Lord Jim | Page 8

their prayer-carpets, with their hands over their
ears and one elbow on each side of the face; a father, his shoulders up
and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a boy who slept
on his back with tousled hair and one arm commandingly extended; a
woman covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with a piece of white
sheeting, had a naked child in the hollow of each arm; the Arab's
belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound of broken outlines,
with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great confusion of vague forms
behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of a deck-chair,
blades of spears, the straight scabbard of an old sword leaning against a
heap of pillows, the spout of a tin coffee-pot. The patent log on the
taffrail periodically rang a single tinkling stroke for every mile
traversed on an errand of faith. Above the mass of sleepers a faint and
patient sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a troubled dream; and
short metallic clangs bursting out suddenly in the depths of the ship, the
harsh scrape of a shovel, the violent slam of a furnace-door, exploded
brutally, as if the men handling the mysterious things below had their
breasts full of fierce anger: while the slim high hull of the steamer went
on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare masts, cleaving
continuously the great calm of the waters under the inaccessible
serenity of the sky.
Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to his
own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming about
the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the unattainable,
and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only shadow on
the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from the
funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in
the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, steered, one on each
side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone fragmentarily in the oval of
light thrown out by the binnacle. Now and then a hand, with black

fingers alternately letting go and catching hold of revolving spokes,
appeared in the illumined part; the links of wheel-chains ground
heavily in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would glance at the compass,
would glance around the unattainable horizon, would stretch himself
till his joints cracked, with a leisurely twist of the body, in the very
excess of well-being; and, as if made audacious by the invincible aspect
of the peace, he felt he cared for nothing that could happen to him to
the end of his days. From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged
out with four drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the
steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea
presented a shiny surface under the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to
a stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of
the waters. Parallel rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the
ship's position at last noon was marked with a small black cross, and
the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course
of the ship--the path of souls towards the holy place, the promise of
salvation, the reward of eternal life--while the pencil with its sharp end
touching the Somali coast lay round and still like a naked ship's spar
floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How steady she goes,' thought
Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high peace of
sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds:
he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements.
They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They
had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him
with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it
drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself.
There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea
that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; and when he
happened to glance back he saw the white streak of the wake drawn as
straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black line drawn by the
pencil upon the chart.
The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his watch was
near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to part from
that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his thoughts.
He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor