ANOTHER STARTLING DISCOVERY.
This hatch formed the entrance to the cabin, and there was no other road
to it that I could see. If I wanted to use it I must first scrape away
the snow; but unhappily I had left my knife in the boat, and was without
any instrument that would serve me to scrape with. I thought of breaking
the beer-bottle that was in my pocket and scratching with a piece of the
glass; but before doing this it occurred to me to search the body on the
starboard side.
I approached him as if he were alive and murderously fierce, and I own I
did not like to touch him. He resembled the figure of a giant moulded in
snow. In life he must have been six feet and a half tall. The snow had
bloated him, and though he leaned he stood as high as I, who was of a
tolerable stature. The snow was on his beard and mustaches and on his
hair; but these features were merged and compacted into the snow on his
coat, and as his cap came low and was covered with snow too, he, with
the little fragment of countenance that remained, the flesh whereof had
the colour and toughness of the skin of a drum that has been well
beaten, submitted as terrible an object as mortal sight ever rested on.
I say I did not like to touch him, and one reason was I feared he would
tumble; and though I know not why I should have dreaded this, yet the
apprehension of it so worked in me that for some time it held me idly
staring at him.
But I could not enter the cabin without first scraping the snow from the
companion door; and the cold, after I had stood a few moments inactive,
was so bitter as to set me craving for shelter. So I put my hand upon
the body, and discovered it, as I might have foreseen, frozen to the
hardness of steel. His coat--if I may call that a coat which resembled a
robe of snow--fell to within a few inches of the deck. Steadying the
body with one hand, I heartily tweaked the coat with the other, hoping
thus to rupture the ice upon it; in doing which I slipped and fell on my
back, and in falling gave a convulsive kick which, striking the feet of
the figure, dislodged them from their frozen hold of the deck, and down
it fell with a mighty bang alongside of me, and with a loud crackling
noise, like the rending of a sheet of silk.
I was not hurt, and sprang to my feet with the alacrity of fright, and
looking at the body saw that it had managed by its fall much better than
my hands could have compassed; for the snow shroud was cracked and
crumpled, slabs of it had broken away leaving the cloth of the coat
visible, and what best pleased me was the sight of the end of a hanger
forking out from the skirt of the coat.
Yet to come at it so as to draw the blade from its scabbard required an
intolerable exertion of strength. The clothes on this body were indeed
like a suit of mail. I never could have believed that frost served cloth
so. At last I managed to pull the coat clear of the hilt of the hanger;
the blade was stuck, but after I had tugged a bit it slipped out, and I
found it a good piece of steel.
The corpse was habited in jackboots, a coat of coarse thick cloth lined
with flannel, under this a kind of blouse or doublet of red cloth,
confined by a belt with leathern loops for pistols. His apparel gave me
no clue to the age he belonged to; it was no better, indeed, than a sort
of masquerading attire, as though the fashions of more than one country,
and perhaps of more than one age, had gone to the habiting of him. He
looked a burly, immense creature, as he lay upon the deck in the same
bent attitude in which he had stood at the rail, and so dreadful was his
face, with a singular diabolical expression of leering malice, caused by
the lids of his eyes being half closed, that having taken one peep I had
no mind to repeat it, though I was above ten minutes wrestling with his
cloak and hanger before I had the weapon fairly in my hand.
I walked to the companion and fell to scraping the snow away from it.
'Twas like scratching at mortar between bricks. But I worked hard, and
presently, with the point of the hanger, felt the crevice 'twixt the
door and its jamb, after which it was not long before I had carved the
door out of its plate of ice and snow.
The wind was now blowing a fresh gale, and the howling aloft was
extremely melancholy and dismal. I could not see the ocean, but I heard
it thundering with a hollow roaring note; and the sharp reports and
distant sullen crashing noises, with nearer convulsions within the ice,
were very frequent.
My labour warmed me, but it also increased my hunger. While I hacked and
scraped at the snow I was considering whether I should come across
anything fit to eat in the ship, and if not what I was to do. Here was
a vessel assuredly not less than fifty or sixty years old, and even
supposing she was almost new when she fell in with the ice, the date of
her disaster would still carry her back half a century; so that--and
certainly there was much in the appearance of the body on the rocks to
warrant the conjecture--she would have been thus sepulchred and
fossilized for fifty years!
What, then, in the form of provisions proper for human food, such as
even a famine-driven stomach could deal with, was I likely to find in
her? Would not her crew have eaten her bare, devoured the very heart out
of her, before they perished?
These thoughts weighed heavily in me, but I toiled on nevertheless, and
having cleared the door of the snow that bound it, I prized it apart
with the hanger and then dragged at it; but the snow on the deck would
not let it open far, and as there was room for me to squeeze through, I
did not stop to scrape the obstruction away.
A flight of steps sank into the darkness of the interior, and a cold
strange smell floated up, with something of a dry earthiness of flavour
and a mingling of leather and timber. I fell back a pace to let
something of this smell exhale before I ventured into an atmosphere that
had been hermetically bottled by the ice in that cabin since the hour
when this little door was last closed. Superstition was active in me
again, and when I peered into the blackness at the bottom of the hatch I
felt as might a schoolboy on the threshold of a haunted room in which
he is to be locked up as a punishment.
I put my foot on the ladder and descended very slowly indeed, my
inclination being strong the other way, and I kept on looking downwards
in a state of ridiculous fright as though at any moment I should be
seized by the leg; being in too much confusion of mind to consider that
it was impossible anything living could be below, whilst a ghostly
shadow could not catch hold of me so as to cause me to feel its grasp.
But then if fear could reason, it would cease to be fear.
On reaching the bottom I remained standing close against the ladder,
striving to see into what manner of place I was arrived. The glare of
the whiteness of the decks and rocks hung upon my eyes like a kind of
blindness charged with fires of several colours, and I could not obtain
the faintest glimpse of any part of this interior outside the sphere of
the little square of hazy light which lay upon the deck at the foot of
the steps. The darkness, indeed, was so deep that I concluded this was
no more than a narrow well formed of bulkheads, and that the cabin was
beyond, and led to by a door in the bulkhead.
To test this conjecture I extended my arms in a groping posture and
stepped a pace forward, feeling to right and left, till, having gone
five or six paces from the ladder, my fingers touched something cold,
and feeling it, I passed my hand down what I instantly knew by the
projection of the nose and the roughness of hair on the upper lip to be
a human face!
A little reflection might have prepared me for this, but I had not
reflected, at least in this direction, and was therefore not prepared;
and the horrible thrill of that black chill contact went in an agony
through my nerves, and I burst into a violent perspiration.
I backed away with all my hair astir, and then shot up the ladder as if
the devil had been behind me; and when I reached the deck I was
trembling so violently that I had to lean against the companion lest my
knees should give way. Never in all my time had I received such a fright
as this; but then I had gone to it in a fright, and was exactly in the
state of mind to be terrified out of my senses. My soul had been
rendered sick and weak within me by mental and corporeal suffering; my
loneliness, too, was dreadful, and the wilder and more scaring too for
this my unhappy association with the dead; the shrieking in the rigging
was like the tongue given by endless packs of hunting phantom wolves,
and the growling and cracking noises of the ice in all directions would
have made one coming new to this desolate scene suppose that the island
of ice was full of fierce beasts.
But needs must when Old Nick drives; I had either to find courage to
enter the schooner and search her, and so stand to come across the means
to prolong my life, and perhaps procure my deliverance, or perish of
famine and frost on deck.
The companion door was small, and being scarce more than ajar I was not
surprised that only a very faint light entered by it. If the top were
removed I doubted not I should be able to get a view of the cabin,
enough to show me where the windows or port-holes were. So I went to
work with the hanger again, insensibly obtaining a little stock of
courage from the mere brandishing of it. In half an hour I had chipped
and cut away the ice round the companion, and then found it to be one of
those old-fashioned clumsy hatch-covers formerly used in certain kinds
of Dutch ships--namely, a box with a shoulder-shaped lid. This lid,
though heavy, and fitting with a tongue, I managed to unship, on which
the full square of the hatch lay open to the sky.
The light gave me heart. Once more I descended. After a few moments the
bewildering dazzle of the snow faded off my sight, and I could see very
distinctly.
The cabin was a small room. The forward part lay in shadow, but I could
distinguish the outline of the mainmast amidships of the bulkhead there.
In the centre of this cabin was a small square table supported by iron
pins, that pierced through stanchions in such a manner that the table
could at will be raised to the ceiling, and there left for the
conveniency of space.
At this table, seated upon short quaintly-wrought benches, and
immediately facing each other, were two men. They were incomparably more
lifelike than the frozen figures. The one whose back was upon the
hatchway ladder, being the man whose face I had stroked, sat upright, in
the posture of a person about to start up, both hands upon the rim of
the table, and his countenance raised as if, in a sudden terror and
agony of death, he had darted a look to God. So inimitably expressive of
life was his attitude, that though I knew him to be a frozen body as
perished as if he had died with Adam or Noah, I was sensible of a
breathless wonder in me that the affrighted start with which he seemed
to be rising from the table was not continued--that, in short, he did
not spring to his feet with the cry that you seemed to _hear_ in his
posture.
The other figure lay over the table with his face buried in his arms. He
wore no covering to his head, which was bald, yet his hair on either
side was plentiful and lay upon his arms, and his beard fluffing up
about his buried face gave him an uncommon shaggy appearance. The other
had on a round fur cap with lappets for the ears. His body was muffled
in a thick ash-coloured coat; his hair was also abundant, curling long
and black down his back; his cheeks were smooth manifestly through
nature rather than the razor, and the ends of a small black mustache
were twisted up to his eyes. These were the only occupants of the cabin,
which their presence rendered terribly ghastly and strange.
There was perhaps something in keeping with the icy spell of death upon
this vessel in the figure of the man who was bowed over the table, for
he looked as though he slept; but the other mocked the view with a
_spectrum_ of the fever and passion of life. You would have sworn he
had beheld the skeleton hand of the Shadow reaching out of the dimness
for him; that he had started back with a curse and cry of horror, and
expired in the very agony of his affrighted recoil.
The interior was extremely plain: the bulkheads of a mahogany colour,
the decks bare, and nothing in the form of an ornament saving a silver
crucifix hanging by a nail to the trunk of the mainmast, and a cage with
a frozen bird of gorgeous plumage suspended to the bulkhead near the
hatch. A small lanthorn of an old pattern dangled over the table, and I
noticed that it contained two or three inches of candle. Abaft the
hatchway was a door on the starboard side which I opened, and found a
narrow dark passage. I could not pierce it with my eye beyond a few
feet; but perceiving within this range the outline of a little door, I
concluded that here were the berths in which the master and his mates
slept. There was nothing to be done in the dark, and I bitterly lamented
that I had left my tinder-box and flint in the boat, for then I could
have lighted the candle in the lanthorn.
"Perhaps," thought I, "one of those figures may have a tinder-box upon
him."
Custom was now somewhat hardening me; moreover I was spurred on by
mortal anxiety to discover if there was any kind of food to be met with
in the vessel. So I stepped up to the figure whose face I had touched,
and felt in his pockets; but neither on him nor on the other did I find
what I wanted, though I was not a little astonished to discover in the
pockets of the occupants of so small and humble a ship as this schooner
a fine gold watch as rich as the one I had brought away from the man on
the rocks, and more elegant in shape, a gold snuff-box set with
diamonds, several rings of beauty and value lying loose in the breeches
pocket of the man whose face was hidden, a handful of Spanish pieces in
gold, handkerchiefs of fine silk, and other articles, as if indeed these
fellows had been overhauling a parcel of booty, and then carelessly
returned the contents to their pockets.
But what I needed was the means of obtaining a light, so, after casting
about, I thought I would search the body on deck, and went to it, and to
my great satisfaction discovered what I wanted in the first pocket I
dipped my hand into, though I had to rip open the mouth of it away from
the snow with the hanger.
I returned to the cabin and lighted the candle, and carried the lanthorn
into the black passage or corridor. There were four small doors,
belonging to as many berths; I opened the first, and entered a
compartment that smelt so intolerably stale and fusty that I had to come
into the passage again and fetch a few breaths to humour my nose to the
odour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of air
was not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetable
or animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as the
foulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in the
bottom of the hold.
I held up the lanthorn and looked about me. A glance or two satisfied me
that I was in a room that had been appropriated to the steward and his
mates. A number of dark objects, which on inspection I found to be hams,
were stowed snugly away in battens under the ceiling or upper-deck; a
cask half full of flour stood in a corner; near it lay a large coarse
sack in which was a quantity of biscuit, a piece of which I bit and
found it as hard as flint and tasteless, but not in the least degree
mouldy. There were four shelves running athwartships full of glass,
knives and forks, dishes, and so forth, some of the glass very choice
and elegant, and many of the dishes and plates also very fine, fit for
the greatest nobleman's table. Under the lower shelf, on the deck, lay a
sack of what I believed to be black stones until, after turning one or
two of them about, it came upon me that they were, or had been, I should
say, potatoes.
Not to tease you with too many particulars under this head, let me
briefly say that in this larder or steward's room I found among other
things several cheeses, a quantity of candles, a great earthenware pot
full of pease, several pounds of tobacco, about thirty lemons, along
with two small casks and three or four jars, manifestly of spirits, but
of what kind I could not tell. I took a stout sharp knife from one of
the shelves, and pulling down one of the hams tried to cut it, but I
might as well have striven to slice a piece of marble. I attempted next
to cut a cheese, but this was frozen as hard as the ham. The lemons,
candles, and tobacco had the same astonishing quality of stoniness, and
nothing yielded to the touch but the flour. I laid hold of one of the
jars, and thought to pull the stopper out, but it was frozen hard in the
hole it fitted, and I was five minutes hammering it loose. When it was
out I inserted a steel--used for the sharpening of knives--and found the
contents solid ice, nor was there the faintest smell to tell me what the
spirit or wine was.
Never before did plenty offer itself in so mocking a shape. It was the
very irony of abundance--substantial ghostliness and a Barmecide's feast
to my aching stomach.
But there was biscuit not unconquerable by teeth used to the fare of the
sea life, and picking up a whole one, I sat me down on the edge of a
cask and fell a-munching. One reflection, however, comforted me, namely,
that this petrifaction by freezing had kept the victuals sweet. I was
sure there was little here that might not be thawed into relishable and
nourishing food and drink by a good fire. The sight of these stores took
such a weight off my mind that no felon reprieved from death could feel
more elated than I. My forebodings had come to nought in this regard,
and here for the moment my grateful spirits were content to stop.