The Purple Cloud

Spring.

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  Well, I saw at last what whalers used to call 'the blink of the ice';that is to say, its bright apparition or reflection in the sky when itis left behind, or not yet come-to. By this time I was in a region wherea good many craft of various sorts were to be seen; I was continuallymeeting them; and not one did I omit to investigate, while many Iboarded in the kayak or the larch-wood pram. Just below latitude 70 deg. Icame upon a good large fleet of what I supposed to be Lafoden cod andherring fishers, which must have drifted somewhat on a northwardcurrent. They had had a great season, for the boats were well laden withcuring fish. I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, theybeing widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon. Theevening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sunjust beginning his low-couched nightly drowse. These sturdy-lookingbrown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as ofthings whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting theappalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when adark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them. The fishers were brawcarles, wearing, many of them, fringes of beard well back from thechin-point, with hanging woollen caps. In every case I found below-decksa number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked _aquavit_, two of which I tookinto the pram. In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in aforward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the twoknees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with theirislands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole. At another ofthem, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the _Boreal's_ liquidair at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to astoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able tojump down. After looking around I descended the three steps aft into thedark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in anawful whisper: '_Anyone? Anyone?_' Nothing answered me: and when I wentup again, the _Boreal_ had drifted three yards beyond my reach. Therebeing a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in thathalf-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors besetme, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, andsense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up: for theocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.

  Two mornings later I came upon another school, rather larger boatsthese, which I found to be Brittany cod-fishers. Most of these, too, Iboarded. In every below-decks was a wooden or earthenware image of theVirgin, painted in gaudy faded colours; and in one case I found a boywho had been kneeling before the statue, but was toppled sideways now,his knees still bent, and the cross of Christ in his hand. Thesestalwart blue woollen blouses and tarpaulin sou'-westers lay in everypose of death, every detail of feature and expression still perfectlypreserved. The sloops were all the same, all, all: with sing-song creaksthey rocked a little, nonchalantly: each, as it were, with a certainsub-consciousness of its own personality, and callous unconsciousness ofall the others round it: yet each a copy of the others: the same hooksand lines, disembowelling-knives, barrels of salt and pickle, piles andcasks of opened cod, kegs of biscuit, and low-creaking rockings, and abilgy smell, and dead men. The next day, about eighty miles south of thelatitude of Mount Hekla, I sighted a big ship, which turned out to bethe French cruiser _Lazare Treport_. I boarded and overhauled herduring three hours, her upper, main, and armoured deck, deck by deck, toher lowest black depths, even childishly spying up the tubes of her twobig, rusted turret-guns. Three men in the engine-room had been muchmangled, after death, I presume, by a burst boiler; floating about 800yards to the north-east lay a long-boat of hers, low in the water,crammed with marines, one oar still there, jammed between the row-lockand the rower's forced-back chin; on the ship's starboard deck, in thelong stretch of space between the two masts, the blue-jackets hadevidently been piped up, for they lay there in a sort of serrieddisorder, to the number of two hundred and seventy-five. Nothing couldbe of suggestion more tragic than the wasted and helpless power of thispoor wandering vessel, around whose stolid mass myriads of wavelets,busy as aspen-leaves, bickered with a continual weltering splash thatwas quite loud to hear. I sat a good time that afternoon in one of hersteely port main-deck casemates on a gun-carriage, my head sunken on mybreast, furtively eyeing the bluish turned-up feet, all shrunk,exsanguined, of a sailor who lay on his back before me; his soles wereall that I could see, the rest of him lying head-downwards beyond thesteel door-sill.

  Drenched in seas of lugubrious reverie I sat, till, with a shudderingstart, I awoke, paddled back to the _Boreal_, and, till sleep conqueredme, went on my way. At ten the next morning, coming on deck, I spied tothe west a group of craft, and turned my course upon them. They turnedout to be eight Shetland sixerns, which must have drifted north-eastwardhither. I examined them well, but they were as the long list of theothers: for all the men, and all the boys, and all the dogs on them weredead.

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  I could have come to land a long time before I did: but I would not: Iwas so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was usedto the silence of the sea: but, God knows it, I was afraid of thesilence of the land.

  * * * * *

  Once, on the 15th July, I had seen a whale, or thought I did, spoutingvery remotely afar on the S.E. horizon; and on the 19th I distinctly sawa shoal of porpoises vaulting the sea-surface, in their swift-successivemanner, northward: and seeing them, I had said pitifully to myself:'Well, I am not quite alone in the world, then, my good God--not quitealone.'

  Moreover, some days later, the _Boreal_ had found herself in a bank ofcod making away northward, millions of fish, for I saw them, and oneafternoon caught three, hand-running, with the hook.

  So the sea, at least, had its tribes to be my mates.

  But if I should find the land as still as the sea, without even thespouting whale, or school of tumbling sea-hogs--_if Paris were dumberthan the eternal ice_--what then, I asked myself, should I do?

  * * * * *

  I could have made short work, and landed at Shetland, for I found myselfas far westward as longitude 11 deg. 23' W.: but I would not: I was soafraid. The shrinking within me to face that vague suspicion which Ihad, turned me first to a foreign land.

  I made for Norway, and on the first night of this definite intention, atabout nine o'clock, the weather being gusty, the sky lowering, the airsombrous, and the sea hard-looking, dark, and ridged, I was steamingalong at a good rate, holding the wheel, my poor port and starboardlights still burning there, when, without the least notice, I receivedthe roughest physical shock of my life, being shot bodily right overthe wheel, thence, as from a cannon, twenty feet to the cabin-door,through it head-foremost down the companion-way, and still beyond somesix yards along the passage. I had crashed into some dark and dead ship,probably of large size, though I never saw her, nor any sign of her; andall that night, and the next day till four in the afternoon, the_Boreal_ went driving alone over the sea, whither she would: for I layunconscious. When I woke, I found that I had received really very smallinjuries, considering: but I sat there on the floor a long time in asulky, morose, disgusted, and bitter mood; and when I rose, pettishlystopped the ship's engines, seeing my twelve dead all huddled anddisfigured. Now I was afraid to steam by night, and even in the daytimeI would not go on for three days: for I was childishly angry with I knownot what, and inclined to quarrel with Those whom I could not see.

  However, on the fourth day, a rough swell which knocked the ship about,and made me very uncomfortable, coaxed me into moving; and I did so withbows turned eastward and southward.

  I sighted the Norway coast four days later, in latitude 63 deg. 19', at noonof the 11th August, and pricked off my course to follow it; but it waswith a slow and dawdling reluctance that I went, at much less thanhalf-speed. In some eight hours, as I knew from the chart, I ought tosight the lighthouse light on Smoelen Island; and when quiet night came
,the black water being branded with trails of still moonlight, I passedquite close to it, between ten and twelve, almost under the shadow ofthe mighty hills: but, oh my God, no light was there. And all the waydown I marked the rugged sea-board slumber darkling, afar or near, withnever, alas! one friendly light.

  * * * * *

  Well, on the 15th August I had another of those maniac raptures, whosepassing away would have left an elephant racked and prostrate. Duringfour days I had seen not one sign of present life on the Norway coast,only hills, hills, dead and dark, and floating craft, all dead and dark;and my eyes now, I found, had acquired a crazy fixity of stare into thevery bottom of the vacant abyss of nothingness, while I remainedunconscious of being, save of one point, rainbow-blue, far down in theinfinite, which passed slowly from left to right before my consciousnessa little way, then vanished, came back, and passed slowly again, fromleft to right