Across the Zodiac | Page 7

sustain life on the island, life under such circumstances would not be worth having,
I was perfectly willing to embark upon a voyage in which I was well aware the chances
of death were at least as five to one. I caught and contrived to smoke a quantity of fish
sufficient to last me for a fortnight, and filled a small cask with brackish but still
drinkable water. In this vessel, thus stored, I embarked about a fortnight after the day of
the mysterious shock. On the second evening of my voyage I was caught by a gale which
compelled me to lower the sail, and before which I was driven for three days and nights,
in what direction I can hardly guess. On the fourth morning the wind had fallen, and by
noon it was a perfect calm. I need not describe what has been described by so many
shipwrecked sailors,--the sufferings of a solitary voyager in an open boat under a tropical
sun. The storm had supplied me with water more than enough; so that I was spared that
arch-torture of thirst which seems, in the memory of such sufferers, to absorb all others.
Towards evening a slight breeze sprang up, and by morning I came in sight of a vessel,

which I contrived to board. Her crew, however, and even her captain, utterly discredited
such part of my strange story as I told them. On that point, however, I will say no more
than this: I will place this manuscript in your hands. I will give you the key to such of its
ciphers as I have been able to make out. The language, I believe, for I am no scholar, is
Latin of a mediæval type; but there are words which, if I rightly decipher them, are not
Latin, and hardly seem to belong to any known language; most of them, I fancy,
quasi-scientific terms, invented to describe various technical devices unknown to the
world when the manuscript was written. I only make it a condition that you shall not
publish the story during my life; that if you show the manuscript or mention the tale in
confidence to any one, you will strictly keep my secret; and that if after my death, of
which you shall be advised, you do publish it, you will afford no clue by which the donor
could be confidently identified."
"I promise," said I. "But I should like to ask you one question. What do you conceive to
have been the cause of the extraordinary shock you felt and of the havoc you witnessed?
What, in short, the nature of the occurrence and the origin of the manuscript you entrust
to my care?"
"Why need you ask me?" he returned. "You are as capable as myself of drawing a
deduction from what I have told you, and I have told you everything, I believe, that could
assist you. The manuscript will tell the rest."
"But," said I, "an actual eye-witness often receives from a number of little facts which he
cannot remember, which are perhaps too minute to have been actually and individually
noted by him, an impression which is more likely to be correct than any that could be
formed by a stranger on the fullest cross-questioning, on the closest examination of what
remains in the witness's memory. I should like to hear, before opening the manuscript,
what you believe to have been its origin.
"I can only say," he answered, "that what must be inferred from the manuscript is what I
had inferred before I opened it. That same explanation was the only one that ever
occurred to me, even in the first night. It then seemed to me utterly incredible, but it is
still the only conceivable explanation that my mind can suggest."
"Did you," asked I, "connect the shock and the relics, which I presume you know were
not on the island before the shock, with the meteor and the strange obscuration of the
sun?"
"I certainly did," he said. "Having done so, there could be but one conclusion as to the
quarter from which the shock was received."
The examination and transcription of the manuscript, with all the help afforded me by my
friend's previous efforts, was the work of several years. There is, as the reader will see,
more than one _hiatus valde deflendus_, as the scholiasts have it, and there are passages
in which, whether from the illegibility of the manuscript or the employment of technical
terms unknown to me, I cannot be certain of the correctness of my translation. Such,
however, as it is, I give it to the world, having fulfilled, I believe, every one of the

conditions imposed upon me by my late and deeply regretted friend.
The character of the manuscript