Gallions Reach

The next day was like it, and the day after was separated but by another night. Time was alternate day and night. Their ship was enchanted in the centre of a vast and empty world. It was the dot and focus of a radiant vacuity; and it was a handhold when about them was nothing but stars and the dirge of the abyss. It laboured, it beat down without ceasing glassy upheavals into fields of hissing white, but it could never escape to that dark and distant line where the wall of heaven stood about them. They were alone. The romance of the sea had flown off, perhaps, on the wings of the clippers, and was lost. It was not there. But the sea and the sky were unaware of any loss. They were beautiful, but were aloof from the desires and anxieties of man. The deck was orange and crimson with rust. Even iron-rust, when it was seen in the right place, accorded with a mind in which perturbation was lessening. Jimmy had a word with Sinclair about that rust. Sinclair surveyed it, and advised Colet that it would do him more good to take a chipping hammer to it. What was more, it would have to be done. The black funnel and the yellow masts leaned this way and that, and sometimes swung in a half-circle.

A coast appeared, late one afternoon. It was illusive, but it must have been land. The shape of earth there, Colet saw, had the luminous indistinction of a pale blue flower in sunlight; those strips of orange would be its beaches. The sky over the inland hills of violet was a clear height of greenish ether. They were lost, very likely. They had strayed to a younger and brighter planet. An opposite coast formed with a scatter of white specks down by the sea. The captain stood with Colet on the starboard side of the bridge. “There’s Tangier,” said Hale.

Names. Bare names. They were no nearer the reality than ever. The only reality was their present ship and its men. Hale and that spellbound seaman inside the wheelhouse were solid. They were there. But beyond them was the old vaporous abstraction. Perhaps an Odyssey could begin with every voyage of every ship. But how was a voyager to know that? What would be the alarming signal: “Here you start?” It must all depend on the spectator himself. Perhaps there is no adventurous morning light showing things anew for those who sleep on. But there is no knowing whether one is awake or asleep.

Captain Hale, having indicated the presence of Africa, remained in the same position, leaning on the weather dodger, with his thin brown hands clasped before him. His white shirt cuffs were linked with gold. A neat, precise, and sensible deacon. He was still regarding Tangier in apparent belief. Somebody was playing an accordion in the forecastle.

“How strange,” commented the ship’s master. “I don’t think I’ve heard that tune since one night at the Queen’s Palace of Varieties. You wouldn’t know that music hall. Poplar High Street. I was a youngster then, in a barque in the South Dock. I heard Jenny Hill that night. Before your time, I think. No, you wouldn’t know her. They called her the Vital Spark.” Captain Hale was still considering the portentous loom of Africa, and seemed pleased with it.

Good Lord, thought Jimmy. Here we are, and the men together on the same ship are in different seas, and only appear to be together. They see different things. What would make this world common for us all?

“The Great Macdermott was on the programme that night,” quietly continued Hale.

“We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do?”

“Yes. You’ve got him. That’s the fellow.”

“It’s a long time ago.”

“Yesterday, or thereabouts, my boy. Just feel our revolutions.”

Jimmy gave conscious attention to the incessant and energetic throbbing which was the only warning of their progress.

“She’s doing her best,” he reported.

“She is,” said Hale. “Well, that’s how time goes.” He turned to look at their wake. Jimmy turned. The track of their past diminished to infinity on the uneventful sea towards the declining sun.

XIII

A little concentration with a chipping hammer will do more to the inexperienced back than to a rusty deck. Colet, not to be beaten, ached while he chipped, and the sun burned his neck. The rust was even drier than ledgers. How long to go to one bell? A flake struck his eye and he gave it a rest; he stretched his back. The sea, after the near red deck, expanded into an astonishing sapphire. An island was in sight in the blaze of day, a desert of tawny rock. It quivered under the sun and the lucent breeze. Where had that place come from? Conjured up? Sinclair, on his way aft, rebukingly active, descended an iron ladder to the deck with a rapid tattoo of his feet, but checked alongside Colet to peer at the island. One tiny house by the shore, a white cube, was all that showed in the desert.

“That’s where she lives,” confided Sinclair. “Circe waits for me there, but alone. No leopards. And especially no swine. Only jars of wine.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“On my first voyage. Yes, I think I saw her. Just a glimpse.”

“But that line of white along the shore. That’ll be the bones of sailors.”

“Served ’em right. I’m the man. One day I shall land, and then she’ll come down to the beach. No good looking today. You won’t see her. She knows I’m passing the place. Not the time yet to stop. Farewell, Circe, my love!” Sinclair kissed his hand to the mirage.

Their ship touched earth again at Port Said. That was a solid abode of men, with the assured smells of historical contamination and well-established intercourse. No doubt about Port Said. It was an area of understandable life, noisy and lusty. It was ramshackle, insistent, predatory, and raucous. Goats