Fire Island | Page 7

being carried toward a burning mountain; but I don't see any glow from the volcano now."
"No; it's all out, and I ought to have said a sea-quake. It seems to me it was like this: a great place opened somewhere, out of which the flame and smoke and thunderings came, till it had half spent its strength, and then the sea mastered it, and ran into the great hole and put out the fire, but it took all the sea to do it."
"I say, Mr Rimmer," exclaimed Oliver Lane, staring hard at the mate, "did you get a heavy blow on the head when we came ashore?"
"No; I had all my trouble before the shock came that sent you down, I mean when we struck I'm as clear as a bell now, sir, and know what I'm saying."
"But the sea--I don't hear any waves now. There are no breakers, the deck is not flooded, and yet you say we are ashore?"
"You can't see any breakers, and they can't," said the mate, pointing to a group dimly seen through the gloom clustered together and looking over the vessel's side, "because it's as I tell you, the earth opened with that eruption, and the seas all ran down the hole."
"Mr Rimmer!"
"That's right, sir. We're ashore, but it's on the bottom of the sea."
"Nonsense!" cried Oliver Lane.
"Oh, very well, look over the side, then. Where's the water? I've been looking and listening, and there isn't a drop to be heard; it's too dark to see anything yet. Now, listen again."
"I can hear nothing," said Oliver.
"No, not a splash, and the great volcano is put out. That isn't smoke which makes it so dark, but steam rising from the big hole in the earth."
"Oh, impossible!" cried Lane.
"All right, sir, then make it possible by explaining it some other way. But, as far as I can make out, our voyage is over, and we've got to walk all the way home, and carry our traps."
"Wait till it gets light," said Lane confidently, "and you'll see that you are wrong. Who's that, Drew?"
"Yes. Are you better?"
"Oh, yes, only a little giddy. Where's Panton?"
"Over yonder. I say, what do you think of this? Isn't it awful! You know we are ashore."
"Mr Rimmer says we're on the bottom of the sea, with all the water run out."
"Well, it does seem like it, but that's impossible, of course. We're not in a lake."
"I don't know where we are gentlemen," said the mate, "only that I feel like a fish out of water, and I'm quite in the dark."
"Wherever we are," said Drew, "we have been in the midst of an awful natural convulsion, and if we can escape with life, I shall feel glad to have been a witness of such a scene."
"I'm thinking about our poor ship, sir," said the mate. "She's of more consequence to me than Nature in convulsions. Oh, if these clouds would only rise and the light come so that we could see!"
"It is coming," cried Lane. "It is certainly clearer over yonder. How still everything is!"
Scree-auh!
A long-drawn, piercing, and harsh cry from a distance.
"What's that?" cried Drew.
"Fish," said the mate, drily. "Found there's no more water, and it's going to die."
"Mr Rimmer," cried Lane, "what nonsense!"
"Nonsense? Why, I've many a time heard fish sing out when they've been dragged on board."
"That was a bird," said Lane, as he shaded his eyes to try and pierce the gloom around them. "There it goes again."
For the cry was repeated, and then answered from behind them, and followed directly after by a piping whistle and a chirp.
"We're ashore with birds all about us," said Oliver Lane decisively. We were carried right in by that earthquake wave, and the water has retired and left us stranded.
"Have it your own way, gentlemen," said the mate. "It's all the same to me whether my ship's left stranded at the bottom of a dry sea or right away on land. She's no use now--that's plain enough."
Just then the darkness closed in again, and save for the murmur of voices in the obscurity, the stillness was terrible. So utterly dark did it become that anything a yard away was quite invisible, and once more, suffering one and all from a sensation of dread against which it was impossible to fight, the occupants of the deck stood waiting to encounter whatever was next to come.
Oliver Lane was at the age when a youth begins to feel that he is about to step into a fresh arena--that of manhood, but with a good deal that is boyish to hold him back. And in those moments, oppressed and overcome as he was by the long-continued darkness, he felt a strong disposition to search out a hand so as to cling to whoever was nearest,