A thousand deaths by Jack London

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a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite

and pass on–a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and

ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with

inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air

in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a

feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do

with the meat in the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind

and hang on to it as a man might hang on to the face of a cliff.

The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe, for it rushed in

through his mouth and nostrils, distending his lungs like bladders. At such

moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and swollen with solid

earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the tree could he breathe.

Also, the ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted him. Body and brain became

wearied. He no longer observed, no longer thought, and was but semiconscious.

One idea constituted his consciousness: SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. That one idea

persisted irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally.

From a state of stupor he would return to it–SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. Then

he would go off into another stupor.

The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in the

morning, and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapuhi and his

women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon, still clutching

his daughter Ngakura. Only a South Sea islander could have lived in such a

driving smother. The pandanus tree, to which he attached himself, turned over

and over in the froth and churn; and it was only by holding on at times and

waiting, and at other times shifting his grips rapidly, that he was able to

get his head and Ngakura’s to the surface at intervals sufficiently near

together to keep the breath in them. But the air was mostly water, what with

flying spray and sheeted rain that poured along at right angles to the

perpendicular.

It was ten miles across the lagoon to the farther ring of sand. Here, tossing

tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters, and wreckage of houses, killed nine

out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage of the lagoon.

Half-drowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad mortar of the elements

and battered into formless flesh. But Mapuhi was fortunate. His chance was the

one in ten; it fell to him by the freakage of fate. He emerged upon the sand,

bleeding from a score of wounds.

Ngakura’s left arm was broken; the fingers of her right hand were crushed; and

cheek and forehead were laid open to the bone. He clutched a tree that yet

stood, and clung on, holding the girl and sobbing for air, while the waters of

the lagoon washed by knee-high and at times waist-high.

At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no more

than a stiff breeze was blowing. And by six it was dead calm and the sun was

shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless edge of the lagoon, Mapuhi

saw the broken bodies of those that had failed in the landing. Undoubtedly

Tefara and Nauri were among them. He went along the beach examining them, and

came upon his wife, lying half in and half out of the water. He sat down and

wept, making harsh animal noises after the manner of primitive grief. Then she

stirred uneasily, and groaned. He looked more closely. Not only was she alive,

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but she was uninjured. She was merely sleeping. Hers also had been the one

chance in ten.

Of the twelve hundred alive the night before but three hundred remained. The

mormon missionary and a gendarme made the census. The lagoon was cluttered

with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing. In the whole atoll not two

stones remained one upon another. One in fifty of the cocoanut palms still

stood, and they were wrecks, while on not one of them remained a single nut.

There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface seepage of

the rain were filled with salt. Out of the lagoon a few soaked bags of flour

were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out of the fallen cocoanut trees

and ate them. Here and there they crawled into tiny hutches, made by

hollowing out the sand and covering over with fragments of metal roofing. The

missionary made a crude still, but he could not distill water for three

hundred persons. By the end of the second day, Raoul, taking a bath in the

lagoon, discovered that his thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the

news, and thereupon three hundred men, women, and children could have been

seen, standing up to their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water in

through their skins. Their dead floated about them, or were stepped upon where

they still lay upon the bottom. On the third day the people buried their dead

and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers.

In the meantime, Nauri, torn from her family by the hurricane, had been swept

away on an adventure of her own. Clinging to a rough plank that wounded and

bruised her and that filled her body with splinters, she was thrown clear over

the atoll and carried away to sea. Here, under the amazing buffets of

mountains of water, she lost her plank. She was an old woman nearly sixty; but

she was Paumotan-born, and she had never been out of sight of the sea in her

life. Swimming in the darkness, strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she

was struck a heavy blow on the shoulder by a cocoanut. On the instant her plan

was formed, and she seized the nut. In the next hour she captured seven more.

Tied together, they formed a life-buoy that preserved her life while at the

same time it threatened to pound her to a jelly. She was a fat woman, and she

bruised easily; but she had had experience of hurricanes, and while she prayed

to her shark god for protection from sharks, she waited for the wind to break.

But at three o’clock she was in such a stupor that she did not know. Nor did

she know at six o’clock when the dead calm settled down. She was shocked into

consciousness when she was thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw and

bleeding hands and feet and clawed against the backwash until she was beyond

the reach of the waves.

She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny islet of

Takokota. It had no lagoon. No one lived upon it.

Hikueru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Hikueru, but she knew that

it lay to the south. The days went by, and she lived on the cocoanuts that had

kept her afloat. They supplied her with drinking water and with food. But she

did not drink all she wanted, nor eat all she wanted. Rescue was

problematical. She saw the smoke of the rescue steamers on the horizon, but

what steamer could be expected to come to lonely, uninhabited Takokota?

From the first she was tormented by corpses. The sea persisted in flinging

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them upon her bit of sand, and she persisted, until her strength failed, in

thrusting them back into the sea where the sharks tore at them and devoured

them. When her strength failed, the bodies festooned her beach with ghastly

horror, and she withdrew from them as far as she could, which was not far.

By the tenth day her last cocoanut was gone, and she was shrivelling from

thirst. She dragged herself along the sand, looking for cocoanuts. It was

strange that so many bodies floated up, and no nuts. Surely, there were more

cocoanuts afloat than dead men! She gave up at last, and lay exhausted. The

end had come. Nothing remained but to wait for death.

Coming out of a stupor, she became slowly aware that she was gazing at a patch

of sandy-red hair on the head of a corpse. The sea flung the body toward her,

then drew it back. It turned over, and she saw that it had no face. Yet there

was something familiar about that patch of sandy-red hair. An hour passed. She

did not exert herself to make the identification. She was waiting to die, and

it mattered little to her what man that thing of horror once might have been.