In the variables, if you wait long
enough, something is bound to happen, and we were so plentifully
stocked with food and water that we could afford to wait. On
October 26, we actually made one hundred and three miles of easting,
and we talked about it for days afterwards. Once we caught a
moderate gale from the south, which blew itself out in eight hours,
but it helped us to seventy-one miles of easting in that particular
twenty-four hours. And then, just as it was expiring, the wind came
straight out from the north (the directly opposite quarter), and
fanned us along over another degree of easting.
In years and years no sailing vessel has attempted this traverse,
and we found ourselves in the midst of one of the loneliest of the
Pacific solitudes. In the sixty days we were crossing it we sighted
no sail, lifted no steamer's smoke above the horizon. A disabled
vessel could drift in this deserted expanse for a dozen generations,
and there would be no rescue. The only chance of rescue would be
from a vessel like the Snark, and the Snark happened to be there
principally because of the fact that the traverse had been begun
before the particular paragraph in the sailing directions had been
read. Standing upright on deck, a straight line drawn from the eye
to the horizon would measure three miles and a half. Thus, seven
miles was the diameter of the circle of the sea in which we had our
centre. Since we remained always in the centre, and since we
constantly were moving in some direction, we looked upon many
circles. But all circles looked alike. No tufted islets, gray
headlands, nor glistening patches of white canvas ever marred the
symmetry of that unbroken curve. Clouds came and went, rising up
over the rim of the circle, flowing across the space of it, and
spilling away and down across the opposite rim.
The world faded as the procession of the weeks marched by. The
world faded until at last there ceased to be any world except the
little world of the Snark, freighted with her seven souls and
floating on the expanse of the waters. Our memories of the world,
the great world, became like dreams of former lives we had lived
somewhere before we came to be born on the Snark. After we had been
out of fresh vegetables for some time, we mentioned such things in
much the same way I have heard my father mention the vanished apples
of his boyhood. Man is a creature of habit, and we on the Snark had
got the habit of the Snark. Everything about her and aboard her was
as a matter of course, and anything different would have been an
irritation and an offence.
There was no way by which the great world could intrude. Our bell
rang the hours, but no caller ever rang it. There were no guests to
dinner, no telegrams, no insistent telephone jangles invading our
privacy. We had no engagements to keep, no trains to catch, and
there were no morning newspapers over which to waste time in
learning what was happening to our fifteen hundred million other
fellow-creatures.
But it was not dull. The affairs of our little world had to be
regulated, and, unlike the great world, our world had to be steered
in its journey through space. Also, there were cosmic disturbances
to be encountered and baffled, such as do not afflict the big earth
in its frictionless orbit through the windless void. And we never
knew, from moment to moment, what was going to happen next. There
were spice and variety enough and to spare. Thus, at four in the
morning, I relieve Hermann at the wheel.
"East-northeast," he gives me the course. "She's eight points off,
but she ain't steering."
Small wonder. The vessel does not exist that can be steered in so
absolute a calm.
"I had a breeze a little while ago - maybe it will come back again,"
Hermann says hopefully, ere he starts forward to the cabin and his
bunk.
The mizzen is in and fast furled. In the night, what of the roll
and the absence of wind, it had made life too hideous to be
permitted to go on rasping at the mast, smashing at the tackles, and
buffeting the empty air into hollow outbursts of sound. But the big
mainsail is still on, and the staysail, jib, and flying-jib are
snapping and slashing at their sheets with every roll. Every star
is out. Just for luck I put the wheel hard over in the opposite
direction to which it had been left by Hermann, and I lean back and
gaze up at the stars. There is nothing else for me to do. There is
nothing to be done with a sailing vessel rolling in a stark calm.
Then I feel a fan on my cheek, faint, so faint, that I can just
sense it ere it is gone. But another comes, and another, until a
real and just perceptible breeze is blowing. How the Snark's sails
manage to feel it is beyond me, but feel it they do, as she does as
well, for the compass card begins slowly to revolve in the binnacle.
In reality, it is not revolving at all. It is held by terrestrial
magnetism in one place, and it is the Snark that is revolving,
pivoted upon that delicate cardboard device that floats in a closed
vessel of alcohol.
So the Snark comes back on her course. The breath increases to a
tiny puff. The Snark feels the weight of it and actually heels over
a trifle. There is flying scud overhead, and I notice the stars
being blotted out. Walls of darkness close in upon me, so that,
when the last star is gone, the darkness is so near that it seems I
can reach out and touch it on every side.
