ADVENTURE.
How I got there, this chapter will tell.
The calm of that passage of the Indian Ocean!--the days of sunlight,
a little too ardent, perhaps; the nights of moons--the calm of the
spirit, I mean, profounder than the calm of waters. A ship is either
a heaven or a hell; and when it is a heaven, why not let that one
suffice? The world empty, and no papers--no daily report from the sick
bed of civilisation. Who could want more, or less?
Ceylon, with its new faces and its shipman’s bustle, hardly ruffled our
repose, and when it did, I shut my eyes. At the Philippines, it was
much the same. Both are fully described in the Gazetteers.
Then it was hey! for the next long lap to the Horn, with only a call
for water or for wild-fowl, here and there. We were in the Pacific
now, for all its bursts of temper how finely named! Should not all
oceans, boreal or equinoctial, have the same generic title, for, spite
of storm and reef and waterspout, surely their message is peace? Such
stretches of proud, self-sufficing silence in between the gusts, such
comforting assurance, in deepest whispers, of the final rest! Here, on
salt water only, can we set compass for the land voyage. Now and again
it thundered, and the rain crashed down like falling walls of water,
but always my soul was still. If the worst happened, we should still
reach the deepest bottom at last, and find a soft bed in the ooze.
There was magnetic disturbance of a kind, however, in that Italian
skipper. He was not too well acquainted with the course, and he was
subject to scares about cannibals. He feared that the natives of these
parts might prefer him to his macaroni. He had an old Genoese edition
of Cook, and he read it as if it were a deliverance of yesterday.
Whenever we touched at an island, existence seemed hardly worth having
at his price of precaution--scouts, and rear-guard, and main body, all
to effect a positive life insurance against some old woman squatting on
a mat. Poisoned arrows, again, were his peculiar aversion, and, to keep
out of reach of them, he usually directed landing operations through a
trumpet from the ship’s side. In vain I argued that one fear ought to
preclude the other, and that, if they poisoned him, he would certainly
never be fit to eat. Sometimes I tried to reassure him by landing
alone, and returning with an escort of friendly natives, and a store of
yams. The lesson was lost on him; he attributed my safety to the fact
that my joints offered no temptation to the critical eye.
One glorious afternoon, sailing from the south we saw a peak rising
sheer from the ocean and huge, for it still might be about thirty
miles off. It seemed to taper from a broad and solid base, like the
summit of a cathedral. He said, ‘St. Peter’s.’ I said, ‘St. Paul’s.’
As we got nearer, we made out a small island of solid rock, with sharp
precipitous sides, plumped down in the blue, and with no neighbours in
sight. Add Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park, and you might have its
total area. It was covered with verdure and stately trees; but a fringe
of white at the water’s edge showed that, in spite of the perfectly
calm weather, the surf was boiling against its awful shores.
It looked fruity, though desolate, and I insisted on going ashore for
guavas, much to the disgust of the skipper. He offered me dried plums,
in dissuasion, from a box fringed with paper lace, but the sight of
them only increased my craving for the fresh fruit. At last he let
me put off alone, crossing himself as I left the ship’s side; but he
had done this so often that it made no particular impression on me. I
promised to be back in three hours at the outside, while he stood off
and on. There was no anchorage for us, even if there had been time to
let go.
The little place grew in beauty as I neared it, but in grimness, too.
Below the verdure, it was all great fangs of rock, biting into the
sea at the sharpest angles. The surf was more terrible than ever on
a closer view. The water was flaked with the fury of its strife with
the iron-bound shore. I thought of turning back, but I am very fond of
guavas. Besides, I had seen something of the management of boats in
surf, and I fancied it was easier than it looked. The knack is to mount
the crest of a wave, and shoot in with it into a soft place. There was
one soft place here, in the angle of a little bay, with earth and wild
plants sloping to the water’s edge, and for this I made. I thought
I was doing it very nicely, until I felt a heavy blow on the head,
and, just before my eyes closed in a dead faint, saw the boat, bottom
upwards, floating out to sea. I had missed by a hair’s-breadth, and
brushed a boulder half hidden in the grass.
The moon was up when I came to. I must have lain there some hours,
wedged comfortably in the brushwood that clung to the stone, high, and
nearly dry again, though at the outset I was, of course, wet through.
It was a mercy rather than a judgment, after all. The sea had shot me
out of its own reach, and no one could have been more considerately
stunned. There was a slight flesh wound on my forehead, but no bone
broken anywhere. I sat up, and brought my thoughts back to life; then
slowly found my feet, and went to look for my hat. In a few moments I
became aware that there were other things missing, namely, the boat and
the ship.
All were gone. The great stretch of sea was without a speck. I was
alone, abandoned to starvation or other miserable death. I threw myself
on the ground and sobbed.
What had become of the ship? Alas! my theory of probabilities was only
too easy to form. They had found the upturned boat, and perhaps the
hat, had jumped to the conclusion that it was all over with me, and
made off, pursued no doubt, in fancy, by a fleet of cannibal canoes.
And here was I, a second Robinson, on a lonely shore, without so much
as a wreck to start me in housekeeping.
The rock sloped at this place, as I have said, and I easily climbed
to the summit, and looked around. I meant to sit down there, and
form plans. But I forgot all about the morrow, as soon as I saw what
nature had sent me that night. It was the full moon; and to know what
moonlight is you must come to these Southern seas. I had no print to
read, but I could trace the lines in my palm, and I was consoled by the
observation that my line of life was a long one. Behind me were the
massive shadows of higher hills, before, a tableland of grass and wild
trees, bathed in the soothing light, and beyond, the molten silver of
the sea fringed with the everlasting surf. The only landward sound was
the soft ‘click, click’ of some native bird. It was impossible to feel
sad; it was a place to die in, if not to live in, come what might.
The night was warm, I felt no chill, and I sat down and thought the
thoughts one thinks in the moonlight. The pity of it that one should
ever take the trouble to be less than one’s best in this passing
flash of life! What matters the pain for the purchase of this certain
joy--the only joy that is sure, so why not make the most of it in
valour, honour, fortitude, without waiting for aught sweeter in the dim
beatitudes beyond? So to live as, at this moment, thou couldst cease
to live! It is the moon’s message, delivered with unfailing regularity
once a month, and her main business is to deliver it, not to suck up
tides. The shilling almanacs will never contain everything till they
devote a line to this interesting fact. When the moon gets that message
into the soul, all else must make way for it. Stockbroking seems a
pity, in her mildly searching light, with most other modes of getting
on; and no wonder there is a tradition in Bayswater families that this
kind of natural illumination is bad for the eyes.
I, too, was not unmindful of a domestic tradition on the subject; and,
when I felt sleepy, I sought the shade of a hill. I made my bed of
brushwood, and sank down. I ought to have felt cold, and caught cold,
but I did neither--perhaps the very dews were pickled by the sea air.
The sun called me betimes next morning, and I rose at once, painfully
hungry, but in perfect serenity of mind. Now that I saw more of my new
home, I could not think of it as my grave. Before me, to the north
east, rose the tremendous peak we had sighted from the sea. The hills
into which it sank at its base stretched right across the island,
forming a ridge at right angles to the other previously seen from the
ship. I was thus shut in a corner, and I could see nothing of what
lay beyond. I might have seen more by mounting the hill, but I seemed
to dread to do it. I thought I would follow the coast line, from a
vague idea that it would be safer to have the sea at hand. There was no
sign of human life, but the air was alive with myriads of sea birds,
wheeling about the rock. The fly catchers, darting through the air for
breakfast, added to the animation of the scene, but, of course, made
me feel hungrier than ever. There was a distant prospect of a meal,
however, in the wild goats looking down on me from the hills--in grave
wonder, I hoped, at their first sight of a man. Early as it was, tiny
lizards darted about at my feet in evident distress of mind.
Always skirting the rock, I came soon to another peak, lower than the
one first seen, but still awful in its sheer fall of six or seven
hundred feet right into the sea. I lay down, to peep over the almost
perpendicular wall, and rose again with a sense that I and my island
were going to be very cosy together, and all to ourselves. Then,
lifting my eyes to the highest summit beyond me, to measure the breadth
of our domain, I saw a human shape, standing clean and clear and quiet
on the verge, against the cloudless sky.