THE VOYAGE AND THE WRECK
WHETHER this was a mere fable I was never able to verify by personal
experience. Christendom will doubtless take it as wholly the creation of
Sneekape’s brain, so unlike nature does it seem. The only feature that I
could vouch for as fact was the warlike attack as we weighed anchor from
Swoonarie. I was awakened from my meditation over the question by a low
murmur from the women’s section; I listened, and was certain that it was
a sleep-song they were chanting. Sneekape gave me the drift of each
verse, and I tried to turn it into the same metre as they used:
Snowflakes of starlight
Drift on us for ever.
Suns lend their far light,
Transmuter of river
And slumberous ocean
To shimmer of gold.
Eyes dim with emotion,
Eyes infinite-souled,
With magic diaphanous
Our spirits entrance;
In our hearts, as they coffin us,
Dreams quiver and dance.
Dead to our kin we lie;
Only the worlds of night,
Wizards that charm the sky,
See our unbodied flight.
Dream-winged we hover,
Death-drawn from birth;
As lover to lover,
Soul to its earth.
Break we the bond at last,
Breasting the infinite;
Future is clear as past,
Chaos as light.
Afloat on the stellar deep
Rest, rest, we crave,
Cradled to eyeless sleep,
Dream we from wave to wave.
Sleep, sleep, let us slumber!
Oh, we have lived and fought,
Borne pains without number.
Waken, Oh, waken us not.
It is impossible to give the drowsy sound of the melody in a language,
like English, that has been forged in unflagging struggle, in the stress
of battle with the forces of nature. Generations of ailooled nerves and
lips had saturated every word with languorous music. No cradle-song that
I had ever heard approached it in soporific power. All who sat within
sound of it dropped their eyelids; the voices began to seem distant and
stifled. At times the music died away, and again it rose in dim yet
growing echo, at first like the murmur of bees in the still summer air,
then like a wail swept fitfully by a breath that comes we know not
whence and vanishes in a moment; out of unknown depths the lullaby threw
its charm and then slowly withdrew it; the scarce-felt gradation of the
cadence was as strong in its hypnotic fascination as the breeze-flung
note. The singers seemed to fall into a dream as they sang. The words
melted into one liquid rill of song. Faint and muffled its melody
floated up as out of a dream. The falla lagged and dallied upon the
gleaming levels of the sea; it was the barge of sleep, and we seemed to
have been a thousand years fettered in trance. The sound of the paddles
came only at intervals, and then it ceased, and the whole skyey vault
and the weary sea and the specks of being that traversed it vanished. I
fell countless fathoms through space. And then the existence snapped
short; a crash rounded me up into the confines of life again. It was the
fusillade of the boatswain’s whip. And before we were rightly awake the
ship was swinging along to this loud chant sung at full lung-pitch by
the paddlers:
We beat with our paddles the passionless sea;
The flush of our wounding dies out on her face;
We dance free as gods on her billowy lea;
The trail of our feet no mortal can trace.
The life in our veins
Outgallops all pains.
Allanamoulin, Allanamoulin.
We slake our fierce thirst from the cup of the sky;
Its azure hath fathomless depths to exhaust;
Translucent within it worlds numberless lie;
With the gold of the dawn its rim is embossed.
The life is divine,
We drink with such wine.
Allanamoulin, Allanamoulin.
Our blood beats in time with the palpitant stars,
Our paddles in harmony rise and fall;
We cease from our labour, and life is a farce;
We rest, and our hearts grow weary of all.
For life, it is toil,
And happiness moil.
Allanamoulin, Allanamoulin.
The grave is the only repose for our being;
Thou ’rt welcome, Oh, death! When thou wilt, we are thine.
There’s nought on this earth that’s worth thinking or seeing,
And life’s fitful fever has no anodyne.
To work is to rest;
To die is the best.
Allanamoulin, Allanamoulin.
The refrain is untranslatable; it was as old as the race, I was told; it
had been used from generation to generation in paddle-songs, till it had
grown rounded and smooth in the stream of time and lost all trace of its
inner grain and force. An approach to the meaning would be, “Farewell,
Rest! There is none upon earth.” Sneekape and his friends were unwilling
to taint their lips with it; for it had been a slave-word for centuries
and they considered it beneath contempt. It was difficult even to get
some translation of the paddle-song; but verse by verse and line by line
I dragged it out of the haughty Figlefians.
Yet when they talked of their slaves, they spoke of them with leniency
and even with kindness. Pressing questions home, I found that they
considered the lash one of the most benevolent of institutions; it
softened the asperities of slave-nature; for slaves were children, and
had to be dealt with as children; they did not know what was good for
them; and their masters had to find out and insist; their best welfare
was obedience to law and routine, and the whip administered with
judicious severity induced obedience and prevented too large doses of
this wholesome physic.
It was the first outrunner of a breeze that had awakened the master of
the paddles, a cool breeze that seemed to come off distant snows. Soon
the falla was all bustle, and the great square sails that stretched
beyond the bulwarks twice the breadth of the ship were taut before the
wind. We spun along at a merry rate, and the paddles disappeared from
the sides. But it was only a catspaw, and died away. The sails fell
heavily against the masts, and had to be run down. The slaves again took
their place at the paddles, and we lounged along the sultry leaden floor
of the sea.
But suddenly there fell upon us like the stroke of a hammer a wandering
gust; the masts creaked, the loose cordage lashed the ship in their fury
till she staggered. Then all was still. The old leaden dulness came upon
the waters; it had been like the gleam of gnashing teeth in the sullen
monotony of enslaved work. A yell from the slaves’ quarters punctured
the silence; it was partly from the whip of the boatswain, partly from
the breaking of their paddles by the ridge of water that swept athwart
us. In five minutes we were helpless between the surly rancour of the
hurricane and the truculent floundering of the billows. On we rushed,
staggering, drunken, with horror and frenzy. The slaves would not rise
to the lash; the officers muttered curses between their teeth, and did
what they could to guide her course. The daylight was blind with the
angry dust of showers; the circle of grey film caged the ship, and eyes
were futile and weary in their frantic eagerness to pierce it. Down in
the women’s quarters I could see Sneekape and his fellows lying
prostrate, their faces in their hands on the planks; the women were
huddled together in apathetic limpness.
Out of the wreck that drowned so many of the Figlefians I was rescued by
one of the slaves, who canoed me with his bride to the base of a great
cliff. The tide was low: as high as we could reach, the surface was
rough with living shells that moved to our touch, and streamers of
seaweed rose and fell with the ripple. At last he forced the boat back
from the rocky wall: there was strong suction inwards. He bade us with a
gesture lie down flat in the bottom, whilst he at the bow grovelled with
a hand raised to the low-valuted rock. We shot in underneath into
darkness, but in a few minutes we were out of the torrent, moored in a
peaceful bay.
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