Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

Something had happened. I switched on the reading lamp at the head of the bunk and looked at my watch. Four in the morning! I could have sworn that the noise which had roused me was the herald of eclipse and overthrow. But had I heard anything? My cabin appeared to be a private seclusion in the hush at the end of time and chance. Had the ship stopped? There was no movement. She might have been in harbor. Yet when I rested against the bulkhead I could hear the many tiny mysterious voices speaking everywhere in the ship: twitters, ticks and tacks, rumbles-a clang, a guggle-a purring and a humming, but all reduced and far. She was going slow. Just as I switched off the light the monstrous sound came again, a long shuddering bellow.

Fog! Well, we were nearing home and it was meet that I should have an early notice that I had come to the end of the islands, the beaches, and the forests. As for islands, I had seen as many as would make an archipelago of myths, islands suitable for all the fables. Only a few days ago I came out on deck at sunrise by chance, and we were steaming by Giardino, and Etna was over us. That was the very hour to pass through the Strait of Messina. We went close to Stromboli, which was vexed with heavy gusts of smoke, and the Lipari Islands were strung out beyond in the Mediterranean weather of the legends. Ah, what a chance man had in that sea, once he had got beyond the worst of his fears and his stone implements! And at least five times in the long story of his life there, after he learned to make bronze, he seemed well on the way to an intellectual light that was equal to the sunshine at his porch. To look at those lambent shores above that plain of malachite was to see the clear invitation to him. How could he remain in darkness? There were the very colors and the radiance to transmute the muddy residue of his mind. Yet each time that he was near to full achievement his house fell on him; perhaps because he met the eye of Jove with arrogance, and perhaps because his pride had made him careless. The sunset of that day when we passed through the Tyrrhenian Sea was like a pean to the renown of man; and so all we latter-day witnesses of Heaven's tribute to man's long effort retired to the saloon, where there was a concert; and an elderly Scotch passenger, to whom probably not a secret of the visible universe is unrevealed, and not many of the secrets of God, sang to us something about the banks of Loch Lomond; or rather, he stated the case for the low road, and for the high, spectacles on the end of his nose, face slightly lifted to keep them there and to get a good sight of his notebook, as though this were evidence and we were in a police court.