Part 5 (1/2)
At length I saw that the tide was setting in, carrying my raft with it, and realized that I was hungry. When I had once more under my feet the feel of solid earth, the sun was hanging near the snow-capped crater of the volcano. I left for to-morrow all problems of exploration, and stripping to the skin, ran up and down the soft sand of the beach until the blood was once more pulsing regularly through my naked body. Then on hands and knees I pursued and devoured numbers of the unpalatable crabs that scuttled to hiding under slimy tangles of sea weed. My throat was hot and sticky with the parch of thirst, but as night fell the jungle began to loom darkly, a forbidding hinterland, and no fresh water came down to my beach.
The melting snow was a guarantee of springs and a man can endure three days without drinking if he must. I stretched myself between two large rocks just upward of the high-tide line, cursing stout Cortez and all those perniciously active souls who insisted on discovering the Pacific Ocean.
Sleep did not at once come to my relief. I saw the stars, close and l.u.s.trous, parade across the night, and instead of planning while I lay awake practical things for the morrow, as a good woodsman might have done, I was thinking futilely of the psychological features of my predicament. Possibly the doctor's prediction of insanity had lain dormant in some brain cell from which it was now emerging to frighten me. I feared less for the hunger of my body than for the impossibility of feeding my mind. It occurred to me that keeping a record of my emotions would at once serve to fight back atrophy and leave an interesting record for those who might, but almost certainly would not, come in after days to the island. Then I recalled that in my penless and paperless plight I was as far from the possibility of writing as from the power to ring for a taxicab and drive home.
Yet the idea of a diary fascinated me. I wished to write in frankness what it felt like to die at the foot of an undiscovered volcano. There came to my mind an example I wished to emulate. I had come upon a report made public by the Naval Department of j.a.pan in which was quoted a letter written by Lieutenant Sak.u.ma, from the bottom of Hiros.h.i.+ma Bay, where his submarine had struck and failed to rise again.
Most of his crew lay dead in the sunken vessel, and he himself was slowly and painfully succ.u.mbing to strangulation. He devoted to a note of apology addressed to his Emperor those hours spent in dying, and expressed the hope that his message might, in future, be of value in the avoidance of similar fatalities. He praised the gallantry of his subordinates.
The letter, read in the Mikado's palace a week later, when the submarine had been raised with its dead, was in the stoic style of the race and severely official. It culminated in a broken sentence.
”It is now 12:30 P. M. My breathing is so difficult and painful--I thought I could blow out gasoline but I am intoxicated with it--Captain Nakano--it is now 12:40 P. M.--I----”
There it ended. It seemed to me that if I could busy myself in faint duplicate, with so human a record of approaching the ferry, I could be in a measure consoled. Then gazing at the Southern Cross, before sleep brought respite, I found myself thinking once more of the elusive lady who had so often escaped my inquisitive glance and whose face I should now never see.
CHAPTER VIII
NATURE INDULGES IN SATIRE
Though I am not giving authors.h.i.+p to this narrative with a view to its general perusal, I am determined so to write it that if other eyes do chance upon it they may read the true records of a man's emotions under those circ.u.mstances.
I shall never be able to coax myself into any illusion of heroism in my adventures and I shall set down my most abject terrors in equal and impartial degree with the few occasions in which the instinct of self-preservation enabled me to rise to the need and bluff magnificently.
The case of the submarine commander of Nippon was different. He wished to leave behind him such a message as an Emperor might read, and with exalted devotion to his object, he left it. Still, had some miracle brought his vessel to the surface before the end, who knows but that, in the confessional of his own memory, he might have acknowledged a very delirium of terror? Who knows but that between the period of one unflinching paragraph and the capital of the next, there may have been intervals of wallowing in the trough of physical despair?
At least with me there were many fears. The night went by a road of nightmare and thirst which led to no haven of rest. I slept fitfully and in terror, and awoke at its end to a feeling of exhaustion. For a while I dreaded to rise and face the possibilities of a new day. It was only the burning torture of thirst that finally outweighed panic and drove me in search of water. I held timidly to the sh.o.r.e, distrusting the jungle and dodging furtively from rock to rock, with straining eyes and ears.
Climbing among the ragged boulders which were strewn like fragments of fallen masonry at the foot of the cliff, I shortly came upon a thread of clear water, where I lay and slaked my thirst. After that came a renewed freshness and a sudden return of vigor. I began also to feel a healthful hunger, and when, in clambering to the top of a steep rock, I frightened a shrieking gull from her nest, I fell avidly on the eggs she left behind.
As the sun climbed, a tepid humidity freighted the air, but the trade-wind, rising steadily and freshly, tempered it and stirred the delicate fronds of palm and fern.
The cliff was honeycombed with small irregular caverns and rifts. Some were mere grottoes, but others went back into somber recesses deeper than I, with no means of lighting my steps, cared to explore. For my dwelling place I selected one that broadened from a twisted and narrow fissure to a crude chamber large enough for a wolf's den, or at need a man's refuge. A fern-fringed brooklet trickled across the opening.
For my door yard I had a small plateau with a sheer wall of cliff at my back and a steep drop at the front. One must climb to reach the place which is an advantage where the tenant may desire to roll stones down upon the heads of his visitors.
The _Wastrel_ must have gone to the bottom near by, for incoming tides from time to time deposited on my sh.o.r.e strange and satirical sc.r.a.ps of flotsam. The sardonic humor of the sea mocked me by delivering on my beach a tattered fragment of old newspaper and an empty biscuit tin.
It was two days after my arrival that I discovered some bulky thing lodged, as my raft had been, upon the near-by rocks. The two days had told upon me. My pajamas were in ribbons; my canvas shoes torn, and my flesh bruised. My feet, too, were cut and blistered and my hands raw. I had already tired of talking aloud to myself and more and more often I caught myself turning with a sudden start to peer apprehensively at the fringe of the forest. To my growing morbidness it seemed that over the beauty of the place hung an impalpable but certain curse. I waded out eagerly to the fresh bit of salvage and found a seaman's chest with quaintly knotted handles of tarred rope. It was of stout workmans.h.i.+p and its heavy locks and hinges had endured without injury the buffeting of the sea. The name of J. H. Lawrence still legible upon one end brought back with startling vividness the memory of a man waiting with stoical amus.e.m.e.nt the coming of death. Laboriously enough I dragged it in, halting often to pant and wipe the sweat out of my eyes with my forearm.
The sun was sinking over the shoulder of the mountain when I at last arrived, exhausted but still tugging at my prize, upon the plateau of my cliff apartment. I lay a long while, my heart pounding with exertion, before I was equal to the task of attacking its lock with a stone and my sheath knife, and after that it was some moments before the lock yielded and I raised the heavy lid. First there met my eyes a scattered collection of souvenir postcards, much discolored and faded, but sufficiently preserved to awaken a clamor of protest and longing. There were tantalizing pictures of the Cafe de Paris and Trafalgar Square and the _bund_ at Hong Kong.
Young Mr. Lawrence must have been a confirmed souvenir-buyer. I could trace his odyssey by trivial things he had picked up here and there.
Two curved daggers with turquoise settings in the hilt had come from the bazaars of Damascus or Jerusalem. A copper incense-burner with a package of scented tapers had been brought from Tokio or Nagasaki. Equally useless things filled package after package.
No mission chest piously outfitted at home ever carried to the remote heathen a more useless a.s.sortment of unnecessaries than this one brought to me. There was not a s.h.i.+rt, not an article of utility, only trinkets as serviceable as doll-babies to a prizefighter. At last, however, I came upon two packages carefully wrapped in sail-cloth. So painstaking and secure had been their packing that when I took off the first covering and the second, I found that the contents had suffered no wetting.
The first bundle contained the violin which had incensed the captain and several packages of extra strings. As I took it out, I seemed to hear again its plaintive, wordless song and I laid it down reverently. It seemed a part of the dead man's soul--something intimate and wonderful which had outlasted his mortality.
In the second package was something wrapped in tissue paper and very soft to the touch. I opened it and spread out on the sand a gorgeously wrought Mandarin kimono. Its silk was of the heaviest and richest quality and its design flamed with the unstinted opulence of Chinese embroidery. On the flowing sleeves and bordered panels were storks of blue and silver flying among poppy-like flowers of crimson purple. There were also delicately worked streams and reeds and moons, all tangled up with ranting dragons of gold, gazing fiercely out from eyes of inset jade. Gold thread, silver thread, silk thread, cunningly combined to the making of its dazzling pattern.