Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 6
Chapter 6
Table of Contents
If you’re new to the story, I suggest beginning with the table of contents so you’ll understand the origins of the text and why I say it was co-authored by Herman Melville.
And now,
Kraken in a Coffee Cup.
Chapter Six
Days, weeks pass, and under easy sail, I sit with the captain at his maps and learn to trace our multiple positions: off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena. I see us in miniature within the aged parchment, gliding through these waters, with the waves rolling above us like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, make what seems a silvery silence, not a solitude. Lit up by the moon, the water’s limit looks celestial; and we some plumed and glittering god uprising from the deep.
Outside, the crew lift their voices, and so impressive is the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that my soul instinctively desires a lowering, although to what I do not know. Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not quiver more; and within the cabin, the captain feels their wonder and lays his hand upon my shoulder.
When not otherwise engaged, on moonlight nights, it has become the cabin boy’s wont to mount to the main-mast head and stand a look-out there. Tonight, a finned spirit has lit upon the rigging and hailed the half-immortal crew.
The captain looks to me in answer to that hail. “The men be desiring their sheol leave, son. The topgallant sails and royals must be set, and every stunsail spread. Order it so and my helmsman to his place. Then, with every mast-head manned, direct our piled-up craft down before the current and forward into the dark.”
I step back. “Me, sir? Order your crew?”
“When men fiercely wish the same destination, they’ll obey a barking dog. Howl and they will interpret your intentions exactly as I’ve said.”
I walk the deck with uncertain, side-lunging strides, and command the crew with the captain’s words, as best as memory serves me. Whatever I’ve said, the crew jumps into instant action and follows his every syllable, though they be uttered by me.
The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail current filling the hollows of so many sails, makes the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushes along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to Hades, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And as I watch the men’s faces that night, I think in them also two different destinations are warring. While their chanting voices make lively echoes along the deck, every strike of their hands to the task sounds like a coffin-tap. For life and death this crew works, and the ship swiftly speeds into a darkness beyond starlight. From every eye, like arrows, eager glances shoot, looking for what I do not know, but every sailor swears he sees it, one at a time, vaguely ahead, but never in the same locale; and I suppose our descent must be into madness.
This sunless mirage has almost grown to encompass all the world and suspends us in a silent hour, when, again a small brilliance ahead is descried by all. With the immemorial superstition of our profession, and in accordance with the preternaturalness which it invested, the soulmen swear that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or however great the depth, that ineffable glow lights the harbor of our pursuit.
In my heart, though, reigns a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it treacherously beckons us on and on, in order that monsters, after alluring us by lamplight, might turn round upon us and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage depths. These apprehensions, vague but awful, derive a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the sea, in which, beneath all its black blandness, there lurks a devilish charm, as for hours we voyage along, through a void so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space vacates itself of life before our urn-like prow.
But, at last, close to our bows, strange forms dart hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flow inscrutable sea-shadows. Finned spirits cling to the hemp, as though they deem our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation. And heave and heave, still unrestingly heave the black currents, as if their vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it has bred.
We drift into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transform into fish and fauna, condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store and beat that black current without horizon. But calm and snow-white, the light beckons and grows, and in its halo, a city, and at the edge of the city, a harbor, and into the harbor, we sail.
During all that blackness of the elements, I, though given for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and seldom addressed my mates. With everything above and aloft secured, nothing more could be done but passively to await the issue of the current. So, with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, for hours and hours I stood gazing dead down-current, while an occasional gust off the cold-hearted currents would all but congeal my very eyelashes together. Now at the end of that shared captaining, between myself and the fates, we arrive in glorious harbor, but my heart is still cold and clinging to its dread.
#
Coral and stone form the cresting wave that is the city of Sirene. We enter the harbor through a bubble membrane, but do not then enter a world of air; all the city is still submerged, but now our ship’s wood groans with the release of pressure.
“For the Christian, hell included paradise, and for the Greeks, Hades had the islands of the Blessed,” the cabin boy says. “They are closely wed to each other, places of torment and plenty, and so the peoples who serve them are likewise bonded.”
I watch the crew leap from the Shade onto a narrow, volcanic quay, but I cannot move. “They are the enemy.”
“Above we are at war, but this is a place of perpetual truce.”
When the cabin boy, too, has followed, I am alone on the ship, and the choice to take my leave in this strange harbor or not is mine. I’ve been confined to the Shade for months, and I can remain forever more if that so suits me; and though I hesitate for several eternal seconds, I leap and give chase to those who have gone ahead. Around me clings a film, a tension-born barrier against the pressures of this sunless land.
“No wonder that these Sireners, born to the bottom, should take to the sea,” the cabin boy says, waving his hand before the dark buildings and the bioluminescent lights. “They first caught driftwood souls, scattered in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for floaters in the dark; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured those just beneath the edge of daylight; and at last, launching great ships on the sea, they explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war against any man, woman, or child who should dare to perish at sea.”
“You make it sound as if they have a navy,” I say, glancing back at the harbor, empty save for the Shade.
“And each and every one of their ships is corded with a portentousness of unconscious power; our very Shade was taken from their number,” he answers. “And thus have these naked Sireners, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders. The sea is theirs; they own it, as Emperors own empires; other soulmen have but a right of way through it, and by other, I mean us. The Sirener resides and riots on the sea; he alone comes up from it in ships; to and fro plowing it as his own special plantation. This is his home; this is his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions upon land. He lives in the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides under the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years we knew the land, but Sirener was born to the sea; and the surface to him is another unreachable world, stranger than the moon to a Bostoner. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so the Sirener, out of sight, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
(Go to Chapter 7)
—Thaddeus Thomas
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