Cloud Atlas

& monstrous visit me. “A sure sign,” Henry consoles me, “your Worm has reacted to our vermicide & seeks shelter in the recesses of your cerebral canals whence visions spring. In vain Gusano coco hides, dear Adam, in vain. We shall winkle ’im out!”

Monday, 2nd December—

By day, my coffin is hot as an oven & my sweat dampens these pages. The tropic sun fattens & fills the noon sky. The men work seminaked with sun-blacked torsos & straw hats. The planking oozes scorching tar that sticks to one’s soles. Rain squalls blow up from nowhere & vanish with the same rapidity & the deck hisses itself dry in a minute. Portuguese man-o’-wars pulsate in the quicksilver sea, flying fish bewitch the beholder & ocher shadows of hammerheads circle the Prophetess. Earlier, I stepped on a squid that had propelled itself over the bulwarks! (Its eyes & beak reminded me of my father-in-law.) The water we took on at Chatham Isle is now brackish & without a dash of brandy in it, my stomach rebels. When not playing chess in Henry’s cabin or the mess room, I rest in my coffin until Homer lulls me into dreams a-billow with sails of Athenians.

Autua knocked on my coffin door yesterday to thank me for saving his neck. He said he was in my debt (true enough) until the day he saves my life (may it never dawn!). I asked how he was finding his new duties. “Better ’n slaving for Kupaka, Missa Ewing.” Anyhow, growing sensible of my fear someone would witness our congress & report to Cpt. Molyneux, the Moriori returned to the fo’c’sle & has not since sought me out. As Henry warns me, “It’s one thing to throw a blackie a bone, but quite another to take him on for life! Friendships between races, Ewing, can never surpass the affection between a loyal gundog & its master.”

Nightly, my doctor & I enjoy a stroll on the deck before retiring. It is pleasant merely to breathe the cooler air. One loses one’s eye in lanes of sea phosphorescence & the Mississippi of stars streaming across the heavens. Last night, the men were gathered on the foredeck laying up grass into sinnet for ropes by lantern light & the prohibition on “supernuminaries” on the foredeck seemed not to apply. (Since the “Autua Incident” that contempt directed at “Mr. Quillcock” is in recess, as is the epithet.) Bentnail sang ten verses on the world’s brothels foul enough to put the most wanton satyr to flight. Henry volunteered an eleventh verse (about Mary O’Hairy of Inverary) that turned the air yet bluer. Rafael was next coerced to take his turn. He sat on the “widow maker” & sang these lines in a voice unschooled yet honest & true:—

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,
Hurrah, you rolling river.
Oh, Shenandoah, I’ll not deceive you,
We’re bound way ’cross the wide Missouri.

Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter,
I love the place across the water.
The ship sails free, the wind is blowing,
The braces taut, the sheets a-flowing.

Missouri, she’s a mighty river,
We’ll brace her up till her topsails shiver.
Oh, Shenandoah, I’ll leave you never,
Till the day I die, I’ll love you ever.

Silence from rude mariners is a grander accolade than any erudite eulogy. Why should Rafael, an Australian-born lad, have an American song by heart? “I din’t know ’twas a Yankee un,” he replied awkwardly. “My mam teached it me before she died. It’s the only thing of hers I got still. It stuck in me.” He turned to his work, an awkward curtness in his manner. Henry & I sensed anew the hostility that workers emanate at the bystanding idler & so we left the toilers to their industry.

Reading my entry for 15th October, when first I met Rafael during our shared mal de mer on the Tasman Sea, I stand amazed at how that sprite lad, aglow with excitement at his maiden voyage & so eager to please, has become this sullen youth in only six weeks. His luminous beauty is chipped away, revealing the timber-muscled seaman he shall become. Already he looks rather given to rum & water. Henry says this “sloughing off of his cocoon” is inevitable, bon gre mal gre, & I suppose he is right. Those smatterings of education & sensibility Rafael received from his patron, Mrs. Fry of Brisbane, serve a cabin boy ill in the harum-scarum world of the fo’c’sle. How I wish I could help him! Were it not for the intervention of my Mr. & Mrs. Channing, my own fate may well have been of a piece with Raf’s. I asked Finbar if he thought the boy was “fitting in well.” Finbar’s Delphic reply, “Fitting what in well, Mr. Ewing?” left the galley cackling but myself quite in the dark.

Saturday, 7th December—

Petrels are aloft, sooty terns afloat & Mother Carey’s chickens roost on the rigging. Fish similar to borettoes pursued fish similar to sprats. As Henry & I ate supper, a blizzard of purplish moths seemed to issue from the cracks in the moon, smothering lanterns, faces, food & every surface in a twitching sheet of wings. To confirm these portents of nearby islands, the man at the lead shouted a depth of only eighteen fathoms. Mr. Boerhaave ordered the anchor to be weighed lest we drift onto a reef in the night.

The whites of my eyes have a lemon-yellow aspect & their rims are reddened & sore. Henry assures me this symptom is welcome, but has obliged my request for an increased dosage of vermicide.

Sunday, 8th December—

Sabbath not being observed on the Prophetess, this morning Henry & I decided to conduct a short Bible Reading in his cabin in the “low-church” style of Ocean Bay’s congregation, “astraddle” the forenoon & morning watches so both starboard & port shifts might

Letters from Zedelghem

CHATEAU ZEDELGHEM,

NEERBEKE,

WEST VLAANDEREN

29TH-VI-1931

Sixsmith,

Dreamt I stood in a china shop so crowded from floor to far-off ceiling with shelves of porcelain antiquities etc. that moving a muscle would cause several to fall and smash to bits. Exactly what happened, but instead of a crashing noise, an august chord rang out, half-cello, half-celeste, D major (?), held for four beats. My wrist knocked a Ming vase affair off its pedestal—E-flat, whole string section, glorious, transcendent, angels wept. Deliberately