The

evening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sun

just beginning his low-couched nightly drowse. These sturdy-looking

brown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as of

things whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting the

appalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when a

dark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them. The fishers were braw

carles, wearing, many of them, fringes of beard well back from the

chin-point, with hanging woollen caps. In every case I found below-decks

a number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked _aquavit_, two of which I took

into the pram. In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in a

forward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the two

knees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with their

islands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole. At another of

them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the _Boreal's_ liquid

air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a

stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to

jump down. After looking around I descended the three steps aft into the

dark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in an

awful whisper: '_Anyone? Anyone?_' Nothing answered me: and when I went

up again, the _Boreal_ had drifted three yards beyond my reach. There

being a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in that

half-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors beset

me, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and

sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up: for the

ocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.

Two mornings later I came upon another school, rather larger boats

these, which I found to be Brittany cod-fishers. Most of these, too, I

boarded. In every below-decks was a wooden or earthenware image of the

Virgin, painted in gaudy faded colours; and in one case I found a boy

who had been kneeling before the statue, but was toppled sideways now,

his knees still bent, and the cross of Christ in his hand. These

stalwart blue woollen blouses and tarpaulin sou'-westers lay in every

pose of death, every detail of feature and expression still perfectly

preserved. The sloops were all the same, all, all: with sing-song creaks

they rocked a little, nonchalantly: each, as it were, with a certain

sub-consciousness of its own personality, and callous unconsciousness of

all the others round it: yet each a copy of the others: the same hooks

and lines, disembowelling-knives, barrels of salt and pickle, piles and

casks of opened cod, kegs of biscuit, and low-creaking rockings, and a

bilgy smell, and dead men. The next day, about eighty miles south of the

latitude of Mount Hekla, I sighted a big ship, which turned out to be

the French cruiser _Lazare Tréport_. I boarded and overhauled her

during three hours, her upper, main, and armoured deck, deck by deck, to

her lowest black depths, even childishly spying up the tubes of her two

big, rusted turret-guns. Three men in the engine-room had been much

mangled, after death, I presume, by a burst boiler; floating about 800

yards to the north-east lay a long-boat of hers, low in the water,

crammed with marines, one oar still there, jammed between the row-lock

and the rower's forced-back chin; on the ship's starboard deck, in the

long stretch of space between the two masts, the blue-jackets had

evidently been piped up, for they lay there in a sort of serried

disorder, to the number of two hundred and seventy-five. Nothing could

be of suggestion more tragic than the wasted and helpless power of this

poor wandering vessel, around whose stolid mass myriads of wavelets,

busy as aspen-leaves, bickered with a continual weltering splash that

was quite loud to hear. I sat a good time that afternoon in one of her

steely port main-deck casemates on a gun-carriage, my head sunken on my

breast, furtively eyeing the bluish turned-up feet, all shrunk,

exsanguined, of a sailor who lay on his back before me; his soles were

all that I could see, the rest of him lying head-downwards beyond the

steel door-sill.

Drenched in seas of lugubrious reverie I sat, till, with a shuddering

start, I awoke, paddled back to the _Boreal_, and, till sleep conquered

me, went on my way. At ten the next morning, coming on deck, I spied to

the west a group of craft, and turned my course upon them. They turned

out to be eight Shetland sixerns, which must have drifted north-eastward

hither. I examined them well, but they were as the long list of the

others: for all the men, and all the boys, and all the dogs on them were

dead.

* * * * *

I could have come to land a long time before I did: but I would not: I

was so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used

to the silence of the sea: but, God knows it, I was afraid of the

silence of the land.

* * * * *

Once, on the 15th July, I had seen a whale, or thought I did, spouting

very remotely afar on the S.E. horizon; and on the 19th I distinctly saw

a shoal of porpoises vaulting the sea-surface, in their swift-successive

manner, northward: and seeing them, I had said pitifully to myself:

'Well, I am not quite alone in the world, then, my good God--not quite

alone.'

Moreover, some days later, the _Boreal_ had found herself in a bank of

cod making away northward, millions of fish, for I saw them, and one

afternoon caught three, hand-running, with the hook.

So the sea, at least, had its tribes to be my mates.

But if I should find the land as still as the sea, without even the

spouting whale, or school of tumbling sea-hogs--_if Paris were dumber

than the eternal ice_--what then, I asked myself, should I do?

* * * * *

I could have made short work, and landed at Shetland, for I found myself

as far westward as longitude 11° 23' W.: but I would not: I was so

afraid. The shrinking within me to face that vague suspicion which I

had, turned me first to a foreign land.

I made for Norway, and on the first night of this definite intention, at

about nine o'clock, the weather being gusty, the sky lowering, the air

sombrous, and the sea hard-looking, dark, and ridged, I was steaming

along at a good rate, holding the wheel, my poor port and starboard

lights still burning there, when, without the least notice, I received

the roughest physical shock of my life, being shot bodily right over

the wheel, thence, as from a cannon, twenty feet to the cabin-door,

through it head-foremost down the companion-way, and still beyond some

six yards along the passage. I had crashed into some dark and dead ship,

probably of large size, though I never saw her, nor any sign of her; and

all that night, and the next day till four in the afternoon, the

_Boreal_ went driving alone over the sea, whither she would: for I lay

unconscious. When I woke, I found that I had received really very small

injuries, considering: but I sat there on the floor a long time in a

sulky, morose, disgusted, and bitter mood; and when I rose, pettishly

stopped the ship's engines, seeing my twelve dead all huddled and

disfigured. Now I was afraid to steam by night, and even in the daytime

I would not go on for three days: for I was childishly angry with I know

not what, and inclined to quarrel with Those whom I could not see.

However, on the fourth day, a rough swell which knocked the ship about,

and made me very uncomfortable, coaxed me into moving; and I did so with

bows turned eastward and southward.

I sighted the Norway coast four days later, in latitude 63° 19', at noon

of the 11th August, and pricked off my course to follow it; but it was

with a slow and dawdling reluctance that I went, at much less than

half-speed. In some eight hours, as I knew from the chart, I ought to

sight the lighthouse light on Smoelen Island; and when quiet night came,

the black water being branded with trails of still moonlight, I passed

quite close to it, between ten and twelve, almost under the shadow of

the mighty hills: but, oh my God, no light was there. And all the way

down I marked the rugged sea-board slumber darkling, afar or near, with

never, alas! one friendly light.

* * * * *

Well, on the 15th August I had another of those maniac raptures, whose

passing away would have left an elephant racked and prostrate. During

four days I had seen not one sign of present life on the Norway coast,

only hills, hills, dead and dark, and floating craft, all dead and dark;

and my eyes now, I found, had acquired a crazy fixity of stare into the

very bottom of the vacant abyss of nothingness, while I remained

unconscious of being, save of one point, rainbow-blue, far down in the

infinite, which passed slowly from left to right before my consciousness

a little way, then vanished, came back, and passed slowly again, from

left to right continually; till some prick, or voice, in my brain would

startle me into the consciousness that I was staring, whispering the

profound confidential warning: _You must not stare so, or it is over

with you!_' Well, lost in a blank trance of this sort, I was leaning

over the wheel during the afternoon of the 15th, when it was as if some

instinct or premonition in my soul leapt up, and said aloud: 'If you

look just yonder, _you will see...!_' I started, and in one instant had

surged up from all that depth of reverie to reality: I glanced to the

right: and there, at last, my God, I saw something human which moved,

rapidly moved: at last!--and it came to me.

That sense of recovery, of waking, of new solidity, of the comfortable

usual, a million-fold too intense for words--how sweetly consoling it

was! Again now, as I write, I can fancy and feel it--the rocky solidity,

the adamant ordinary, on which to base the feet, and live. From the day

when I stood at the Pole, and saw there the dizzy thing that made me

swoon, there had come into my way not one sign or trace that other

beings like myself were alive on the earth with me: till now, suddenly,

I had the sweet indubitable proof: for on the south-western sea, not

four knots away, I saw a large, swift ship: and her bows, which were

sharp as a hatchet, were steadily chipping through the smooth sea at a

pretty high pace, throwing out profuse ribbony foams that went

wide-vawering, with outward undulations, far behind her length, as she

ran the sea in haste, straight northward.

At the moment, I was steering about S.E. by S., fifteen miles out from a

shadowy-blue series of Norway mountains; and just giving the wheel one

frantic spin to starboard to bring me down upon her, I flew to the

bridge, leant my back on the main-mast, which passed through it, put a

foot on the white iron rail before me, and there at once felt all the

mocking devils of distracted revelry possess me, as I caught the cap

from my long hairs, and commenced to wave and wave and wave, red-faced

maniac that I was: for at the second nearer glance, I saw that she was

flying an ensign at the main, and a long pennant at the main-top, and I

did not know what she was flying those flags there for: and I was

embittered and driven mad.

With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness in

that five minutes' interval: she was painted a dull and cholera yellow,

like many Russian ships, and there was a faded pink space at her bows

under the line where the yellow ceased: the ensign at her main I made

out to be the blue-and-white saltire, and she was clearly a Russian

passenger-liner, two-masted, two-funnelled, though from her funnels came

no trace of smoke, and the position of her steam-cones was anywhere. All

about her course the sea was spotted with wobbling splendours of the low

sun, large coarse blots of glory near the eye, but lessening to a

smaller pattern in the distance, and at the horizon refined to a

homogeneous band of livid silver.

The double speed of the _Boreal_ and the other, hastening opposite ways,

must have been thirty-eight or forty knots, and the meeting was

accomplished in certainly less than five minutes: yet into that time I

crowded years of life. I was shouting passionately at her, my eyes

starting from my head, my face all inflamed with rage the most prone,

loud and urgent. For she did not stop, nor signal, nor make sign of

seeing me, but came furrowing down upon me like Juggernaut, with

steadfast run. I lost reason, thought, memory, purpose, sense of

relation, in that access of delirium which transported me, and can only

remember now that in the midst of my shouting, a word, uttered by the

fiends who used my throat to express their frenzy, set me laughing high

and madly: for I was crying: 'Hi! Bravo! Why don't you stop? _Madmen! I

have been to the Pole!'_

That instant an odour arose, and came, and struck upon my brain, most

detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware

of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past

me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. She

was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for

offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of decks

piled thick with her festered dead.

In big black letters on the round retreating yellow stern my eye-corner

caught the word _Yaroslav_, as I bent over the rail to retch and cough

and vomit at her. She was a horrid thing.

This ship had certainly been pretty far south in tropical or

sub-tropical latitudes with her great crowd of dead: for all the bodies

which I had seen till then, so far from smelling ill, seemed to give out

a certain perfume of the peach. She was evidently one of those many

ships of late years which have substituted liquid air for steam, yet

retained their old steam-funnels, &c., in case of emergency: for air, I

believe, was still looked at askance by several builders, on account of

the terrible accidents which it sometimes caused. The _Boreal_ herself

is a similar instance of both motors. This vessel, the _Yaroslav_, must

have been left with working engines when her crew were overtaken by

death, and, her air-tanks being still unexhausted, must have been

ranging the ocean with impunity ever since, during I knew not how many

months, or, it might be, years.

Well, I coasted Norway for nearly a hundred and sixty miles without once

going nearer land than two or three miles: for something held me back.

But passing the fjord-mouth where I knew that Aadheim was, I suddenly

turned the helm to port, almost before I knew that I was doing it, and

made for land.

In half an hour I was moving up an opening in the land with mountains on

either hand, streaky crags at their summit, umbrageous boscage below;

and the whole softened, as it were, by veils woven of the rainbow.

This arm of water lies curved about like a thread which one drops, only

the curves are much more pointed, so that every few minutes the scene

was changed, though the vessel just crawled her way up, and I could see

behind me nothing of what was passed, or only a land-locked gleam like a

lake.

I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble,

reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over which

hardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpled

about the bluff _Boreal_, which seemed to move as if careful not to

bruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, or

dewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacle

yonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet all

seemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, and

made of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rinds

of the peach.

I saw it not only with delight, but with complete astonishment: having

forgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice and

sea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human,

familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachy

scent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe and a charm in that place

at that hour, as it were of those gardens of Hesperus, and fields of

asphodel, reserved for the spirits of the just.

Alas! but I had the glass at my side, and for me nepenthe was mixed with

a despair immense as the vault of heaven, my good God: for anon I would

take it up to spy some perched hut of the peasant, or burg of the

'bonder,' on the peaks: and I saw no one there; and to the left, at the

third marked bend of the fjord, where there is one of those watch-towers

that these people used for watching in-coming fish, I spied, lying on a

craggy slope just before the tower, a body which looked as if it must

surely tumble head-long, but did not. And when I saw that, I felt

definitely, for the first time, that shoreless despair which I alone of

men have felt, high beyond the stars, and deep as hell; and I fell to

staring again that blank stare of Nirvana and the lunacy of Nothingness,

wherein Time merges in Eternity, and all being, like one drop of water,

flies scattered to fill the bottomless void of space, and is lost.

The _Boreal's_ bow walking over a little empty fishing-boat roused me,

and a minute later, just before I came to a new promontory and bend, I

saw two people. The shore there is some three feet above the water, and

edged with boulders of rock, about which grows a fringe of shrubs and

small trees: behind this fringe is a path, curving upward through a

sombre wooded little gorge; and on the path, near the water, I saw a

driver of one of those Norwegian sulkies that were called karjolers: he,

on the high front seat, was dead, lying sideways and backwards, with low

head resting on the wheel; and on a trunk strapped to a frame on the

axle behind was a boy, his head, too, resting sideways on the wheel,

near the other's; and the little pony was dead, pitched forward on its

head and fore-knees, tilting the shafts downward; and some distance from

them on the water floated an empty skiff.

* * * * *

When I turned the next fore-land, I all at once began to see a number of

craft, which increased as I advanced, most of them small boats, with

some schooners, sloops, and larger craft, the majority a-ground: and

suddenly now I was conscious that, mingling with that delicious odour of

spring-blossoms--profoundly modifying, yet not destroying it--was

another odour, wafted to me on the wings of the very faint land-breeze:

and 'Man,' I said, 'is decomposing': for I knew it well: it was the

odour of human corruption.

* * * * *

The fjord opened finally in a somewhat wider basin, shut-in by quite

steep, high-towering mountains, which reflected themselves in the water

to their last cloudy crag: and, at the end of this I saw ships, a quay,

and a modest, homely old town.

Not a sound, not one: only the languidly-working engines of the

_Boreal_. Here, it was clear, the Angel of Silence had passed, and his

scythe mown.

I ran and stopped the engines, and, without anchoring, got down into an

empty boat that lay at the ship's side when she stopped; and I paddled

twenty yards toward the little quay. There was a brigantine with all her

courses set, three jibs, stay-sails, square-sails, main and fore-sails,

and gaff-top-sail, looking hanging and listless in that calm place, and

wedded to a still copy of herself, mast-downward, in the water; there

were three lumber-schooners, a forty-ton steam-boat, a tiny barque, five

Norway herring-fishers, and ten or twelve shallops: and the

sailing-craft had all fore-and-aft sails set, and about each, as I

passed among them, brooded an odour that was both sweet and abhorrent,

an odour more suggestive of the very genius of mortality--the inner mind

and meaning of Azrael--than aught that I could have conceived: for all,

as I soon saw, were crowded with dead.

Well, I went up the old mossed steps, in that strange dazed state in

which one notices frivolous things: I remember, for instance, feeling

the lightness of my new clothes: for the weather was quite mild, and the

day before I had changed to Summer things, having on now only a common

undyed woollen shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and cord trousers, with a

belt, and a cloth cap over my long hair, and an old pair of yellow

shoes, without laces, and without socks. And I stood on the unhewn

stones of the edge of the quay, and looked abroad over a largish piece

of unpaved ground, which lay between the first house-row and the quay.

What I saw was not only most woeful, but wildly startling: woeful,

because a great crowd of people had assembled, and lay dead, there; and

wildly startling, because something in their _tout ensemble_ told me in

one minute why they were there in such number.

They were there in the hope, and with the thought, to fly westward by

boat.

And the something which told me this was a certain _foreign_ air about

that field of the dead as the eye rested on it, something un-northern,

southern, and Oriental.

Two yards from my feet, as I stepped to the top, lay a group of three:

one a Norway peasant-girl in skirt of olive-green, scarlet stomacher,

embroidered bodice, Scotch bonnet trimmed with silver lace, and big

silver shoe-buckles; the second was an old Norway man in knee-breeches,

and eighteenth-century small-clothes, and red worsted cap; and the third

was, I decided, an old Jew of the Polish Pale, in gaberdine and

skull-cap, with ear-locks.

I went nearer to where they lay thick as reaped stubble between the

quay and a little stone fountain in the middle of the space, and I saw

among those northern dead two dark-skinned women in costly dress, either

Spanish or Italian, and the yellower mortality of a Mongolian, probably

a Magyar, and a big negro in zouave dress, and some twenty-five obvious

French, and two Morocco fezes, and the green turban of a shereef, and

the white of an Ulema.

And I asked myself this question: 'How came these foreign stragglers

here in this obscure northern town?'

And my wild heart answered: 'There has been an impassioned stampede,

northward and westward, of all the tribes of Man. And this that I, Adam

Jeffson, here see is but the far-tossed spray of that monstrous,

infuriate flood.'

* * * * *

Well, I passed up a street before me, careful, careful where I trod. It

was not utterly silent, nor was the quay-square, but haunted by a pretty

dense cloud of mosquitoes, and dreamy twinges of music, like the drawing

of the violin-bow in elf-land. The street was narrow, pavered, steep,

and dark; and the sensations with which I, poor bent man, passed

through that dead town, only Atlas, fabled to bear the burden of this

Earth, could divine.

* * * * *

I thought to myself: If now a wave from the Deep has washed over this

planetary ship of earth, and I, who alone happened to be in the extreme

bows, am the sole survivor of that crew?... What then, my God, shall I

do?

* * * * *

I felt, I felt, that in this townlet, save the water-gnats of Norway,

was no living thing; that the hum and the savour of Eternity filled, and

wrapped, and embalmed it.

The houses are mostly of wood, some of them fairly large, with a

_porte-cochère_ leading into a semi-circular yard, around which the

building stands, very steep-roofed, and shingled, in view of the heavy

snow-masses of winter. Glancing into one open casement near the ground,

I saw an aged woman, stout and capped, lie on her face before a very

large porcelain stove; but I paced on without stoppage, traversed

several streets, and came out, as it became dark, upon a piece of

grass-land leading downward to a mountain-gorge. It was some distance

along this gorge that I found myself sitting the next morning: and how,

and in what trance, I passed that whole blank night is obliterated from

my consciousness. When I looked about with the return of light I saw

majestic fir-grown mountains on either hand, almost meeting overhead at

some points, deeply shading the mossy gorge. I rose, and careless of

direction, went still onward, and walked and walked for hours,

unconscious of hunger; there was a profusion of wild

mountain-strawberries, very tiny, which must grow almost into winter, a

few of which I ate; there were blue gentianellas, and

lilies-of-the-valley, and luxuriance of verdure, and a noise of waters.

Occasionally, I saw little cataracts on high, fluttering like white wild

rags, for they broke in the mid-fall, and were caught away, and

scattered; patches also of reaped hay and barley, hung up, in a singular

way, on stakes six feet high, I suppose to dry; there were perched huts,

and a seemingly inaccessible small castle or burg, but none of these did

I enter: and five bodies only I saw in the gorge, a woman with a babe,

and a man with two small oxen.

About three in the afternoon I was startled to find myself there, and

turned back. It was dark when I again passed through those gloomy

streets of Aadheim, making for the quay, and now I felt both my hunger

and a dropping weariness. I had no thought of entering any house, but

as I passed by one open _porte-cochère_, something, I know not what,

made me turn sharply in, for my mind had become as fluff on the winds,

not working of its own action, but the sport of impulses that seemed

external. I went across the yard, and ascended a wooden spiral stair by

a twilight which just enabled me to pick my way among five or six vague

forms fallen there. In that confined place fantastic qualms beset me; I

mounted to the first landing, and tried the door, but it was locked; I

mounted to the second: the door was open, and with a chill reluctance I

took a step inward where all was pitch darkness, the window-stores being

drawn. I hesitated: it was very dark. I tried to utter that word of

mine, but it came in a whisper inaudible to my ears: I tried again, and

this time heard myself say: '_anyone_?' At the same time I had made

another step forward, and trodden upon a soft abdomen; and at that

contact terrors the most cold and ghastly thrilled me through and

through, for it was as though I saw in that darkness the sudden eyeballs

of Hell and frenzy glare upon me, and with a low gurgle of affright I

was gone, helter-skelter down the stairs, treading upon flesh, across

the yard, and down the street, with pelting feet, and open arms, and

sobbing bosom, for I thought that all Aadheim was after me; nor was my

horrid haste appeased till I was on board the _Boreal_, and moving down

the fjord.

Out to sea, then, I went again; and within the next few days I visited

Bergen, and put in at Stavanger. And I saw that Bergen and Stavanger

were dead.

It was then, on the 19th August, that I turned my bow toward my native

land.

* * * * *

From Stavanger I steered a straight course for the Humber.

I had no sooner left behind me the Norway coast than I began to meet the

ships, the ships--ship after ship; and by the time I entered the zone

of the ordinary alternation of sunny day and sunless night, I was moving

through the midst of an incredible number of craft, a mighty and

wide-spread fleet.

Over all that great expanse of the North Sea, where, in its most

populous days of trade, the sailor might perhaps sight a sail or two, I

had now at every moment at least ten or twelve within scope of the

glass, oftentimes as many as forty, forty-five.

And very still they lay on a still sea, itself a dead thing, livid as

the lips of death; and there was an intensity in the calm that was

appalling: for the ocean seemed weighted, and the air drugged.

Extremely slow was my advance, for at first I would not leave any ship,

however remotely small, without approaching sufficiently to investigate

her, at least with the spy-glass: and a strange multitudinous mixture of

species they were, trawlers in hosts, war-ships of every nation, used,

it seemed, as passenger-boats, smacks, feluccas, liners, steam-barges,

great four-masters with sails, Channel boats, luggers, a Venetian

_burchiello_, colliers, yachts, _remorqueurs_, training ships, dredgers,

two _dahabeeahs_ with curving gaffs, Marseilles fishers, a Maltese

_speronare_, American off-shore sail, Mississippi steam-boats, Sorrento

lug-schooners, Rhine punts, yawls, old frigates and three-deckers,

called to novel use, Stromboli caiques, Yarmouth tubs, xebecs, Rotterdam

flat-bottoms, floats, mere gunwaled rafts--anything from anywhere that

could bear a human freight on water had come, and was here: and all, I

knew, had been making westward, or northward, or both; and all, I knew,

were crowded; and all were tombs, listlessly wandering, my God, on the

wandering sea with their dead.

And so fair was the world about them, too: the brightest suavest autumn

weather; all the still air aromatic with that vernal perfume of peach:

yet not so utterly still, but if I passed close to the lee of any

floating thing, the spicy stirrings of morning or evening wafted me

faint puffs of the odour of mortality over-ripe for the grave.

So abominable and accursed did this become to me, such a plague and a

hissing, vague as was the offence, that I began to shun rather than seek

the ships, and also I now dropped my twelve, whom I had kept to be my

companions all the way from the Far North, one by one, into the sea: for

now I had definitely passed into a zone of settled warmth.

I was convinced, however, that the poison, whatever it might be, had

some embalming, or antiseptic, effect upon the bodies: at Aadheim,

Bergen and Stavanger, for instance, where the temperature permitted me

to go without a jacket, only the merest hints and whiffs of the

processes of dissolution had troubled me.

* * * * *

Very benign, I say, and pleasant to see, was sky and sea during all that

voyage: but it was at sun-set that my sense of the wondrously beautiful

was roused and excited, in spite of that great burden which I carried.

Certainly, I never saw sun-sets resembling those, nor could have

conceived of aught so flamboyant, extravagant, and bewitched: for the

whole heaven seemed turned into an arena for warring Hierarchies,

warring for the universe, or it was like the wild countenance of God

defeated, and flying marred and bloody from His enemies. But many

evenings I watched with unintelligent awe, believing it but a portent of

the un-sheathed sword of the Almighty; till, one morning, a thought

pricked me like a sword, for I suddenly remembered the great sun-sets of

the later nineteenth century, witnessed in Europe, America, and, I

believe, over the world, after the eruption of the volcano of Krakatoa.

And whereas I had before said to myself: 'If now a wave from the Deep

has washed over this planetary ship of earth...,' I said now: 'A

wave--but not from the Deep: a wave rather which she had reserved, and

has spouted, from her own un-motherly entrails...'

* * * * *

I had some knowledge of Morse telegraphy, and of the manipulation of

tape-machines, telegraphic typing-machines, and the ordinary wireless

transmitter and coherer, as of most little things of that sort which

came within the outskirts of the interest of a man of science; I had

collaborated with Professor Stanistreet in the production of a text-book

called 'Applications of Science to the Arts,' which had brought us some

notoriety; and, on the whole, the _minutiae_ of modern things were

still pretty fresh in my memory. I could therefore have wired from

Bergen or Stavanger, supposing the batteries not run down, to somewhere:

but I would not: I was so afraid; afraid lest for ever from nowhere

should come one answering click, or flash, or stirring....

* * * * *

I could have made short work, and landed at Hull: but I would not: I was

so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used to

the silence of the sea: but I was afraid of the silence of England.

* * * * *

I came in sight of the coast on the morning of the 26th August,

somewhere about Hornsea, but did not see any town, for I put the helm to

port, and went on further south, no longer bothering with the

instruments, but coasting at hap-hazard, now in sight of land, and now

in the centre of a circle of sea; not admitting to myself the motive of

this loitering slowness, nor thinking at all, but ignoring the

deep-buried fear of the to-morrow which I shirked, and instinctively

hiding myself in to-day. I passed the Wash, I passed Yarmouth,

Felixstowe. By now the things that floated motionless on the sea were

beyond numbering, for I could hardly lower my eyes ten minutes and lift

them, without seeing yet another there: so that soon after dusk I, too,

had to lie still among them all, till morning: for they lay dark, and to

move at any pace would have been to drown the already dead.

Well, I came to the Thames-mouth, and lay pretty well in among the Flats

and Pan Sands towards eight one evening, not seven miles from Sheppey

and the North Kent coast: and I did not see any Nore Light, nor Girdler

Light: and all along the coast I had seen no light: but as to that I

said not one word to myself, not admitting it, nor letting my heart know

what my brain thought, nor my brain know what my heart surmised; but

with a daft and mock-mistrustful under-look I would regard the darkling

land, holding it a sentient thing that would be playing a prank upon a

poor man like me.

And the next morning, when I moved again, my furtive eye-corners were

very well aware of the Prince's Channel light-ship, and also the Tongue

ship, for there they were: but I would not look at them at all, nor go

near them: for I did not wish to have anything to do with whatever might

have happened beyond my own ken, and it was better to look straight

before, seeing nothing, and concerning one's-self with one's-self.

The next evening, after having gone out to sea again, I was in a little

to the E. by S. of the North Foreland: and I saw no light there, nor any

Sandhead light; but over the sea vast signs of wreckage, and the coasts

were strewn with old wrecked fleets. I turned about S.E., very slowly

moving--for anywhere hereabouts hundreds upon hundreds of craft lay dead

within a ten-mile circle of sea--and by two in the fore-day had wandered

up well in sight of the French cliffs: for I had said: 'I will go and

see the light-beam of the great revolving-drum on Calais pier that

nightly beams half-way over-sea to England.' And the moon shone clear in

the southern heaven that morning, like a great old dying queen whose

Court swarms distantly from around her, diffident, pale, and tremulous,

the paler the nearer; and I could see the mountain-shadows on her spotty

full-face, and her misty aureole, and her lights on the sea, as it were

kisses stolen in the kingdom of sleep; and all among the quiet ships

mysterious white trails and powderings of light, like palace-corridors

in some fairy-land forlorn, full of breathless wan whispers, scandals,

and runnings-to-and-fro, with leers, and agitated last embraces, and

flight of the princess, and death-bed of the king; and on the N.E.

horizon a bank of brown cloud that seemed to have no relation with the

world; and yonder, not far, the white coast-cliffs, not so low as at

Calais near, but arranged in masses separated by vales of sward, each

with its wreck: but no light of any revolving-drum I saw.

* * * * *

I could not sleep that night: for all the operations of my mind and body

seemed in abeyance. Mechanically I turned the ship westward again; and

when the sun came up, there, hardly two miles from me, were the cliffs

of Dover; and on the crenulated summit of the Castle I spied the Union

Jack hang motionless.

I heard eight, nine o'clock strike in the cabin, and I was still at sea.

But some mad, audacious whisper was at my brain: and at 10.30, the 2nd

September, immediately opposite the Cross Wall Custom House, the

_Boreal's_ anchor-chain, after a voyage of three years, two months, and

fourteen days, ran thundering, thundering, through the starboard

hawse-hole.

Ah heaven! but I must have been stark mad to let the anchor go! for the

effect upon me of that shocking obstreperous hubbub, breaking in upon

all that cemetery repose that blessed morning, and lasting it seemed a

year, was most appalling; and at the sudden racket I stood excruciated,

with shivering knees and flinching heart, God knows: for not less

terrifically uproarious than the clatter of the last Trump it raged and

raged, and I thought that all the billion dead could not fail to start,

and rise, at alarum so excessive, and question me with their eyes....

* * * * *

On the top of the Cross Wall near I saw a grey crab fearlessly crawl; at

the end where the street begins, I saw a single gas-light palely burn

that broad day, and at its foot a black man lay on his face, clad only

in a shirt and one boot; the harbour was almost packed with every sort

of craft, and on a Calais-Dover boat, eight yards from my stern, which

must have left Calais crowded to suffocation, I saw the rotted dead lie

heaped, she being unmoored, and continually grinding against an anchored

green brig.

And when I saw that, I dropped down upon my knees at the capstan, and my

poor heart sobbed out the frail cry: 'Well, Lord God, Thou hast

destroyed the work of Thy hand...'

* * * * *

After a time I got up, went below in a state of somnambulism, took a

packet of pemmican cakes, leapt to land, and went following the railway

that runs from the Admiralty Pier. In an enclosed passage ten yards

long, with railway masonry on one side, I saw five dead lie, and could

not believe that I was in England, for all were dark-skinned people,

three gaudily dressed, and two in flowing white robes. It was the same

when I turned into a long street, leading northward, for here were a

hundred, or more, and never saw I, except in Constantinople, where I

once lived eighteen months, so variegated a mixture of races, black,

brunette, brown, yellow, white, in all the shades, some emaciated like

people dead from hunger, and, overlooking them all, one English boy with

a clean Eton collar sitting on a bicycle, supported by a lamp-post which

his arms clasped, he proving clearly the extraordinary suddenness of the

death which had overtaken them all.

I did not know whither, nor why, I went, nor had I the least idea

whether all this was visually seen by me in the world which I had known,

or in some other, or was all phantasy of my disembodied spirit--for I

had the thought that I, too, might be dead since old ages, and my spirit

wandering now through the universe of space, in which there is neither

north nor south, nor up nor down, nor measure nor relation, nor aught

whatever, save an uneasy consciousness of a dream about bottomlessness.

Of grief or pain, I think, I felt nothing; though I have a sort of

memory now that some sound, resembling a sob or groan, though it was

neither, came at regular clockwork intervals from my bosom during three

or four days. Meantime, my brain registered like a tape-machine details

the most frivolous, the most ludicrous--the name of a street, Strond

Street, Snargate Street; the round fur cap--black fur for the side,

white ermine for the top--of a portly Karaite priest on his back, whose

robes had been blown to his spread knees, as if lifted and neatly folded

there; a violin-bow gripped between the thick, irregular teeth of a

little Spaniard with brushed-back hair and mad-looking eyes; odd shoes

on the foot of a French girl, one black, one brown. They lay in the

street about as numerous as gunners who fall round their carriage, at

intervals of five to ten feet, the majority--as was the case also in

Norway, and on the ships--in poses of distraction, with spread arms, or

wildly distorted limbs, like men who, the instant before death, called

upon the rocks and hills to cover them.

* * * * *

On the left I came to an opening in the land, called, I believe, 'The

Shaft,' and into this I turned, climbing a very great number of steps,

almost covered at one point with dead: the steps I began to count, but

left off, then the dead, and left off. Finally, at the top, which must

be even higher than the Castle, I came to a great open space laid out

with gravel-walks, and saw fortifications, barracks, a citadel. I did

not know the town, except by passings-through, and was surprised at the

breadth of view. Between me and the Castle to the east lay the district

of crowding houses, brick and ragstone, mixed in the distance with vague

azure haze; and to the right the harbour, the sea, with their ships; and

visible around me on the heights seven or eight dead, biting the dust;

the sun now high and warm, with hardly a cloud in the sky; and yonder a

mist, which was the coast of France.

It seemed too big for one poor man.

My head nodded. I sat on a bench, black-painted and hard, the seat and

back of horizontal boards, with intervals; and as I looked, I nodded,

heavy-headed and weary: for it was too big for me. And as I nodded, with

forehead propped on my left hand, and the packet of pemmican cakes in my

right, there was in my head, somehow, an old street-song of my

childhood: and I groaned it sleepily, like coronachs and drear funereal

nenias, dirging; and the packet beat time in my right hand, falling and

raising, falling heavily and rising, in time.

I'll buy the ring,

You'll rear the kids:

Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.

. . . . .

. . . . .

Ting, ting,

Won't we be happy?

Ting, ting,

That shall be it:

I'll buy the ring,

You'll rear the kids:

Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.

. . . . .

. . . . .

So maundering, I fell forward upon my face, and for twenty-three hours,

the living undistinguished from the dead, I slept there.

* * * * *

I was awakened by drizzle, leapt up, looked at a silver chronometer

which, attached by a leather to my belt, I carried in my

breeches-pocket, and saw that it was 10 A.M. The sky was dark, and a

moaning wind--almost a new thing now to me--had arisen.

I ate some pemmican, for I had a reluctance--needless as it turned

out--to touch any of the thousand luxuries here, sufficient no doubt,

in a town like Dover alone, to last me five or six hundred years, if I

could live so long; and, having eaten, I descended The Shaft, and spent

the whole day, though it rained and blustered continually, in wandering

about. Reasoning, in my numb way, from the number of ships on the sea, I

expected to find the town over-crowded with dead: but this was not so;

and I should say, at a venture, that not a thousand English, nor fifteen

thousand foreigners, were in it: for that westward rage and stampede

must have operated here also, leaving the town empty but for the ever

new-coming hosts.

The first thing which I did was to go into an open grocer's shop, which

was also a post and telegraph office, with the notion, I suppose, to get

a message through to London. In the shop a single gas-light was burning

its last, and this, with that near the pier, were the only two that I

saw: and ghastly enough they looked, transparently wannish, and as it

were ashamed, like blinking night-things overtaken by the glare of day.

I conjectured that they had so burned and watched during months, or

years: for they were now blazing diminished, with streaks and rays in

the flame, as if by effort, and if these were the only two, they must

have needed time to all-but exhaust the works. Before the counter lay a

fashionably-dressed negro with a number of tied parcels scattered about

him, and on the counter an empty till, and behind it a tall thin woman

with her face resting sideways in the till, fingers clutching the outer

counter-rim, and such an expression of frantic terror as I never saw. I

got over the counter to a table behind a wire-gauze, and, like a numb

fool, went over the Morse alphabet in my mind before touching the

transmitting key, though I knew no code-words, and there, big enough to

be seen, was the ABC dial, and who was to answer my message I did not

ask myself: for habit was still strong upon me, and my mind refused to

reason from what I saw to what I did not see; but the moment I touched

the key, and peered greedily at the galvanometer-needle at my right, I

saw that it did not move, for no current was passing; and with a kind of

fright, I was up, leapt, and got away from the place, though there was a

great number of telegrams about the receiver which, if I had been in my

senses, I would have stopped and read.

Turning the corner of the next street, I saw wide-open the door of a

substantial large house, and went in. From bottom to top there was no

one there, except one English girl, sitting back in an easy-chair in the

drawing-room, which was richly furnished with Valenciennes curtains and

azure-satin things. She was a girl of the lowest class, hardly clad in

black rags, and there she lay with hanging jaw, in a very crooked and

awkward pose, a jemmy at her feet, in her left hand a roll of

bank-notes, and in her lap three watches. In fact, the bodies which I

saw here were, in general, either those of new-come foreigners, or else

of the very poor, the very old, or the very young.

But what made me remember this house was that I found here on one of the

sofas a newspaper: _The Kent Express_; and sitting unconscious of my

dead neighbour, I pored a long while over what was written there.

It said in a passage which I tore out and kept:

'Telegraphic communication with Tilsit, Insterburg, Warsaw, Cracow,

Przemysl, Gross Wardein, Karlsburg, and many smaller towns lying

immediately eastward of the 21st parallel of longitude has ceased during

the night. In some at least of them there must have been operators still

at their duty, undrawn into the great westward-rushing torrent: but as

all messages from Western Europe have been answered only by that dread

mysterious silence which, just three months and two days since,

astounded the world in the case of Eastern New Zealand, we can only

assume that these towns, too, have been added to the long and mournful

list; indeed, after last evening's Paris telegrams we might have

prophesied with some certainty, not merely their overthrow, but even the

hour of it: for the rate-uniformity of the slow-riding vapour which is

touring our globe is no longer doubtful, and has even been definitely

fixed by Professor Craven at 100-1/2 miles per day, or 4 miles 330 yards

per hour. Its nature, its origin, remains, of course, nothing but matter

of conjecture: for it leaves no living thing behind it: nor, God knows,

is that of any moment now to us who remain. The rumour that it is

associated with an odour of almonds is declared, on high authority, to

be improbable; but the morose purple of its impending gloom has been

attested by tardy fugitives from the face of its rolling and smoky

march.

'Is this the end? We do not, and cannot, believe it. Will the pure sky

which we to-day see above us be invaded in nine days, or less, by this

smoke of the Pit of Darkness? In spite of the assurances of the

scientists, we still doubt. For, if so, to what purpose that long drama

of History, in which we seem to see the Hand of the Dramaturgist?

Surely, the end of a Fifth Act should be obvious, satisfying to one's

sense of the complete: but History, so far, long as it has been,

resembles rather a Prologue than a Fifth Act. Can it be that the

Manager, utterly dissatisfied, would sweep all off, and 'hang up' the

piece for ever? Certainly, the sins of mankind have been as scarlet: and

if the fair earth which he has turned into Hell, send forth now upon him

the smoke of Hell, little the wonder. But we cannot yet believe. There

is a sparing strain in nature, and through the world, as a thread, is

spun a silence which smiles, and on the end of events we find placarded

large the words: "Why were ye afraid?" A dignified Hope, therefore--even

now, when we cower beneath this worldwide shadow of the wings of the

Condor of Death--becomes us: and, indeed, we see such an attitude among

some of the humblest of our people, from whose heart ascends the cry:

"Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Here, therefore, O Lord! O

Lord, look down, and save!

'But even as we thus write of hope, Reason, if we would hear her,

whispers us "fool": and inclement is the sky of earth. No more ships can

New York Harbour contain, and whereas among us men die weekly of

privations by the hundred thousand, yonder across the sea they perish by

the million: for where the rich are pinched, how can the poor live?

Already 700 out of the 1000 millions of our race have perished, and the

empires of civilisation have crumbled like sand-castles in a horror of

anarchy. Thousands upon thousands of unburied dead, anticipating the

more deliberate doom that comes and smokes, and rides and comes and

comes, and does not fail, encumber the streets of London, Manchester,

Liverpool. The guides of the nation have fled; the father stabs his

child, and the wife her husband, for a morsel of food; the fields lie

waste; wanton crowds carouse in our churches, universities, palaces,

banks and hospitals; we understand that late last night three

territorial regiments, the Munster Fusiliers, and the Lotian and East

Lancashire Regiments, riotously disbanded themselves, shooting two

officers; infectious diseases, as we all know, have spread beyond limit;

in several towns the police seem to have disappeared, and, in nearly

all, every vestige of decency; the results following upon the sudden

release of the convicts appear to be monstrous in the respective

districts; and within three short months Hell seems to have acquired

this entire planet, sending forth Horror, like a rabid wolf, and

Despair, like a disastrous sky, to devour and confound her. Hear,

therefore, O Lord, and forgive our iniquities! O Lord, we beseech Thee!

Look down, O Lord, and spare!'

* * * * *

When I had read this, and the rest of the paper, which had one whole

sheet-side blank, I sat a long hour there, eyeing a little patch of the

purple ash on a waxed board near the corner where the girl sat with her

time-pieces, so useless in her Eternity; and there was not a feeling in

me, except a pricking of curiosity, which afterwards became morbid and

ravenous, to know something more of that cloud, or smoke, of which this

man spoke, of its dates, its origin, its nature, its minute details.

Afterwards, I went down, and entered several houses, searching for more

papers, but did not find any; then I found a paper-shop which was open,

with boards outside, but either it had been deserted, or printing must

have stopped about the date of the paper which I had read, for the only

three news-papers there were dated long prior, and I did not read them.

Now it was raining, and a blustering autumn day it was, distributing the

odours of the world, and bringing me continual mixed whiffs of flowers

and the hateful stench of decay. But I would not mind it much.

I wandered and wandered, till I was tired of spahi and bashi-bazouk, of

Greek and Catalan, of Russian 'pope' and Coptic abuna, of dragoman and

Calmuck, of Egyptian maulawi and Afghan mullah, Neapolitan and sheik,

and the nightmare of wild poses, colours, stuffs and garbs, the

yellow-green kefie of the Bedouin, shawl-turbans of Baghdad, the

voluminous rose-silk tob of women, and face-veils, and stark distorted

nakedness, and sashes of figured muslin, and the workman's cords, and

the red tarboosh. About four, for very weariness, I was sitting on a

door-steep, bent beneath the rain; but soon was up again, fascinated no

doubt by this changing bazaar of sameness, its chance combinations and

permutations, and novelty in monotony. About five I was at a station,

marked Harbour Station, in and about which lay a considerable crowd, but

not one train. I sat again, and rested, rose and roamed again; soon

after six I found myself at another station, called 'Priory'; and here I

saw two long trains, both crowded, one on a siding, and one at the

up-platform.

I examined both engines, and found them of the old boiler steam-type

with manholes, heaters, autoclaves, feed-pump, &c., now rare in western

countries, except England. In one there was no water, but in that at the

platform, the float-lever, barely tilted toward the float, showed that

there was some in the boiler. Of this one I overhauled all the

machinery, and found it good, though rusted. There was plenty of fuel,

and oil, which I supplemented from a near shop: and during ninety

minutes my brain and hands worked with an intelligence as it were

automatic, of their own motion. After three journeys across the station

and street, I saw the fire blaze well, and the manometer move; when the

lever of the safety-valve, whose load I lightened by half an atmosphere,

lifted, I jumped down, and tried to disconnect the long string of

carriages from the engine: but failed, the coupling being an automatic

arrangement new to me; nor did I care. It was now very dark; but there

was still oil for bull's-eye and lantern, and I lit them. I forgot

nothing. I rolled driver and stoker--the guard was absent--one to the

platform, one upon the rails: and I took their place there. At about

8.30 I ran out from Dover, my throttle-valve pealing high a long

falsetto through the bleak and desolate night.

* * * * *

My aim was London. But even as I set out, my heart smote me: I knew

nothing of the metals, their junctions, facing-points, sidings,

shuntings, and complexities. Even as to whether I was going toward, or

away from, London, I was not sure. But just in proportion as my first

timorousness of the engine hardened into familiarity and self-sureness,

I quickened speed, wilfully, with an obstinacy deaf and blind.

Finally, from a mere crawl at first, I was flying at a shocking

velocity, while something, tongue in cheek, seemed to whisper me: 'There

must be other trains blocking the lines, at stations, in yards, and

everywhere--it is a maniac's ride, a ride of death, and Flying

Dutchman's frenzy: remember your dark five-deep brigade of passengers,

who rock and bump together, and will suffer in a collision.' But with

mulish stubbornness I thought: 'They wished to go to London'; and on I

raged, not wildly exhilarated, so far as I can remember, nor lunatic,

but feeling the dull glow of a wicked and morose Unreason urge in my

bosom, while I stoked all blackened at the fire, or saw the vague mass

of dead horse or cow, running trees and fields, and dark homestead and

deep-slumbering farm, flit ghostly athwart the murky air, as the

half-blind saw 'men like trees walking.'

Long, however, it did not last: I could not have been twenty miles from

Dover when, on a long reach of straight lines, I made out before me a

tarpaulined mass opposite a signal-point: and at once callousness

changed to terror within me. But even as I plied the brake, I felt that

it was too late: I rushed to the gangway to make a wild leap down an

embankment to the right, but was thrown backward by a quick series of

rough bumps, caused by eight or ten cattle which lay there across the

lines: and when I picked myself up, and leapt, some seconds before the

impact, the speed must have considerably slackened, for I received no

fracture, but lay in semi-coma in a patch of yellow-flowered whin on

level ground, and was even conscious of a fire on the lines forty yards

away, and, all the night, of vague thunder sounding from somewhere.

* * * * *

About five, or half-past, in the morning I was sitting up, rubbing my

eyes, in a dim light mixed with drizzle. I could see that the train of

my last night's debauch was a huddled-up chaos of fallen carriages and

disfigured bodies. A five-barred gate on my left opened into a hedge,

and swung with creaks: two yards from my feet lay a little shaggy pony

with swollen wan abdomen, the very picture of death, and also about me a

number of dead wet birds.

I picked myself up, passed through the gate, and walked up a row of

trees to a house at their end. I found it to be a little country-tavern

with a barn, forming one house, the barn part much larger than the

tavern part. I went into the tavern by a small side-door--behind the

bar--into a parlour--up a little stair--into two rooms: but no one was

there. I then went round into the barn, which was paved with

cobble-stones, and there lay a dead mare and foal, some fowls, with two

cows. A ladder-stair led to a closed trap-door in the floor above. I

went up, and in the middle of a wilderness of hay saw nine

people--labourers, no doubt--five men and four women, huddled together,

and with them a tin-pail containing the last of some spirit; so that

these had died merry.

I slept three hours among them, and afterwards went back to the tavern,

and had some biscuits of which I opened a new tin, with some ham, jam

and apples, of which I made a good meal, for my pemmican was gone.

Afterwards I went following the rail-track on foot, for the engines of

both the collided trains were smashed. I knew northward from southward

by the position of the sun: and after a good many stoppages at houses,

and by railway-banks, I came, at about eleven in the night, to a great

and populous town.

By the Dane John and the Cathedral, I immediately recognised it as

Canterbury, which I knew quite well. And I walked up Castle Street to

the High Street, conscious for the first time of that

regularly-repeated sound, like a sob or groan, which was proceeding from

my throat. As there was no visible moon, and these old streets very dim,

I had to pick my way, lest I should desecrate the dead with my foot, and

they all should rise with hue and cry to hunt me. However, the bodies

here were not numerous, most, as before, being foreigners: and these,

scattered about this strict old English burg that mourning dark night,

presented such a scene of the baneful wrath of God, and all abomination

of desolation, as broke me quite down at one place, where I stood in

travail with jeremiads and sore sobbings and lamentations, crying out

upon it all, God knows.

Only when I stood at the west entrance of the Cathedral I could discern,

spreading up the dark nave, to the lantern, to the choir, a

phantasmagorical mass of forms: I went a little inward, and striking

three matches, peered nearer: the two transepts, too, seemed

crowded--the cloister-doorway was blocked--the southwest porch thronged,

so that a great congregation must have flocked hither shortly before

their fate overtook them.

Here it was that I became definitely certain that the after-odour of the

poison was not simply lingering in the air, but was being more or less

given off by the bodies: for the blossomy odour of this church actually

overcame that other odour, the whole rather giving the scent of old

mouldy linens long embalmed in cedars.

Well, away with stealthy trot I ran from the abysmal silence of that

place, and in Palace Street near made one of those sudden immoderate

rackets that seemed to outrage the universe, and left me so woefully

faint, decrepit, and gasping for life (the noise of the train was

different, for there I was flying, but here a captive, and which way I

ran was capture). Passing in Palace Street, I saw a little lampshop, and

wanting a lantern, tried to get in, but the door was locked; so, after

going a few steps, and kicking against a policeman's truncheon, I

returned to break the window-glass. I knew that it would make a fearful

noise, and for some fifteen or twenty minutes stood hesitating: but

never could I have dreamed, my good God, of _such_ a noise, so

passionate, so dominant, so divulgent, and, O Heaven, so long-lasting:

for I seemed to have struck upon the weak spot of some planet, which

came suddenly tumbling, with protracted bellowing and _débâcle_, about

my ears. It was a good hour before I would climb in; but then quickly

found what I wanted, and some big oil-cans; and till one or two in the

morning, the innovating flicker of my lantern went peering at random

into the gloomy nooks of the town.

Under a deep old Gothic arch that spanned a pavered alley, I saw the

little window of a little house of rubble, and between the two

diamond-paned sashes rags tightly beaten in, the idea evidently being to

make the place air-tight against the poison. When I went in I found the

door of that room open, though it, too, apparently, had been stuffed at

the edges; and on the threshold an old man and woman lay low. I

conjectured that, thus protected, they had remained shut in, till either

hunger, or the lack of oxygen in the used-up air, drove them forth,

whereupon the poison, still active, must have instantly ended them. I

found afterwards that this expedient of making air-tight had been widely

resorted to; and it might well have proved successful, if both the

supply of inclosed air, and of food, had been anywhere commensurate with

the durability of the poisonous state.

Weary, weary as I grew, some morbid persistence sustained me, and I

would not rest. About four in the morning I was at a station again,

industriously bending, poor wretch, at the sooty task of getting another

engine ready for travel. This time, when steam was up, I succeeded in

uncoupling the carriages from the engine, and by the time morning

broke, I was lightly gliding away over the country, whither I did not

know, but making for London.

* * * * *

Now I went with more intelligence and caution, and got on very well,

travelling seven days, never at night, except it was very clear, never

at more than twenty or twenty-five miles, and crawling through tunnels.

I do not know the maze into which the train took me, for very soon after

leaving Canterbury it must have gone down some branch-line, and though

the names were marked at stations, that hardly helped me, for of their

situation relatively to London I was seldom sure. Moreover, again and

again was my progress impeded by trains on the metals, when I would have

to run back to a shunting-point or a siding, and, in two instances,

these being far behind, changed from my own to the impeding engine. On

the first day I travelled unhindered till noon, when I stopped in open

country that seemed uninhabited for ages, only that half a mile to the

left, on a shaded sward, was a large stone house of artistic design,

coated with tinted harling, the roof of red Ruabon tiles, and timbered

gables. I walked to it after another row with putting out the fire and

arranging for a new one, the day being bright and mild, with great

masses of white cloud in the sky. The house had an outer and an inner

hall, three reception rooms, fine oil-paintings, a kind of museum, and a

large kitchen. In a bed-room above-stairs I found three women with

servants' caps, and a footman, arranged in a strange symmetrical way,

head to head, like rays of a star. As I stood looking at them, I could

have sworn, my good God, that I heard someone coming up the stairs. But

it was some slight creaking of the breeze in the house, augmented a

hundredfold to my inflamed and fevered hearing: for, used for years now

to this silence of Eternity, it is as though I hear all sounds through

an ear-trumpet. I went down, and after eating, and drinking some

clary-water, made of brandy, sugar, cinnamon, and rose water, which I

found in plenty, I lay down on a sofa in the inner hall, and slept a

quiet sleep until near midnight.

I went out then, still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London,

and after getting the engine to rights, went off under a clear black sky

thronged with worlds and far-sown spawn, some of them, I thought,

perhaps like this of mine, whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence,

with one only inhabitant to see it, and hear its silence. And all the

long night I travelled, stopping twice only, once to get the coal from

an engine which had impeded me, and once to drink some water, which I

took care, as always, should be running water. When I felt my head nod,

and my eyes close about 5 A.M., I threw myself, just outside the arch of

a tunnel upon a grassy bank, pretty thick with stalks and flowers, the

workings of early dawn being then in the east: and there, till near

eleven, slept.

On waking, I noticed that the country now seemed more like Surrey than

Kent: there was that regular swell and sinking of the land; but, in

fact, though it must have been either, it looked like neither, for

already all had an aspect of return to a state of wild nature, and I

could see that for a year at the least no hand had tended the soil. Near

before me was a stretch of lucerne of such extraordinary growth, that I

was led during that day and the succeeding one to examine the condition

of vegetation with some minuteness, and nearly everywhere I detected a

certain hypertrophie tendency in stamens, calycles, pericarps, and

pistils, in every sort of bulbiferous growth that I looked at, in the

rushes, above all, the fronds, mosses, lichens, and all cryptogamia, and

in the trefoils, clover especially, and some creepers. Many

crop-fields, it was clear, had been prepared, but not sown; some had

not been reaped: and in both cases I was struck with their appearance of

rankness, as I was also when in Norway, and was all the more surprised

that this should be the case at a time when a poison, whose action is

the arrest of oxidation, had traversed the earth; I could only conclude

that its presence in large volumes in the lower strata of the atmosphere

had been more or less temporary, and that the tendency to exuberance

which I observed was due to some principle by which Nature acts with

freer energy and larger scope in the absence of man.

Two yards from the rails I saw, when I got up, a little rill beside a

rotten piece of fence, barely oozing itself onward under masses of foul

and stagnant fungoids: and here there was a sudden splash, and life: and

I caught sight of the hind legs of a diving young frog. I went and lay

on my belly, poring over the clear dulcet little water, and presently

saw two tiny bleaks, or ablets, go gliding low among the swaying

moss-hair of the bottom-rocks, and thought how gladly would I be one of

them, with my home so thatched and shady, and my life drowned in their

wide-eyed reverie. At any rate, these little creatures are alive, the

batrachians also, and, as I found the next day, pupae and chrysales of

one sort or another, for, to my deep emotion, I saw a little white

butterfly staggering in the air over the flower-garden of a rustic

station named Butley.

* * * * *

It was while I was lying there, poring upon that streamlet, that a

thought came into my head: for I said to myself: 'If now I be here

alone, alone, alone... alone, alone... one on the earth... and my girth

have a spread of 25,000 miles... what will happen to my mind? Into what

kind of creature shall I writhe and change? I may live two years so!

What will have happened then? I may live five years--ten! What will have

happened after the five? the ten? I may live twenty, thirty, forty...'

Already, already, there are things that peep and sprout within me...!

* * * * *

I wanted food and fresh running water, and walked from the engine half a

mile through fields of lucerne whose luxuriance quite hid the

foot-paths, and reached my shoulder. After turning the brow of a hill, I

came to a park, passing through which I saw some dead deer and three

persons, and emerged upon a terraced lawn, at the end of which stood an

Early English house of pale brick with copings, plinths, stringcourses

of limestone, and spandrels of carved marble; and some distance from the

porch a long table, or series of tables, in the open air, still spread

with cloths that were like shrouds after a month of burial; and the

table had old foods on it, and some lamps; and all around it, and all on

the lawn, were dead peasants. I seemed to know the house, probably from

some print which I may have seen, but I could not make out the

escutcheon, though I saw from its simplicity that it must be very

ancient. Right across the façade spread still some of the letters in

evergreens of the motto: 'Many happy returns of the day,' so that

someone must have come of age, or something, for inside all was gala,

and it was clear that these people had defied a fate which they, of

course, foreknew. I went nearly throughout the whole spacious place of

thick-carpeted halls, marbles, and famous oils, antlers and arras, and

gilt saloons, and placid large bed-chambers: and it took me an hour.

There were here not less than a hundred and eighty people. In the first

of a vista of three large reception-rooms lay what could only have been

a number of quadrille parties, for to the _coup d'oeil_ they presented a

two-and-two appearance, made very repulsive by their jewels and

evening-dress. I had to steel my heart to go through this house, for I

did not know if these people were looking at me as soon as my back was

turned. Once I was on the very point of flying, for I was going up the

great central stairway, and there came a pelt of dead leaves against a

window-pane in a corridor just above on the first floor, which thrilled

me to the inmost soul. But I thought that if I once fled, they would all

be at me from behind, and I should be gibbering mad long, long before I

reached the outer hall, and so stood my ground, even defiantly

advancing. In a small dark bedroom in the north wing on the second

floor--that is to say, at the top of the house--I saw a tall young lady

and a groom, or wood-man, to judge by his clothes, horribly riveted in

an embrace on a settee, she with a light coronet on her head in

low-necked dress, and their lipless teeth still fiercely pressed

together. I collected in a bag a few delicacies from the under-regions

of this house, Lyons sausages, salami, mortadel, apples, roes, raisins,

artichokes, biscuits, a few wines, a ham, bottled fruit, pickles,

coffee, and so on, with a gold plate, tin-opener, cork-screw, fork, &c.,

and dragged them all the long way back to the engine before I could eat.

* * * * *

My brain was in such a way, that it was several days before the

perfectly obvious means of finding my way to London, since I wished to

go there, at all occurred to me; and the engine went wandering the

intricate railway-system of the south country, I having twice to water

her with a coal-bucket from a pool, for the injector was giving no water

from the tank under the coals, and I did not know where to find any near

tank-sheds. On the fifth evening, instead of into London, I ran into

Guildford.

* * * * *

That night, from eleven till the next day, there was a great storm over

England: let me note it down. And ten days later, on the 17th of the

month came another; and on the 23rd another; and I should be put to it

to count the great number since. And they do not resemble English

storms, but rather Arctic ones, in a certain very suggestive something

of personalness, and a carousing malice, and a Tartarus gloom, which I

cannot quite describe. That night at Guildford, after wandering about,

and becoming very weary, I threw myself upon a cushioned pew in an old

Norman church with two east apses, called St. Mary's, using a

Bible-cushion for pillow, and placing some distance away a little tin

lamp turned low, whose ray served me for _veilleuse_ through the night.

Happily I had taken care to close up everything, or, I feel sure, the

roof must have gone. Only one dead, an old lady in a chapel on the north

side of the chancel, whom I rather mistrusted, was there with me: and

there I lay listening: for, after all, I could not sleep a wink, while

outside vogued the immense tempest. And I communed with myself,

thinking: 'I, poor man, lost in this conflux of infinitudes and vortex

of the world, what can become of me, my God? For dark, ah dark, is the

waste void into which from solid ground I am now plunged a million

fathoms deep, the sport of all the whirlwinds: and it were better for me

to have died with the dead, and never to have seen the wrath and

turbulence of the Ineffable, nor to have heard the thrilling bleakness

of the winds of Eternity, when they pine, and long, and whimper, and

when they vociferate and blaspheme, and when they expostulate and

intrigue and implore, and when they despair and die, which ear of man

should never hear. For they mean to eat me up, I know, these Titanic

darknesses: and soon like a whiff I shall pass away, and leave the world

to them.' So till next morning I lay mumping, with shivers and

cowerings: for the shocks of the storm pervaded the locked church to my

very heart; and there were thunders that night, my God, like callings

and laughs and banterings, exchanged between distant hill-tops in Hell.

* * * * *

Well, the next morning I went down the steep High Street, and found a

young nun at the bottom whom I had left the previous evening with a

number of girls in uniform opposite the Guildhall--half-way up the

street. She must have been spun down, arm over arm, for the wind was

westerly, and whereas I had left her completely dressed to her wimple

and beads, she was now nearly stripped, and her little flock scattered.

And branches of trees, and wrecked houses, and reeling clouds of dead

leaves were everywhere that wild morning.

This town of Guildford appeared to be the junction of an extraordinary

number of railway-lines, and before again setting out in the afternoon,

when the wind had lulled, having got an A B C guide, and a railway-map,

I decided upon my line, and upon a new engine, feeling pretty sure now

of making London, only thirty miles away. I then set out, and about five

o'clock was at Surbiton, near my aim; I kept on, expecting every few

minutes to see the great city, till darkness fell, and still, at

considerable risk, I went, as I thought, forward: but no London was

there. I had, in fact, been on a loop-line, and at Surbiton gone wrong

again; for the next evening I found myself at Wokingham, farther away

than ever.

I slept on a rug in the passage of an inn called The Rose, for there was

a wild, Russian-looking man, with projecting top-teeth, on a bed in the

house, whose appearance I did not like, and it was late, and I too tired

to walk further; and the next morning pretty early I set out again, and

at 10 A.M. was at Reading.

The notion of navigating the land by precisely the same means as the

sea, simple and natural as it was, had not at all occurred to me: but at

the first accidental sight of a compass in a little shop-window near the

river at Reading, my difficulties as to getting to any desired place in

the world vanished once and for all: for a good chart or map, the

compass, a pair of compasses, and, in the case of longer distances, a

quadrant, sextant or theodolite, with a piece of paper and pencil, were

all that were necessary to turn an engine into a land-ship, one choosing

the lines that ran nearest the direction of one's course, whenever they

did not run precisely.

Thus provided, I ran out from Reading about seven in the evening, while

there was still some light, having spent there some nine hours. This was

the town where I first observed that shocking crush of humanity, which

I afterwards met in every large town west of London. Here, I should say,

the English were quite equal in number to the foreigners: and there were

enough of both, God knows: for London must have poured many here. There

were houses, in every room of which, and on the stairs, the dead

actually overlay each other, and in the streets before them were points

where only on flesh, or under carriages, was it possible to walk. I went

into the great County Gaol, from which, as I had read, the prisoners had

been released two weeks before-hand, and there I found the same pressed

condition, cells occupied by ten or twelve, the galleries continuously

rough-paved with faces, heads, and old-clothes-shops of robes; and in

the parade-ground, against one wall, a mass of human stuff, like tough

grey clay mixed with rags and trickling black gore, where a crush as of

hydraulic power must have acted. At a corner between a gate and a wall

near the biscuit-factory of this town I saw a boy, whom I believe to

have been blind, standing jammed, at his wrist a chain-ring, and, at the

end of the chain, a dog; from his hap-hazard posture I conjectured that

he, and chain, and dog had been lifted from the street, and placed so,

by the storm of the 7th of the month; and what made it very curious was

that his right arm pointed a little outward just over the dog, so that,

at the moment when I first sighted him, he seemed a drunken fellow

setting his dog at me. In fact, all the dead I found much mauled and

stripped and huddled: and the earth seemed to be making an abortive

effort to sweep her streets.

Well, some little distance from Reading I saw a big flower-seed farm,

looking dead in some plots, and in others quite rank: and here again,

fluttering quite near the engine, two little winged aurelians in the

quiet evening air. I went on, passing a great number of crowded trains

on the down-line, two of them in collision, and very broken up, and one

exploded engine; even the fields and cuttings on either hand of the line

had a rather populous look, as if people, when trains and vehicles

failed, had set to trudging westward in caravans and streams. When I

came to a long tunnel near Slough, I saw round the foot of the arch an

extraordinary quantity of wooden _débris_, and as I went very slowly

through, was alarmed by the continuous bumping of the train, which, I

knew, was passing over bodies; at the other end were more _débris_; and

I easily guessed that a company of desperate people had made the tunnel

air-tight at the two arches, and provisioned themselves, with the hope

to live there till the day of destiny was passed; whereupon their

barricades must have been crashed through by some up-train and

themselves crushed, or else, other crowds, mad to share their cave of

refuge, had stormed the boardings. This latter, as I afterwards found,

was a very usual event.

I should very soon have got to London now, but, as my bad luck would

have it, I met a long up-train on the metals, with not one creature in

any part of it. There was nothing to do but to tranship, with all my

things, to its engine, which I found in good condition with plenty of

coal and water, and to set it going, a hateful labour: I being already

jet-black from hair to toes. However, by half-past ten I found myself

stopped by another train only a quarter of a mile from Paddington, and

walked the rest of the way among trains in which the standing dead still

stood, propped by their neighbours, and over metals where bodies were as

ordinary and cheap as waves on the sea, or twigs in a forest. I believe

that wild crowds had given chase on foot to moving trains, or fore-run

them in the frenzied hope of inducing them to stop.

I came to the great shed of glass and girders which is the station, the

night being perfectly soundless, moonless, starless, and the hour about

eleven.

I found later that all the electric generating-stations, or all that I

visited, were intact; that is to say, must have been shut down before

the arrival of the doom; also that the gas-works had almost certainly

been abandoned some time previously: so that this city of dreadful

night, in which, at the moment when Silence choked it, not less than

forty to sixty millions swarmed and droned, must have more resembled

Tartarus and the foul shades of Hell than aught to which my fancy can

liken it.

For, coming nearer the platforms, I saw that trains, in order to move at

all, must have moved through a slough of bodies pushed from behind, and

forming a packed homogeneous mass on the metals: and I knew that they

_had_ moved. Nor could _I_ now move, unless I decided to wade: for flesh

was everywhere, on the roofs of trains, cramming the interval between

them, on the platforms, splashing the pillars like spray, piled on

trucks and lorries, a carnal quagmire; and outside, it filled the space

between a great host of vehicles, carpeting all that region of London.

And all here that odour of blossoms, which nowhere yet, save on one vile

ship, had failed, was now wholly overcome by another: and the thought

was in my head, my God, that if the soul of man had sent up to Heaven

the odour which his body gave to me, then it was not so strange that

things were as they were.

I got out from the station, with ears, God knows, that still awaited the

accustomed noising of this accursed town, habituated as I now was to all

the dumb and absent void of Soundlessness; and I was overwhelmed in a

new awe, and lost in a wilder woesomeness, when, instead of lights and

business, I saw the long street which I knew brood darker than Babylons

long desolate, and in place of its ancient noising, heard, my God, a

shocking silence, rising higher than I had ever heard it, and blending

with the silence of the inane, eternal stars in heaven.

* * * * *

I could not get into any vehicle for some time, for all thereabouts was

practically a mere block; but near the Park, which I attained by

stooping among wheels, and selecting my foul steps, I overhauled a

Daimler car, found in it two cylinders of petrol, lit the ignition-lamp,

removed with averted abhorrence three bodies, mounted, and broke that

populous stillness. And through streets nowhere empty of bodies I went

urging eastward my jolting, and spattered, and humming way.

That I should have persisted, with so much pains, to come to this

unbounded catacomb, seems now singular to me: for by that time I could

not have been sufficiently daft to expect to find another being like

myself on the earth, though I cherished, I remember, the irrational hope

of yet somewhere finding dog, or cat, or horse, to be with me, and would

anon think bitterly of Reinhardt, my Arctic dog, which my own hand had

shot. But, in reality, a morbid curiosity must have been within me all

the time to read the real truth of what had happened, so far as it was

known, or guessed, and to gloat upon all that drama, and cup of

trembling, and pouring out of the vials of the wrath of God, which must

have preceded the actual advent of the end of Time. This inquisitiveness

had, at every town which I reached, made the search for newspapers

uppermost in my mind; but, by bad luck, I had found only four, all of

them ante-dated to the one which I had read at Dover, though their dates

gave me some idea of the period when printing must have ceased, viz.

soon after the 17th July--about three months subsequent to my arrival at

the Pole--for none I found later than this date; and these contained

nothing scientific, but only orisons and despairings. On arriving,

therefore, at London, I made straight for the office of the _Times_,

only stopping at a chemist's in Oxford Street for a bottle of antiseptic

to hold near my nose, though, having once left the neighbourhood of

Paddington, I had hardly much need of this.

I made my way to the square where the paper was printed, to find that,

even there, the ground was closely strewn with calpac and pugaree, black

abayeh and fringed praying-shawl, hob-nail and sandal, figured lungi and

striped silk, all very muddled and mauled. Through the dark square to

the twice-dark building I passed, and found open the door of an

advertisement-office; but on striking a match, saw that it had been

lighted by electricity, and had therefore to retrace my stumbling steps,

till I came to a shop of lamps in a near alley, walking meantime with

timid cares that I might hurt no one--for in this enclosed neighbourhood

I began to feel strange tremors, and kept striking matches, which, so

still was the black air, hardly flickered.

When I returned to the building with a little lighted lamp, I at once

saw a file on a table, and since there were a number of dead there, and

I wished to be alone, I took the heavy mass of paper between my left arm

and side, and the lamp in my right hand; passed then behind a counter;

and then, to the right, up a stair which led me into a very great

building and complexity of wooden steps and corridors, where I went

peering, the lamp visibly trembling in my hand, for here also were the

dead. Finally, I entered a good-sized carpeted room with a baize-covered

table in the middle, and large smooth chairs, and on the table many

manuscripts impregnated with purple dust, and around were books in

shelves. This room had been locked upon a single man, a tall man in a

frock-coat, with a pointed grey beard, who at the last moment had

decided to fly from it, for he lay at the threshold, apparently fallen

dead the moment he opened the door. Him, by drawing his feet aside, I

removed, locked the door upon myself, sat at the table before the dusty

file, and, with the little lamp near, began to search.

I searched and read till far into the morning. But God knows, He

alone....

I had not properly filled the little reservoir with oil, and at about

three in the fore-day, it began to burn sullenly lower, letting sparks,

and turning the glass grey: and in my deepest chilly heart was the

question: 'Suppose the lamp goes out before the daylight....'

I knew the Pole, and cold, I knew them well: but to be frozen by panic,

my God! I read, I say, I searched, I would not stop: but I read that

night racked by terrors such as have never yet entered into the heart

of man to conceive. My flesh moved and crawled like a lake which, here

and there, the breeze ruffles. Sometimes for two, three, four minutes,

the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I would

peruse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the meaning of

one single word, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable host of the

wan dead that camped about me, pierced with horror lest they should

start, and stand, and accuse me: for the grave and the worm was the

world; and in the air a sickening stirring of cerements and shrouds; and

the taste of the pale and insubstantial grey of ghosts seemed to infect

my throat, and faint odours of the loathsome tomb my nostrils, and the

toll of deep-toned passing-bells my ears; finally the lamp smouldered

very low, and my charnel fancy teemed with the screwing-down of coffins,

lych-gates and sextons, and the grating of ropes that lower down the

dead, and the first sound of the earth upon the lid of that strait and

gloomy home of the mortal; that lethal look of cold dead fingers I

seemed to see before me, the insipidness of dead tongues, the pout of

the drowned, and the vapid froths that ridge their lips, till my flesh

was moist as with the stale washing-waters of morgues and mortuaries,

and with such sweats as corpses sweat, and the mawkish tear that lies

on dead men's cheeks; for what is one poor insignificant man in his

flesh against a whole world of the disembodied, he alone with them, and

nowhere, nowhere another of his kind, to whom to appeal against them? I

read, and I searched: but God, God knows ... If a leaf of the paper,

which I slowly, warily, stealingly turned, made but one faintest rustle,

how did that _reveille_ boom in echoes through the vacant and haunted

chambers of my poor aching heart, my God! and there was a cough in my

throat which for a cruelly long time I would not cough, till it burst in

horrid clamour from my lips, sending crinkles of cold through my inmost

blood. For with the words which I read were all mixed up visions of

crawling hearses, wails, and lugubrious crapes, and piercing shrieks of

madness in strange earthy vaults, and all the mournfulness of the black

Vale of Death, and the tragedy of corruption. Twice during the ghostly

hours of that night the absolute and undeniable certainty that some

presence--some most gashly silent being--stood at my right elbow, so

thrilled me, that I leapt to my feet to confront it with clenched fists,

and hairs that bristled stiff in horror and frenzy. After that second

time I must have fainted; for when it was broad day, I found my dropped

head over the file of papers, supported on my arms. And I resolved then

never again after sunset to remain in any house: for that night was

enough to kill a horse, my good God; and that this is a haunted planet I

know.

* * * * *

What I read in the _Times_ was not very definite, for how could it be?

but in the main it confirmed inferences which I had myself drawn, and

fairly satisfied my mind.

There had been a battle royal in the paper between my old collaborator

Professor Stanistreet and Dr. Martin Rogers, and never could I have

conceived such an indecorous piece of business, men like them calling

one another 'tyro,' 'dreamer,' and in one place 'block-head.'

Stanistreet denied that the perfumed odour of almonds attributed to the

advancing cloud could be due to anything but the excited fancy of the

reporting fugitives, because, said he, it was unknown that either Cn,

HCn, or K_4FeCn_6 had been given out by volcanoes, and the

destructiveness to life of the travelling cloud could only be owing to

CO and CO_2. To this Rogers, in an article characterised by

extraordinary heat, replied that he could not understand how even a

'tyro'(!) in chemical and geological phenomena would venture to rush

into print with the statement that HCn had not commonly been given out

by volcanoes: that it _had_ been, he said, was perfectly certain; though

whether it had been or not could not affect the decision of a reasoning

mind as to whether it was being: for that cyanogen, as a matter of fact,

was not rare in nature, though not directly occurring, being one of the

products of the common distillation of pit-coal, and found in roots,

peaches, almonds, and many tropical flora; also that it had been

actually pointed out as probable by more than one thinker that some salt

or salts of Cn, the potassic, or the potassic ferrocyanide, or both,

must exist in considerable stores in the earth at volcanic depths. In

reply to this, Stanistreet in a two-column article used the word

'dreamer,' and Rogers, when Berlin had been already silenced, finally

replied with his amazing 'block-head.' But, in my opinion, by far the

most learned and lucid of the scientific dicta was from the rather

unexpected source of Sloggett, of the Dublin Science and Art Department:

he, without fuss, accepted the statements of the fugitive eye-witnesses,

down to the assertion that the cloud, as it rolled travelling, seemed

mixed from its base to the clouds with languid tongues of purple flame,

rose-coloured at their edges. This, Sloggett explained, was the

characteristic flame of both cyanogen and hydrocyanic acid vapour,

which, being inflammable, may have become locally ignited in the passage

over cities, and only burned in that limited and languid way on account

of the ponderous volumes of carbonic anhydride with which they must, of

course, be mixed: the dark empurpled colour was due to the presence of

large quantities of the scoriae of the trappean rocks: basalts,

green-stone, trachytes, and the various porphyries. This article was

most remarkable for its clear divination, because written so early--not

long, in fact, after the cessation of telegraphic communication with

Australia and China; and at a date so early Sloggett stated that the

character of the devastation not only proved an eruption--another, but

far greater Krakatoa--probably in some South Sea region, but indicated

that its most active product must be, not CO, but potassic ferrocyanide

(K_4FeCn_6), which, undergoing distillation with the products of sulphur

in the heat of eruption, produced hydrocyanic acid (HCn); and this

volatile acid, he said, remaining in a vaporous state in all climates

above a temperature of 26.5° C., might involve the entire earth, if the

eruption proved sufficiently powerful, travelling chiefly in a direction

contrary to the earth's west-to-east motion, the only regions which

would certainly be exempt being the colder regions of the Arctic

circles, where the vapour of the acid would assume the liquid state, and

fall as rain. He did not anticipate that vegetation would be permanently

affected, unless the eruption were of inconceivable duration and

activity, for though the poisonous quality of hydrocyanic acid consisted

in its sudden and complete arrest of oxidation, vegetation had two

sources of life--the soil as well as the air; with this exception, all

life, down to the lowest evolutionary forms, would disappear (here was

the one point in which he was somewhat at fault), until the earth

reproduced them. For the rest, he fixed the rate of the on-coming cloud

at from 100 to 105 miles a day; and the date of eruption, either the

14th, 15th, or 16th of April--which was either one, two, or three days

after the arrival of the _Boreal_ party at the Pole; and he concluded by

saying that, if the facts were as he had stated them, then he could

suggest no hiding-place for the race of man, unless such places as mines

and tunnels could be made air-tight; nor could even they be of use to

any considerable number, except in the event of the poisonous state of

the air being of very short duration.

* * * * *

I had thought of mines before: but in a very languid way, till this

article, and other things that I read, as it were struck my brain a slap

with the notion. For 'there,' I said, 'if anywhere, shall I find a

man....'

* * * * *

I went out from that building that morning feeling like a man bowed down

with age, for the depths of unutterable horror into which I had had

glimpses during that one night made me very feeble, and my steps

tottered, and my brain reeled.

I got out into Farringdon Street, and at the near Circus, where four

streets meet, had under my furthest range of vision nothing but four

fields of bodies, bodies, clad in a rag-shop of every faded colour, or

half-clad, or not clad at all, actually, in many cases, over-lying one

another, as I had seen at Reading, but here with a markedly more

skeleton appearance: for I saw the swollen-looking shoulders, sharp

hips, hollow abdomens, and stiff bony limbs of people dead from famine,

the whole having the grotesque air of some _macabre_ battle-field of

fallen marionettes. Mixed with these was an extraordinary number of

vehicles of all sorts, so that I saw that driving among them would be

impracticable, whereas the street which I had taken during the night

was fairly clear. I thought a minute what I should do: then went by a

parallel back-street, and came out to a shop in the Strand, where I

hoped to find all the information which I needed about the excavations

of the country. The shutters were up, and I did not wish to make any

noise among these people, though the morning was bright, it being about

ten o'clock, and it was easy to effect entrance, for I saw a crow-bar in

a big covered furniture-van near. I, therefore, went northward, till I

came to the British Museum, the cataloguing-system of which I knew well,

and passed in. There was no one at the library-door to bid me stop, and

in the great round reading-room not a soul, except one old man with a

bag of goître hung at his neck, and spectacles, he lying up a

book-ladder near the shelves, a 'reader' to the last. I got to the

printed catalogues, and for an hour was upstairs among the dim sacred

galleries of this still place, and at the sight of certain Greek and

Coptic papyri, charters, seals, had such a dream of this ancient earth,

my good God, as even an angel's pen could not half express on paper.

Afterwards, I went away loaded with a good hundred-weight of

Ordnance-maps, which I had stuffed into a bag found in the cloak-room,

with three topographical books; I then, at an instrument-maker's in

Holborn, got a sextant and theodolite, and at a grocer's near the river

put into a sack-bag provisions to last me a week or two; at Blackfriars

Bridge wharf-station I found a little sharp white steamer of a few tons,

which happily was driven by liquid air, so that I had no troublesome

fire to light: and by noon I was cutting my solitary way up the Thames,

which flowed as before the ancient Britons were born, and saw it, and

built mud-huts there amid the primaeval forest; and afterwards the

Romans came, and saw it, and called it Tamesis, or Thamesis.

* * * * *

That night, as I lay asleep on the cabin-cushions of my little boat

under the lee of an island at Richmond, I had a clear dream, in which

something, or someone, came to me, and asked me a question: for it said:

'Why do you go seeking another man?--that you may fall upon him, and

kiss him? or that you may fall upon him, and murder him?' And I answered

sullenly in my dream: 'I would not murder him. I do not wish to murder

anyone.'

* * * * *

What was essential to me was to know, with certainty, whether I was

really alone: for some instinct began to whisper me: 'Find that out: be

sure, be sure: for without the assurance you can never be--yourself.'

I passed into the great Midland Canal, and went northward, leisurely

advancing, for I was in no hurry. The weather remained very warm, and

great part of the country was still dressed in autumn leaves. I have

written, I think, of the terrific character of the tempests witnessed in

England since my return: well, the calms were just as intense and novel.

This observation was forced upon me: and I could not but be surprised.

There seemed no middle course now: if there was a wind, it was a storm:

if there was not a storm, no leaf stirred, not a roughening zephyr ran

the water. I was reminded of maniacs that laugh now, and rave now--but

never smile, and never sigh.

On the fourth afternoon I passed by Leicester, and the next morning left

my pleasant boat, carrying maps and compass, and at a small station took

engine, bound for Yorkshire, where I loitered and idled away two foolish

months, sometimes travelling by steam-engine, sometimes by automobile,

sometimes by bicycle, and sometimes on foot, till the autumn was quite

over.

* * * * *

There were two houses in London to which especially I had thought to

go: one in Harley Street, and one in Hanover Square: but when it came to

the point, I would not; and there was a little embowered home in

Yorkshire, where I was born, to which I thought to go: but I would not,

confining myself for many days to the eastern half of the county.

One morning, while passing on foot along the coast-wall from Bridlington

to Flambro', on turning my eyes from the sea, I was confronted by a

thing which for a moment or two struck me with the most profound

astonishment. I had come to a mansion, surrounded by trees, three

hundred yards from the cliffs: and there, on a path at the bottom of the

domain, right before me, was a board marked: 'Trespassers will be

Prosecuted.' At once a mad desire--the first which I had had--to laugh,

to roar with laughter, to send wild echoes of merriment clapping among

the chalk gullies, and abroad on the morning air, seized upon me: but I

kept it under, though I could not help smiling at this poor man, with

his little delusion that a part of the earth was his.

Here the cliffs are, I should say, seventy feet high, broken by frequent

slips in the upper stratum of clay, and, as I proceeded, climbing

always, I encountered some rather formidable gullies in the chalk, down

and then up which I had to scramble, till I came to a great mound or

barrier, stretching right across the great promontory, and backed by a

natural ravine, this, no doubt, having been raised as a rampart by some

of those old invading pirate-peoples, who had their hot life-scuffle,

and are done now, like the rest. Going on, I came to a bay in the cliff,

with a great number of boats lodged on the slopes, some quite high,

though the declivities are steep; toward the inner slopes is a lime-kiln

which I explored, but found no one there. When I came out on the other

side, I saw the village, with an old tower at one end, on a bare stretch

of land; and thence, after an hour's rest in the kitchen of a little

inn, went out to the coast-guard station, and the lighthouse.

Looking across the sea eastward, the light-keepers here must have seen

that thick cloud of convolving browns and purples, perhaps mixed with

small tongues of fire, slowly walking the water, its roof in the clouds,

upon them: for this headland is in precisely the same longitude as

London; and, reckoning from the hour when, as recorded in the _Times_,

the cloud was seen from Dover over Calais, London and Flambro' must have

been overtaken soon after three o'clock on the Sunday afternoon, the

25th July. At sight in open daylight of a doom so gloomy--prophesied,

but perhaps hoped against to the last, and now come--the light-keepers

must have fled howling, supposing them to have so long remained faithful

to duty: for here was no one, and in the village very few. In this

lighthouse, which is a circular white tower, eighty feet high, on the

edge of the cliff, is a book for visitors to sign their names: and I

will write something down here in black and white: for the secret is

between God only, and me: After reading a few of the names, I took my

pencil, and I wrote my name there.

* * * * *

The reef before the Head stretches out a quarter of a mile, looking bold

in the dead low-water that then was, and showing to what extent the sea

has pushed back this coast, three wrecks impaled on them, and a big

steamer quite near, waiting for the first movements of the already

strewn sea to perish. All along the cliff-wall to the bluff crowned by

Scarborough Castle northward, and to the low vanishing coast of

Holderness southward, appeared those cracks and caves which had brought

me here, though there seemed no attempts at barricades; however, I got

down a rough slope on the south side to a rude wild beach, strewn with

wave-worn masses of chalk: and never did I feel so paltry and short a

thing as there, with far-outstretched bays of crags about me, their

bluffs encrusted at the base with stale old leprosies of shells and

barnacles, and crass algae-beards, and, higher up, the white cliff all

stained and weather-spoiled, the rock in some parts looking quite

chalky, and elsewhere gleaming hard and dull like dirty marbles, while

in the huge withdrawals of the coast yawn darksome gullies and caverns.

Here, in that morning's walk, I saw three little hermit-crabs, a limpet,

and two ninnycocks in a pool of weeds under a bearded rock. What

astonished me here, and, indeed, above, and everywhere, in London even,

and other towns, was the incredible number of birds that strewed the

ground, at some points resembling a real rain, birds of nearly every

sort, including tropic specimens: so that I had to conclude that they,

too, had fled before the cloud from country to country, till conquered

by weariness and grief, and then by death.

By climbing over rocks thick with periwinkles, and splashing through

great sloppy stretches of crinkled sea-weed, which give a raw stench of

brine, I entered the first of the gullies: a narrow, long, winding one,

with sides polished by the sea-wash, and the floor rising inwards. In

the dark interior I struck matches, able still to hear from outside the

ponderous spasmodic rush and jostle of the sea between the crags of the

reef, but now quite faintly. Here, I knew, I could meet only dead men,

but urged by some curiosity, I searched to the end, wading in the middle

through a three-feet depth of sea-weed twine: but there was no one; and

only belemnites and fossils in the chalk. I searched several to the

south of the headland, and then went northward past it toward another

opening and place of perched boats, called in the map North Landing:

where, even now, a distinct smell of fish, left by the old crabbers and

herring-fishers, was perceptible. A number of coves and bays opened as I

proceeded; a faded green turf comes down in curves at some parts on the

cliff-brows, like wings of a young soldier's hair, parted in the middle,

and plastered on his brow; isolated chalk-masses are numerous, obelisks,

top-heavy columns, bastions; at one point no less than eight headlands

stretched to the end of the world before me, each pierced by its arch,

Norman or Gothic, in whole or in half; and here again caves, in one of

which I found a carpet-bag stuffed with a wet pulp like bread, and,

stuck to the rock, a Turkish tarboosh; also, under a limestone quarry,

five dead asses: but no man. The east coast had evidently been shunned.

Finally, in the afternoon I reached Filey, very tired, and there slept.

* * * * *

I went onward by train-engine all along the coast to a region of

iron-ore, alum, and jet-excavations round Whitby and Middlesborough. By

by-ways near the small place of Goldsborough I got down to the shore at

Kettleness, and reached the middle of a bay in which is a cave called

the Hob-Hole, with excavations all around, none of great depth, made by

jet-diggers and quarrymen. In the cave lay a small herd of cattle,

though for what purpose put there I cannot guess; and in the

jet-excavations I found nothing. A little further south is the chief

alum-region, as at Sandsend, but as soon as I saw a works, and the great

gap in the ground like a crater, where the lias is quarried, containing

only heaps of alum-shale, brushwood-stacks, and piles of cement-nodules

extracted from the lias, I concluded that here could have been found no

hiding; nor did I purposely visit the others, though I saw two later.

From round Whitby, and those rough moors, I went on to Darlington, not

far now from my home: but I would not continue that way, and after two

days' indecisive lounging, started for Richmond and the lead mines

about Arkengarth Dale, near Reeth. Here begins a region of mountain,

various with glens, fells, screes, scars, swards, becks, passes,

villages, river-heads, and dales. Some of the faces which I saw in it

almost seemed to speak to me in a broad dialect which I knew. But they

were not numerous in proportion: for all this country-side must have had

its population multiplied by at least some hundreds; and the villages

had rather the air of Danube, Levant, or Spanish villages. In one, named

Marrick, I saw that the street had become the scene either of a great

battle or a great massacre; and soon I was everywhere coming upon men

and women, English and foreign, dead from violence: cracked heads,

wounds, unhung jaws, broken limbs, and so on. Instead of going direct to

the mines from Reeth, that waywardness which now rules my mind, as

squalls an abandoned boat, took me somewhat further south-west to the

village of Thwaite, which I actually could not enter, so occupied with

dead was every spot on which the eye rested a hundred yards about it.

Not far from here I turned up, on foot now, a very steep, stony road to

the right, which leads over the Buttertubs Pass into Wensleydale, the

day being very warm and bright, with large clouds that looked like

lakes of molten silver giving off grey fumes in their centre, casting

moody shadows over the swardy dale, which below Thwaite expands, showing

Muker two miles off, the largest village of Upper Swaledale. Soon,

climbing, I could look down upon miles of Swaledale and the hills

beyond, a rustic panorama of glens and grass, river and cloudshadow, and

there was something of lightness in my step that fair day, for I had

left all my maps and things, except one, at Reeth, to which I meant to

return, and the earth, which is very good, was--mine. The ascent was

rough, and also long: but if I paused and looked behind--I saw, I saw.

Man's notion of a Heaven, a Paradise, reserved for the spirits of the

good, clearly arose from impressions which the earth made upon his mind:

for no Paradise can be fairer than this; just as his notion of a Hell

arose from the squalid mess into which his own foolish habits of thought

and action turned this Paradise. At least, so it struck me then: and,

thinking it, there was a hiss in my breath, as I went up into what more

and more acquired the character of a mountain pass, with points of

almost Alpine savagery: for after I had skirted the edge of a deep glen

on the left, the slopes changed in character, heather was on the

mountain-sides, a fretting beck sent up its noise, then screes, and

scars, and a considerable waterfall, and a landscape of crags; and

lastly a broad and rather desolate summit, palpably nearer the clouds.

* * * * *

Two days later I was at the mines: and here I first saw that wide-spread

scene of horror with which I have since become familiar. The story of

six out of ten of them all is the same, and short: selfish 'owners,' an

ousted world, an easy bombardment, and the destruction of all concerned,

before the arrival of the cloud in many cases. About some of the Durham

pit-mouths I have been given the impression that the human race lay

collected there; and that the notion of hiding himself in a mine must

have occurred to every man alive, and sent him thither.

In these lead mines, as in most vein-mining, there are more shafts than

in collieries, and hardly any attempt at artificial ventilation, except

at rises, winzes and cul-de-sacs. I found accordingly that, though their

depth does not exceed three hundred feet, suffocation must often have

anticipated the other dreaded death. In nearly every shaft, both up-take

and down-take, was a ladder, either of the mine, or of the fugitives,

and I was able to descend without difficulty, having dressed myself in a

house at the village in a check flannel shirt, a pair of two-buttoned

trousers with circles of leather at the knees, thick boots, and a

miner's hat, having a leather socket attached to it, into which fitted a

straight handle from a cylindrical candlestick; with this light, and

also a Davy-lamp, which I carried about with me for a good many months,

I lived for the most part in the deeps of the earth, searching for the

treasure of a life, to find everywhere, in English duckies and guggs,

Pomeranian women in gaudy stiff cloaks, the Walachian, the Mameluk, the

Khirgiz, the Bonze, the Imaum, and almost every type of man.

* * * * *

One most brilliant Autumn day I walked by the village market-cross at

Barnard, come at last, but with a tenderness in my heart, and a

reluctance, to where I was born; for I said I would go and see my sister

Ada, and--the other old one. I leaned and loitered a long time on the

bridge, gazing up to the craggy height, which is heavy with waving wood,

and crowned by the Castle-tower, the Tees sweeping round the

mountain-base, smooth here and sunlit, but a mile down, where I wished

to go, but would not, brawling bedraggled and lacerated, like a sweet

strumpet, all shallow among rocks under reaches of shadow--the shadow of

Rokeby Woods. I climbed very leisurely up the hill-side, having in my

hand a bag with a meal, and up the stair in the wall to the top I went,

where there is no parapet, but a massiveness of wall that precludes

danger; and here in my miner's attire I sat three hours, brooding

sleepily upon the scene of lush umbrageous old wood that marks the long

way the river takes, from Marwood Chase up above, and where the rapid

Balder bickers in, down to bowery Rokeby, touched now with autumn; the

thickness of trees lessening away toward the uplands, where there are

far etherealized stretches of fields within hedgerows, and in the sunny

mirage of the farthest azure remoteness hints of lonesome moorland. It

was not till near three that I went down along the river, then, near

Rokeby, traversing the old meadow, and ascending the old hill: and

there, as of old, was the little black square with yellow letters on the

gate-wall: