"I'll Furnish The Books And Instruments," I
Said, "And Do You Study Up Navigation Now.
I'll be too busy to do
any studying.
Then, when we get to sea, you can teach me what you
have learned." Roscoe was delighted. Furthermore, Roscoe was as
frank and ingenuous and modest as the young men I have described.
But when we got out to sea and he began to practise the holy rite,
while I looked on admiringly, a change, subtle and distinctive,
marked his bearing. When he shot the sun at noon, the glow of
achievement wrapped him in lambent flame. When he went below,
figured out his observation, and then returned on deck and announced
our latitude and longitude, there was an authoritative ring in his
voice that was new to all of us. But that was not the worst of it.
He became filled with incommunicable information. And the more he
discovered the reasons for the erratic jumps of the Snark over the
chart, and the less the Snark jumped, the more incommunicable and
holy and awful became his information. My mild suggestions that it
was about time that I began to learn, met with no hearty response,
with no offers on his part to help me. He displayed not the
slightest intention of living up to our agreement.
Now this was not Roscoe's fault; he could not help it. He had
merely gone the way of all the men who learned navigation before
him. By an understandable and forgivable confusion of values, plus
a loss of orientation, he felt weighted by responsibility, and
experienced the possession of power that was like unto that of a
god.
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