The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II | Page 8

ashore," said the chief engineer. "This--fool of a mate has got caught in shore and we can't make steam enough to hold our own against this wind." I had not thought of this; I was chafing at the delay and the discomfort to Laura and the children. What was the worst in the case was still to be known. The boilers of the steamer were old and rotten, and had been condemned, and, but for the sharp economy of the Greek steamship company, would have been out already. The chief engineer, when he found that the engines at ordinary pressure did not keep the steamer from, going astern, had tied the safety valve down and made all the steam the furnaces would make. "If we don't go ahead we are done for just as much as if we blow up," said he; "for if we touch those rocks not a soul of us can escape, and we shall touch them if we drift, just as surely as if we blow up."
I went out of the mess-room with a feeling that it was a dream,--so bright, so beautiful a day,--we so well, so late from land, and so near to death! "Bah!" I said to myself. "They are fanciful; the cliffs are still a couple of miles away, and something will come to avert the wreck." I went down to the stateroom; Laura and the boy were unable to raise their heads from extreme sea-sickness, but baby Lisa was swinging on the edge of her berth, delighted with the motion, and singing like a bird, in her baby way. I sat down in my berth--there were four berths in each room--and watched her, and somehow the faith grew in me that we were not going that way at that time, that the hour had not come; and I went back to the mess-room to try to inspire confidence in my friends.
The afternoon was now wearing on. Since 10 A.M. we had made no headway towards our port, and when I looked at the cliffs it was clear that they were getting nearer, and the wind showed no signs of lulling. Our only hope lay in being able to drift so slowly that the wind might fall before we struck, and if that did not take place before nightfall it probably would not till the next morning. Rationally I understood this perfectly, but I could not feel that there was imminent danger. I had no presentiment of death, and nothing that I could do would enable me to realize the real and visible danger.
The wind never lulled an instant or blew a degree less furiously; it came still from the blue sky, and still we plunged and buried our bows and shipped floods at every plunge; the wheels throbbed and beat as ever, and no one moved on deck. The engineers changed their watches and the captain unrelieved kept up his to and fro on the bridge. I am confident that of all the men on board I was the only one who was not persuaded that death was near. My wife never knew till long after what the danger had been. We could already see that the water beneath the cliff was a wild expanse of breakers, coming in and recoiling, crossing, heaving, surging,--a white field of foam, where no human being could catch a breath. The waves that swung in before this gale rose in breakers against the cliff higher than our masts. We might go up in their spray if we reached the rocks, but no anchor could check our crawling to doom. To this day I look back with surprise at the complete freedom, not from fright, but even from a recognition of any real danger impending over us, which I then felt; it was not courage, but a something stronger than myself or my own weakness; it was not even a superstitious faith that I should be preserved from the threatened peril, but a profound and immovable conviction that the danger was not real; and the whole thing was to me simply a magnificent spectacle, in which the apprehension of my shipmates rather perplexed than unnerved me.
In half an hour more, the captain said, our margin of safety would be passed,--drifting as we then drifted our stern would try conclusions with the cliffs of Cephalonia. The sun was going down in a wild and lurid sky, a few fragments of clouds still flying from the west, when, almost as the sun touched the horizon, there came a lull; the wind went out as it had come on, died away utterly, and as we got our bows round for Argostoli we could hear the roar of the great waves that broke against the cliffs, and could see in