What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines
went on. Had the earth been checked in her course?
They could not understand; and suddenly the calm sea,
the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure
in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning
destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically
full length and collapsed again into a vague heap.
This heap said ‘What’s that?’ in
the muffled accents of profound grief. A faint
noise as of thunder, of thunder infinitely remote,
less than a sound, hardly more than a vibration, passed
slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the
thunder had growled deep down in the water. The
eyes of the two Malays at the wheel glittered towards
the white men, but their dark hands remained closed
on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way
seemed to rise a few inches in succession through
its whole length, as though it had become pliable,
and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving
the smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering
stopped, and the faint noise of thunder ceased all
at once, as though the ship had steamed across a narrow
belt of vibrating water and of humming air.
CHAPTER 4
A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed
questions, tried to tell honestly the truth of this
experience, he said, speaking of the ship: ’She
went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling
over a stick.’ The illustration was good:
the questions were aiming at facts, and the official
Inquiry was being held in the police court of an Eastern
port. He stood elevated in the witness-box, with
burning cheeks in a cool lofty room: the big
framework of punkahs moved gently to and fro high
above his head, and from below many eyes were looking
at him out of dark faces, out of white faces, out
of red faces, out of faces attentive, spellbound,
as if all these people sitting in orderly rows upon
narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination
of his voice. It was very loud, it rang startling
in his own ears, it was the only sound audible in
the world, for the terribly distinct questions that
extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in
anguish and pain within his breast,—came
to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning
of one’s conscience. Outside the court the
sun blazed—within was the wind of great
punkahs that made you shiver, the shame that made
you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed.
The face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved
and impassible, looked at him deadly pale between
the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The
light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from
above on the heads and shoulders of the three men,
and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light
of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed
of staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts!
They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain
anything!
