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 reclined in its gutterways. Its crowds hinted indifference or hostility. Vendors of obscenities, purveyors of cosmopolitan lesions, enticed with the smirking confidence that the desires of their own species were well known to them. It swarmed with flies. Its Canal was a lucky way of escape.

But by Suez, one daybreak, Colet sat up in his bunk from sleep with the instant waking certainty that something was going to happen. The ship, too, he could feel, was waiting for it. She was still and reconciled. She was anchored. The cabin was as close and quiet as a crypt. A crypt; this might be the breathless resurrection day. There was no sign. It had not begun yet. The book he had been reading late into the night was just discernible, open on the floor, where it had fallen from his bunk. Something in his favour. It was the Bible. The book looked up at him. It counselled him nothing from that distance below. The ship, he thought, was abandoned; he was left aboard, to make the best of it on his own.

Colet glanced out of the cabin port. There he saw, though not without doubt, what must have been the usual stanchion. A loose rope was beside it hanging from above. The rope was as still as the iron. That appearance of waiting in resignation was more than strange. It was a warning. The queer thing was that London seemed of less consequence to him now than that book on the floor. Reading that book had been his last act. The bare shadow of London moved but once in his thought, as he sat up; but Billiter Avenue had gone. Of no importance. What was important now? Through the port, beyond the stanchion, the distance deepened as he looked. Light was coming. Land formed under it.

Syria, very likely. Somewhere hereabouts Moses used to roam with his aboriginal mob and his first laws done in stone. Perhaps this was the chosen region of earth, whenever it was decided to vouchsafe a new light. That silence and brooding obscurity would make a man contrite and willing to learn. Out there, something would soon begin. The eastern sky seemed to be indicating the dread judgment to come, but no sign was under it of the works of men. Or else all that work was in hiding. Men and their work guessed what was coming. They had crawled under the film of sin and night which the past had left on the earth. But the upstanding ship would be terribly conspicuous.

That stanchion was already plain. A level flush of reddish gold beyond made the earth shrink into a deeper dark, but the elevated iron of the ship from London, unable to escape, was brightly caught. Without the sound of a trumpet the eye of Heaven suddenly lifted and blazed. Bones and opinions were like glass. The earth was prostrate under that unremitting celestial stare.

And every man at breakfast that morning was dressed in white. Immaculate linen for a transcendent day, when the old things had passed! Colet surveyed his messmates in surprise. Were they all confident they would be approved, and had anticipated it in pure raiment? Captain Hale waved aside the bloater and bacon. No more grease. There was a stifling suggestion that furnace doors were somewhere open. “Not now,” he said to the steward with the dishes. “This Gulf is the easier for a little fasting,” he explained to his colleagues at the table.

“Man, never give in to the Red Sea,” said Gillespie. “How would you care for yon engine-room now?” he asked Sinclair.

The chief officer was glum. He wiped his wet face. He glared malignantly at old Gillespie. “Engine-room! This is about the place where all that began, isn’t it? Civilisation and engines. God seems to be savage about it now. On the bridge you’d think He was trying to burn out a mistake.”

“It’s no right. That’s no the way to talk. Sun and rock and no wind. What would ye expect?”

“I tell you he is sorry he let us start it. This place is being paid out. That’s what makes it so damned hot.”

“Och. Get away, man!”

“It’s your cursed engines and science, that’s my idea, Mr. Engineer.”

The captain smiled; he was not at breakfast; he was waiting for a message from the shore. “Don’t let it worry you. We can’t alter it. It’s not Gillespie’s fault.”

“I think so, sir. If it wasn’t for engines, we shouldn’t be here.”

“An’ where would ye be? Piddling aroun’ south with a bit canvas. I tell ye. The engineers are the men. Ye couldna do withoot them.”

“I think,” said Hale, “Sinclair is not really annoyed with the engines. He must find them handy at times. Perhaps he is is only thinking of the uses to which we put our knowledge. Is that it, Mr. Sinclair?”

The chief officer had not seen this turn to his petulance. “Well, sir. No. I don’t know. I was only hot.”

The engineer presently left, still argumentative. “Hot! I never heard the like of it.” The captain shook his head in amusement at his lieutenant. “Be careful, Mister. If you must get peevish, don’t blaspheme science. Nobody will mind if you round on God. But leave the engines alone. They’re sacred.”

Sinclair looked round at the master in a little surprise. That elderly man was sitting with his eyes cast down, but he looked up in a friendly way at his junior. “You’ll find it so,” he said. “It’s no good getting annoyed with the way of things. We might as well argue with the seasons. They change, when the turn comes. Some day⁠—perhaps⁠—even engines may not be sacred.” He went out of the saloon, but came back to put his head in the door, “We get going in half an hour.”

They went on. The ship came to sullen life, grumbling and stuffy, breathing cinders heavily all over them from a languid bulge of smoke. She had entered another region of earth, and was committed to another existence. Europe was far off, and out of mind; they were beset by another order, and must make the best of it with the little they knew. The shores near to them on either beam showed that Sinclair was right in one thing. Those coasts were burnt out. There the earth had finished with men. There was no more darkness in the high bergs of Africa. They were masses of radiant bronze and brass. The very sea was lumpish and resentful of the intrusion of keels. It did not want them to pass. At sunset it was a level of heavy lava, polished and opaque, where their ship was fixed centrally in a glow between fulgent metallic shores. Sounds had gone from that world, for no men were there, no rain, and no wind.

Off the island of Socotra they found some air, and their ship began to sway. They had crossed over; they were involved now in the hazard of a new probation. The waters opened to the East, to a legend that was fabulous in ancient cities when London was sedge and mud.

“It doesn’t look as if the monsoon had broken, sir,” said Sinclair to the captain. They were on the bridge. Socotra, a serrated confusion of the horizon, was far to starboard.

“No,” said Hale. “I wish it had. We should know what to expect. The weather looks oily. I think we will have those hatch covers secured. Never know when it may break.”

But Colet was trying to puzzle out Socotra from an obscurity of cloud, sea glint, and shadow. That presence, to him, was more insistent than a monsoon which was not there.

“I’ve heard of it often enough, and there it is. Have you ever been there, captain?”

Sinclair frowned to starboard as if that shape had no right on the seas. Hale took Colet’s arm, and surveyed Socotra, with a smile.

“No, and I’ve never met a man who has. But there it always is, somehow. If you want to know about some of the things here, you’ll get it from Sinbad.”