“Good full, sir.”
The wind fanned my cheek, the sails slept, the world was silent. The strain of watching the dark loom of the land grow bigger and denser was too much for me. I had shut my eyes—because the ship must go closer. She must! The stillness was intolerable. Were we standing still?
When I opened my eyes the second view started my heart with a thump. The black southern hill of Koh-ring seemed to hang right over the ship like a towering fragment of the everlasting night. On that enormous mass of blackness there was not a gleam to be seen, not a sound to be heard. It was gliding irresistibly toward us and yet seemed already within reach of the hand. I saw the vague figures of the watch grouped in the waist, gazing in awed silence.
“Are you going on, sir?” inquired an unsteady voice at my elbow.
I ignored it. I had to go on.
“Keep her full. Don’t check her way. That won’t do now,” I said warningly.
“I can’t see the sails very well,” the helmsman answered me, in strange, quavering tones.
Was she close enough? Already she was, I won’t say in the shadow of the land, but in the very blackness of it, already swallowed up as it were, gone too close to be recalled, gone from me altogether.
“Give the mate a call,” I said to the young man who stood at my elbow as still as death. “And turn all hands up.”
My tone had a borrowed loudness reverberated from the height of the land. Several voices cried out together: “We are all on deck, sir.”
Then stillness again, with the great shadow gliding closer, towering higher, without a light, without a sound. Such a hush had fallen on the ship that she might have been a bark of the dead floating in slowly under the very gate of Erebus.
“My God! Where are we?”
It was the mate moaning at my elbow. He was thunderstruck, and as it were deprived of the moral support of his whiskers. He clapped his hands and absolutely cried out, “Lost!”
“Be quiet,” I said sternly.
He lowered his tone, but I saw the shadowy gesture of his despair. “What are we doing here?”
“Looking for the land wind.”
He made as if to tear his hair, and addressed me recklessly.
“She will never get out. You have done it, sir. I knew it’d end in something like this. She will never weather, and you are too close now to stay. She’ll drift ashore before she’s round. O my God!”
I caught his arm as he was raising it to batter his poor devoted head, and shook it violently.
“She’s ashore already,” he wailed, trying to tear himself away.
“Is she?…Keep good full there!”
“Good full, sir,” cried the helmsman in a frightened, thin, childlike voice.
I hadn’t let go the mate’s arm and went on shaking it. “Ready about, do you hear? You go forward”—shake—”and stop there”—shake—”and hold your noise”—shake—”and see these head sheets properly overhauled”—shake, shake—shake.
And all the time I dared not look toward the land lest my heart should fail me. I released my grip at last and he ran forward as if fleeing for dear life.
I wondered what my double there in the sail locker thought of this commotion. He was able to hear everything—and perhaps he was able to understand why, on my conscience, it had to be thus close—no less. My first order “Hard alee!” re-echoed ominously under the towering shadow of Koh-ring as if I had shouted in a mountain gorge. And then I watched the land intently. In that smooth water and light wind it was impossible to feel the ship coming-to. No! I could not feel her. And my second self was making now ready to slip out and lower himself overboard. Perhaps he was gone already…?
The great black mass brooding over our very mastheads began to pivot away from the ship’s side silently. And now I forgot the secret stranger ready to depart, and remembered only that I was a total stranger to the ship. I did not know her. Would she do it? How was she to be handled?