Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [78]
"Shut up!" Swede shouted. "Don't talk about things unless you're sure of 'em! Most of the hell in this world comes from loose talk!"
"Now look," Captain Dean said hoarsely. "We can't go on this way, or we'll freeze to death. My feet are numb already. I can't move or think as fast as I could before we went ashore. It took me quite a time to realize the mate was again implying that I ran the ship ashore on purpose."
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Langman cursed him.
The captain's voice was as mild as it could be in such a tumult. "That's neither here nor there. I'm still captain, and I still give orders. Tomorrow you can elect a new captain if you think it's necessary. Right now I've got to do everything I can to see that there is a tomorrow for us. If we can last until daylight, and see where to put our feet, we'll find a better shelter. We can be warm. We'll be able to sleep. Maybe the ship will hold together. Maybe there'll be part of her left. What we've got to do is keep moving, two at a time, all night."
Langman spoke up at once. "I say No! If anybody moves around over those ice-covered rocks, he'll break a leg."
"Nobody's asking anyone to do so," Captain Dean said. "As near as I can tell from your voice, you're opposite me. All right: get to your feet. I'll get to my feet. All the rest start counting out loud. Count slow. Count to a hundred. While you count, the mate and I'll stamp up and down, standing in one place, and slap our arms across our chests. When the count is one hundred, the mate and I'll help those beside us to stand up. The rest of us'll count a hundred, while they stamp their feet and swing their arms, same as we did."
We had barely started when one of our number screamed horribly, and our rock hollow became a turmoil of flying arms and legs. "It's Henry," Captain Dean shouted. "Catch him and hold him!" Never before had I heard or felt a man in the throes of epilepsy, and when at last Henry Dean was pinioned and lay gurgling and groaning beneath us, I thought I had plumbed the depths of horror, and knew I couldn't endure another night like this.
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All that night I rose, hunched my shoulders to the driving storm, stamped my feet, swung my arms; then pulled Neal to his feet and sank down to count to a hundred over and over again. It was like thunderous eternity, something beyond the power of a mere man to bear. If I'd been alone, I couldn't have borne it. I knew if I stopped that agony of struggling up, facing the driving snow that blistered my facethat added to the wet weight of my clammy clothesNeal might stop.
The others might stop as well; so I couldn't stop. I could only hope and pray.
My prayers were as formless as my hopesOh God Oh God Oh God Oh God, over and over.
Deep within me, underneath the counting aloud and the praying, were other vagrant longings for warmth, for shelter, for an end to the deafening crashing of the waves: flashes of my father and his distress if he could know of our plight; of how he would blame himself for it; of how I, like a fool, had protested at being sent to Oxford; of how I would never again find fault with anything provided I could be warm and dry and have friends about me....
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December 12th, Tuesday
The time came, eventually, when, on stooping to pull Neal to his feet, I could see him dimly. Snow, mixed with rain, pelted us from the northeast, but the wet rocks on which we had ached and shivered through that long, long night were visible. All of us had ceased suddenly to be disembodied voices and were human beings once morehuman but wild-eyed at the sights revealed to us by that pallid dawn.
We were on an island, as all of us had feared since Chips Bullock had dared hazard that awful suspicion after hunting for shelter the night beforean island, but what an island!
It lay low in the water, like the back of a whale. In a long-gone age it might have been a rounded mountaintop of solid rock, but one that a demonic force had smashed with giant hammers and made into a shattered travesty