The Ebb-Tide Chapter 7 - The Pearl-Fisher

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CHAPTER VII THE PEARL-FISHER About four in the morning, as the Captain and Herrick sat together on the rail, there rose from the midst of the night in front of them the voice of breakers. Each sprang to his feet and stared and listened. The sound was continuous, like the passing of a train. No rise or fall could be distinguished. Minute by minute the ocean heaved with an equal potency against the invisible isle. And as time passed, and Herrick waited in vain for any vicissitude in the volume of that roaring, a sense of the eternal weighed upon his mind. To the expert eye, the isle itself was to be inferred from a certain string of blots along the starry heaven. And the schooner was laid to and anxiously observed till daylight. There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in the east, then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between crimson and silver, and then coals of fire. These glimmered a while on the sea-line, and seemed to brighten and darken and spread out. And still the night and the stars rained undisturbed. It was as though a spark should catch and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost incombustible wall-hanging, and the room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after, and the whole east glowed with gold and scarlet, and the hollow of heaven was filled with the daylight.

The Isle, the undiscovered, the scarce believed in, now lay before them and close aboard, and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate. The beach was excellently white, the continuous barrier of trees inimitably green, the land perhaps ten feet high, the trees thirty more. Every here and there, as the schooner coasted northward, the wood was intermitted, and he could see clear over the inconsiderable strip of land, as a man looks over a wall, to the lagoon within, and clear over that again to where the far side of the atoll prolonged its penciling of trees against the morning sky.

He tortured himself to find analogies. The isle was like the rim of a great vessel sunken in the waters. It was like the embankment of an annular railway grown upon with wood, so slender it seemed amidst the outrageous breakers, so frail and pretty, he would scarce have wandered to see it sink and disappear without a sound, and the waves closed smoothly over its descent.

Meanwhile the captain was in the forecross trees, glass in hand, his eyes in every quarter spying for an entrance, spying for signs of tenancy. But the isle continued to unfold itself in joints, and to run out in indeterminate capes, and still there was neither house nor man nor the smoke of fire. Here a multitude of seabirds soared and twinkled and fished in the blue waters, and there, and for miles together, the fringe of Coco-Palm and Pandanus extended desolate and made desirable green bowers for nobody to visit, and the silence of death was only broken by the throbbing of the sea.

The airs were very light. Their speed was small, the heat intense. The decks were scorching underfoot, the sun flamed overhead, brazen, out of a brazen sky, the pitch bubbled in the seams, and the brains in the brain-pan. And all the while the excitement of the three adventurers glowed about their bones like a fever. They whispered and nodded and pointed, and put mouth to ear, with a singular instinct of secrecy, approaching that island underhand like eavesdroppers and thieves, and even Davis from the cross-trees gave his orders mostly by gestures. The hands shared in this mute strain, like dogs, without comprehending it, and through the roar of so many miles of breakers, it was a silent ship that approached an empty island.

At last they drew near to the break in that interminable gangway. A spur of coral sands stood forth on one hand, on the other a high and thick tuft of trees cut off the view, between was the mouth of the huge lava.

Twice a day the ocean crowded in that narrow entrance, and was heaped between these frail walls. Twice a day, with the return of the ebb, the mighty surplussage of water must struggle to escape. The hour in which the far alone came there was the hour of flood. The sea turned, as with the instinct of the homing pigeon, for the vast receptacle, swept eddying through the gates, was transmuted, as it did so, into a wonder of watery and silken hues, and brimmed into the inland sea beyond. The schooner looked up, close-hauled, and was caught and carried away by the influx like a toy. She skimmed, she flew, a momentary shadow touched her decks from the shore-side trees, the bottom of the channel showed up for a moment and was in a moment gone. The next, she floated on the bosom of the lagoon, and below, in the transparent chamber of waters, a myriad of many-coloured fishes were sporting, a myriad pill-flowers of coral diversified the floor. Herrick stood transported. In the gratified lust of his eye, he forgot the past and the present, forgot that he was menaced by a prison on the one hand and starvation on the other, forgot that he was come to that island, desperately foraging, clutching at expedience, a drove of fishes, painted like the rainbow and billed like parrots, hovered up in the shadow of the schooner and passed clear of it, and glinted in the submarine sun. They were beautiful, like birds, and their silent passage impressed him like a strain of song.