RIALLARO
SUCH was the name that one group of islands gave to this mystic region
of the sea; and it meant “the ring of mist.” A sense of awe fell on me
as I listened to the chorus. Whither was I dragging these young spirits
with me? What would be the end of our expedition? Would we ever come
forth alive from this misty sphere? It held within it, I felt, some of
the most momentous secrets of existence; but whether these would be
baneful or gracious no one could tell. It was only after I had felt
everything ready for my venture that I became tremulous as to the
result. The energy of my nature, that had been absorbed in definite
search for knowledge, and definite preparation, was now set free for
brooding; and I passed daily in thought from hope to despair, from
despair to hope. All the delight of outlook was now lost in the
uncertainty. The few shreds of fact, that I had been able to pick out of
hint and tradition and religious fear, seemed in the immediate presence
of the mystery to be ridiculous and inadequate for any definite step. I
became the prey of trepidation and self-upbraiding. Dreams of failure
and disaster haunted me day and night. I thought over the stories of
Ulysses, and Æneas, of Orpheus, and Dante as the prototypes of our
enterprise; they had returned from the lower world; might not we too
return from this nebulous hades? But alas! no consolation came from such
tales; they were but the shadows of dreams; whilst we were about to face
an impossible geographical problem in the midst of a sceptical
scientific generation. How could I close my eyes to the insane hardihood
of our venture?
Before I could recover from the truculent despotism of such thoughts,
this sphinx of mist stared me in the face, and no retreat was left for
us. Long and silent meditations and pacings of the deck had left me
exhausted, and one breathless and moonless night I sank into a profound
sleep that fettered me down long after sunrise. My officers could not
waken me, and it was only at last sheer necessity that drove them to
rouse me by main force. I stared about me dazed; but one word from
them—“Riallaro”—set every nerve a-quiver. I rushed on deck and saw close
on us a mist that blurred the whole eastern side of the sky. I stopped
the engines and then reversed them. But on came the mist; on flew the
ship into it. I looked over the bulwarks, and saw that we were borne
along by a current like a mill-race. My men stared blankly at me. The
engines had little effect in stemming the force of the water. And before
we could think what to do the fog had closed in upon us, and we could
not see above a ship’s length in any direction.
Away we rushed, whither we knew not, for the compass spun wildly back
and forward on its pivot. Every piece of iron on the ship seemed to be
turned into a magnet. And what was worse, my signals to the engine-room
were unheeded; and on looking down, we found the engineers lying stiff
upon its floor. I sent two down to take their place; and as soon as they
had stopped the engines, they too succumbed and fell into a trance. Even
the man at the wheel felt drowsy and incapable, only violent
self-control and movement resisting the somnolence that seemed to creep
over him. I remembered that the house in which he stood was iron, and
that around there was more iron than anywhere else on the ship, except
in the engine-room. I determined to husband my crew till I had
understood our position, and was ready for a supreme effort at escape.
Amazement passed into terror, as there swept out of the mist and slowly
passed us an old Spanish caravel, with rotting sails and yards, and
shrivelled mummies in antique Spanish costume lying on the poop and at
various points of the deck, in the attitude of sleep. We could have
almost leapt on board this ship of death, so close was it to us. The
horror paralysed us, and out of sight it vanished, taking giant
proportions to it in the mist. Not many yards behind it moved another
apparition of the past, a canoe with mummied natives fallen at the oar
as in a trance. And still another in the ghostly funeral train, a Malay
proa with motionless crew that seemed just fallen asleep, loomed
spectral in our rear. Was this awful procession never to cease? Were we
to fall into its line and sail on for ages? The last apparition was
right in our wake, and had it moved nearer to us would have struck us on
the stern; but it swept on after a brief interval aft. And then I had
time to think that it was the impulse of the reversed engines that had
thus brought us within sight of three different craft in this ghastly
pageant.
The native superstition that nests in every seafarer’s heart began to
leaven my crew and master even their courage and their loyalty to me. A
curse seemed to rest on all that were drawn into this mist-bearing
current. Whither it was to take us and what would be our fate weighed
heavily on my own mind. A drowsy feeling crept over me as I stood and
meditated; only when I moved about could I drive off the lethargy. If
once we went to sleep, there was clearly no awaking. Action was needed;
and yet how to act was a puzzle; in which direction to steer we knew
not.
Out of my reverie was I startled by a new and appalling danger. There
rose gigantic out of the mist upon our starboard bow a great ship as
still and silent as the reef into which it was wedged. My men rushed
with a wild cry to the bulwarks to fend off our yacht; but we grazed
past her unhurt; and on her decks we saw the forms of English sailors
stretched in sleep at least if not in death. The sight dispelled the
creeping torpor from our minds. I saw that swift action must be taken. I
sent a volunteer down into the engine-room; and, before the iron drowse
overcame him, he managed to fasten two ropes, that we let down from the
skylights, in such a way that we could start or stop the engines from
the deck. We must get steering way upon the ship in order to avoid these
reefs and their wrecks. We moved gently ahead and passed along the
ghostly procession; every generation for centuries past, every seafaring
race upon earth seemed to contribute one ship of death, or more, to this
long funeral train; ghastly lay their crew, sometimes shrivelled by long
ages of rest, often seeming to have just fallen asleep.
My newly stirred thought now grasped the meaning of this sepulchral
pageant. The movement of these hurrying graves must be in a circle round
some centre that lay on the starboard; round and round they had wheeled
for years, many of them for centuries. If I were to fulfil the purpose
of my voyage, our way lay to the right; for from the larboard side we
had been sucked into this whirlpool.
I took the wheel myself and steered the ship across the floating funeral
train. Once we grazed the bow of an East Indiaman; again we cut in two a
war canoe of the islanders; out of the mist they swept appallingly upon
us. Nor could we pause to see what became of the shattered craft. A half
an hour and we sailed in freer waters; for several minutes not one
circling apparition loomed through the mist; the set of the current grew
less impetuous; and the fog seemed to rarefy. Before long a luminous
warmth mingled with the nebulous atmosphere; we could see denser masses
move and break above us; and at last a corona of light shone hazily
through the gloom. Our hearts leapt within us; and yet we repressed the
cry of joy that rose spontaneously to our lips, for we might only be
passing across from one circle of eclipse to another. The glimmer of
light grew into intermittent gleams and then broke into the resplendence
of full day. The repressed cheer burst forth at the sight, and our
comrades stirred in their trance at the sound. They rubbed their eyes
and awoke. They marvelled at our jubilance, and thought that they had
fainted but the minute before. It had been an hour or so after daybreak
that we entered the circle of death and now the sun was westering
towards its set. The long hours of fast and terror and anxious thought
had exhausted those of us who had been awake. And after instructions to
those who had but risen from sleep to stop the ship and watch, we
succumbed to our fatigue.
We lay inert for almost twenty-four hours, and our comrades, after
stopping the engines, had again fallen into their trance. It was more
than mere exhaustion that held us so imprisoned in unconsciousness; it
was the magnetic power of the ring of mist through which we had passed.
I learned afterwards the causes of this strange phenomenon, though for
years it remained a mystery to me. Thousands of ages before a submerged
continent had left an irregular oval like a broken ring close to the
surface of the water; and this annular reef consisted chiefly of
magnetic iron molten from the adjacent rocks by the heat of the great
central volcano that formed the nucleus of the gigantic atoll; on this
adamantine ellipse the coral insects had raised their lace-like ridge.
Upon the north and south sides of it respectively two great currents
impinged, one from the tropics and one from the antarctic regions. The
warmer rush of waters was bent round the eastern side of the circular
wall of iron, the colder broke round the western side; and instead of
losing all their impetus, or neutralising each other, they ran parallel
most of their watery orbit before they mingled; and this continuous
proximity of hot and cold generated the circle of steam that sealed the
waters of this mighty unknown atoll. Into the swift circle of death
ships were sucked both from north and south, and the magnetic force of
the iron foundations of the reef caught their life in the trammels of
sleep and then of death. Never before had a power that could master
these subtle forces entered the sphere of their influence. Steam had
broken the seal of this annular exhalation. And good fortune had led me
to steer our new craft through the only opening left unpiled by the
little coral workers. A feeble branch of the elliptic current found its
way into the quieter waters within; and upon this we chanced in our
efforts to get clear of the ships of death that swept on in funeral
procession.
So gentle was this current that I had not noticed it before I fell
asleep; and when I awoke under the stroke of the noon’s rays I found
that we were drifting rapidly upon a precipitous coast.
With the swiftness of alarm I wakened my men and sent her spinning
astern at full speed. As we stood out from the land, I could see it was
a low island or promontory, for the water beyond gleamed across it. And
far in the distance were the dim outlines of two or three islands that
broke the horizon line; and like an iceberg rose, at a still greater
distance, the snow-capped peak of some great mountain that seemed
companion to the clouds of fleece in the sky. Behind us lay the wall of
mist through which we had broken; the eastern curve of the ellipse was
too far off to show the slightest fleck of mist above the rim of sky.
[Illustration]
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