THE RAFT AND THE GREEN DOVE
No sooner had the idol collapsed, than like a whimpering child lulled to
sleep, the tempest suddenly abated. The howling of the wind died away;
the lightning flashed no longer; the black masses of cloud dispersed in
all directions; the agitated waves, after rocking the ship to and fro
for a time, grew smoother and smoother, till at last a perfect calm
reigned upon the waters.
"A miracle! a miracle!" cried the astonished crew; but as in the still
night watches they raised their eyes to the cloudless sky, a fresh
astonishment fell upon them. This starry heaven was not the heaven they
were accustomed to. Those were other constellations. The seven stars of
the Great Bear were no longer to be seen; the bright and constant polar
star was no longer in its place; the mariner's guide, that double eye of
heaven and all the other constellations of the Northern firmament,
which the sailor regards in so poetic a light, whose going and coming he
knows so well and whose position tells him in what part of the world he
is--all these had vanished from the sky, and in their place were other
stars, still more brilliant than they, which no man was able to call to
mind. One of these stars shone with so intense a radiance that it cast
shadows on the deck.
Amazed and anxious, the bewildered crew looked up into the unknown
heaven which thus disturbed all their calculations, and turning to Bar
Noemi, inquired timidly--
"Sir! where are we?"
Bar Noemi himself, not without secret horror, examined these stars of
another world, and answered with a sigh--
"We are in God's hand!"
"We are beyond the limits of the world!" cried a despairing voice; "we
are gliding into Nothingness!" Another maintained that they were
approaching the land of the great Rok-rok, the home of serpents and
amphibians, where beasts hunt men as men hunt beasts elsewhere. A third
told of the Magnet-mountain of the Indians, which drew ships to
destruction from afar, and all were terrified at finding themselves in a
position so queer that not even a single legend had anticipated it.
For a while the crew whispered among themselves, then the boldest of
them stepped defiantly up to Bar Noemi, and said--
"Listen to our words, Bar Noemi! All thy continuous praying to Jehovah
has only brought trouble upon thyself and those who are with thee. Thou
makest us to be tossed of tempests and suffer grievous perils; thou hast
shattered the God Thammus; thou dost nought but praise and glorify
Jehovah, and now we are in the midst of a strange sea. How we got hither
we know not nor how we shall escape from thence; and what is the cause
of all this but thou and the Ark of thy Covenant and the name of Jehovah
that thou prayest to? So long as Thammus was with us, the storm howled,
but since thou didst break him to pieces a calm more terrible than a
storm has come upon us. Till then we at least moved along, but now we
are fast bound to one spot as if with double anchors. The crew,
therefore, will now abandon thee and the Ark of the Covenant to the
ocean. Depart from us whithersoever thou camest. We are not angry with
thee, but we fear thee. We will make thee a raft of planks; we will give
it a rudder and steering gear; we will share our sail with thee, and
give thee bread and water for six days. Be content, therefore, and in
Jehovah's name depart, and we too will go whithersoever the good or evil
humour of our devils may lead us."
Bar Noemi answered nothing. This people was hurrying to its doom. For
the third time it denied its faith. The sea will surely swallow them up
as the earth did Dathan and Abiram. When the sins of Sodom exhausted the
patience of the Lord, He withdrew the one righteous man from the
abandoned city. Even now the angels of the Lord are many.
When Byssenia, who had hitherto shared all the sufferings of the crew
without a murmur, saw how they were making ready a raft for Bar Noemi,
she embraced her sorrowing husband, and said, in an encouraging
whisper--
"Be at ease, Bar Noemi. Here is not the limit of the world. The men of
Carthage possess a secret which may not be named there, and yet is
handed down from father to son and thus never forgotten. Tossed by
storms, the courageous Hanno wandered once upon a time into these
regions. His whole course is recorded on huge stone tables which are
jealously preserved in the temple of the God of Death. For whoever
betrays this secret is a dead man. I learnt it from my father, who is
one of the guardians of this temple, and sits in the great council of
merchants. In the quarter where that dazzling star goes to rest, there
is a new continent much larger and more beautiful than ours. We shall
find it if we follow the course of the star. Two mighty geniuses are
with us and will help us: Jehovah is with thee and Love with me!"
Bar Noemi kissed and embraced her whom God had sent as His angel to save
him in his extremity, and with that he himself helped his crew to make
ready the frail bark on which, with God's covenant of peace and the love
of his wife, he was to be committed to the ocean.
The raft was now ready. A single upright plank formed its mast, a piece
of brocaded cloth, once the mantle of the bride, was fastened thereto by
way of sail. A leather skin of water, a basket of coarse wheat cakes
which the Carthaginians used for bread (and these much damaged by
sea-water), were all the victuals which Bar Noemi received from his
crew, and of all his countless treasures, he took with him but three:
the Ark of the Covenant of his God; his beloved, the faithful Byssenia;
and his good and trusty sword.
As Bar Noemi went on board the raft, the crew shouted after him:
"Jehovah be with thee!" He gazed back sadly upon the forsaken ship from
which the one righteous man had thus been driven, and as he withdrew
further and further from it, and as the wilderness of water between them
became greater and greater, and he still stood and gazed sorrowfully
back upon his ship, lo! she suddenly began to settle down sideways,
then, slowly turning round and round for some minutes, finally sank
before his eyes. The breeze carried the last screams of the dying
sailors to Bar Noemi's ears.
Thus he found himself quite alone in the midst of the unknown waters.
But he did not remain alone long. The flapping of wings resounded on
high, and from the midst of the serene blue sky, descended that same
wondrous dove which had visited his ship on Africa's coasts, and now
lighted fearlessly on the top of his little mast.
She, too, had fled from the storm. Her gold glittering plumage was all
rumpled and soiled, and she smoothed and composed it with her scarlet
bill; then fluttering on to Bar Noemi's arm, as if he were an old
acquaintance, she flew down from thence upon Byssenia's snowy shoulder
with a loud cooing, and when they offered her of the wheaten cakes, she
pecked at it but did not eat, and then flew away again with the gentle
coo of the wild dove.
"I'll follow thee, thou heavenly messenger!" cried Bar Noemi,
trustfully; and unfurling his little sail to the wind, he steered the
raft in the direction taken by the dove.
The heavenly guide never disappeared from view. When the raft was
becalmed, she flew down upon it and rested. At night she always roosted
on the summit of the mast, and in the early morning departed again,
flying constantly in one and the same direction.
Three days and three nights the dove and the mariner travelled together.
On the morning of the fourth day, the dove flew joyously on to
Byssenia's knee, ate heartily of the wheaten cakes, and thereupon flew
so rapidly away that the eye could scarcely follow her: at last she
quite disappeared from the horizon.
In the fourth night the ship sailed along alone, and the beloved, the
loving wife, laid her head on her husband's bosom, as if she were
resting on her bridal bed at home, so calmly did she sleep amidst the
waste of waters.
But Bar Noemi could not sleep. There is a feeling in the sailor's
breast, the vibration of some hidden chord, one of those myriad secret
forebodings which the learned may perhaps deny, but can never explain,
which expresses itself in a feverish unrest whenever he is approaching
the green headland of his dreams, which he cannot yet see, and yet could
point out with his finger and say, "There it is!" when all around him is
nought but commingling sea and sky.--"There it is! There it must be!"
The morning twilight suffuses heaven and ocean with gold and purple,
and, lo! where the gilded sky touches the water, a lofty rock stands out
against the horizon, its bepurpled summits shimmering through the azure
morning mists.
"The Lord He is God alone!" exclaims Bar Noemi, and raised thankful
hands to heaven, while Byssenia sank down before the Ark of the
Covenant, and covered its silver-studded corners and angles with her
kisses.
A new world? No! It is an old world already hastening to the end of its
history, just as the history of the known world has begun to take notice
of it. Ye who have fixed the duration of the Ages, how know ye how many
previous millenniums with a whole world of men, beasts, and plants have
already vanished hopelessly from your ken? Those skeletons which are
found in the beds of rivers, at the bottom of deep clefts; those remains
of unknown animals never seen by European eyes; those relics of a
primeval vegetation which amaze us in the coal layers, and the chalk
strata,--speak of an older, perhaps of a better, in any case of a
mightier, world than ours. And do not those gigantic ruined palaces,
with their wondrous architecture which adventurous travellers have
discovered in the land of the Incas, do not they point to a vanished
people, the masters of power and glory who, once upon a time, filled
half a world with their struggles and their joys; ruled the land and
waxed great, seeming to the inhabitants of that trans-oceanic continent
a race of very demigods, till their sins made them ripe for death, and
the luxuriant vegetation of a savage Nature disputed the possession of
the soil with the children of men? The calculations of the wise Plato
about the "Fortunate Islands" may indeed have only been a poetic dream,
perhaps the mere striving of an inspired philosophical soul to realize
its own ideals; but so much is certain: the relics which have survived
the ravages of centuries, relics which no sea can wear down, which no
forest can overgrow, no tempest can wash away, testify to the fact that
in the far distant ages before us, beings have existed who aimed at
perfection, and only perished when their pride reached its summit, and
they fancied in their insane presumption that there was no longer any
God above them.