THE INVISIBLE WITNESS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XI, Issue 238, 4 November 1876, Page 1

THE INVISIBLE WITNESS.

AN UNACCOUNTABLE STOKY. CHAPTER I. It is not as if I could account for it. That is just what I can't do, just what I have never been able to find anybody else to do. If I had been asleep when 1 hud the dream, if any of my dreams had been natural to the life I was leading at the time ; if I had known, or could have supposed, he was in any such place or circumstances ; or if the sequel could possibly have been explained away, as beingless than the hardest and saddest of hard and sad realities — then I might expect you to receive my narrative with some little credence, or at least with some degree of toleration. But, as I have to tell the .story without any of these conditions, I must be content to brave your disbelief, and even, at the worst to endure your scorn. I was surgeon on board the " Old Potomac," when the brave old whaler was crushed to splinters between two icebergs in Lancaster Sound, at the latter end of the season in 186 — . Wejiad been on the ice about fifteen weeks" and were, as nearly as we could bring our reckoning, within a few miles of the northern extremity of the spurs of Cockburn Land. Daylight was a luxury we did not very largely indulge in ; and when we had any of it we could turn it to no good account. The destruction of our vessel had been so sudden, rapid, and complete, that our salvage of stores had been most meagre ; ami such sport as we were afterwards able to obtain went but a little way towards ekeing out our livelihood. Imagine me, then, lying at dead of night under a pile of furs and skins, at the bottom of a den we had dug out of the frozen matter which served us instead of earth ; too cold to sleep, almost too completely stupitied to think, and far to miserable to speculate on the relative chances of my owii life or death. All around us was silent as the grave. Neither sough of wind, nor wash of wave, nor cry of wild dog or bird, nor whisper of human creature, broke the utter, death-like stillness in the midst of which I lay benumbed and hopeless, as one may who has been buried alive, and, after his last struggle with ironhanded Fate, calmly waits for the coining of Doom. At such a time, in such a place, with such surroundings, 1 saw the scene on which this story turns. From the high meridian centre of a cloudless, tropical sky, the sun — a monstrous, glorious, blazing ball of lire — looked down upon a A r ast circular plain of waters, so still, so clear, so bright, so burning hot, it might have been a shield of silver, white-heated in the furnace. As my sight ranged far and wide across this desert of sea and sky, its magnificent and horrible monotony was unrelieved by wing, or waif, or weed, by mist, or spray, or shadow, by ripple, breath or shimmer. Only the fierce, merciless Hood of. scalding light beat down upon the helpless, inunoveable Hood below. All the rest was death : more awful in its dread intensity than the silent, lifeless terror of the Arctic night in which my spirit vision mutely gazed upon its paradox. I remember opening wide my heavy eyes upon the darkness : I remember absolutely feeling the darkness with my eyes : groping in it with my sightless balls ; yet, while neither ray nor beam relieved the blackness, gazing still upon the frightful brightness of that picture which was more real to me than all that was present around me. There was a fascination in that faroff painted picture of the blazing tropics, and I strove and wrestled in vain to break the spell. I closed my eyes, clenched my eyelids with a force of desperate strength that seemed to scorch them as they pressed upon the fiery scene I would fain destroy. I started upright in my bed, and thrust my eyelids down upon the burning pupils, but all in vain. Brighter, hotter, more desolate, more frightfully horrible, grew the dread panorama of my waking dream. While I shivered with the freezing cold, and my limbs trembled with the palsy of a mysterious tejror, this picture seemed to burn its way through my vision into my very soul : as one may faintly fancy red-hot irons win their way through the eyeballs of the doomed when tyrants make martyrs. For an instant my sight died out, and all before, about, around, within me was but as one dense ball of blindness. Only for an instant. 'The darkness dwindled to a speck, and all around it, like the glittering setting of a dusky jewel, grew out again the picture of that southern ocean with its glowing wilderness of blazing sunlight. Yet there waa some respite in this, for I fixed my gaze upon the speck of darkness, and found relief in watching its diminished eize, as it dwindled slowly down and came

to be as a pin's point only in the wide expanse of fire. Suddenly, when it should have died out, and mingled in the silver sea, it stayed, took form, and moved along the surface of the placid, growing waves. As 1 watched, and traced it in its progress, it became a boat : a lonely castaway of hollowed timber, floating rudderless, oarless, ungnided through the desert of flame. It seemed to me as if the scene came nearer, growing, as it came. The speckboat grew, till I could trace its opaque outline on the glistening waters, and could see that it was painted white — its white paint looking black in contrast with the ]jurer day-stream that encompassed it. Even in my fancy-dream I smiled at the half-grotesque reality which forced itself upon me when I read, in painted letters on its side, the words — " Barkey, Shields." But, strangely, I perceived that as the black speck had left the horizon and become a boat, so now it left the outline of the boat and settled in the stern-sheets, with the border of the boat's white timbers as a frame around it. Then it slowly rose above the Bide, aud again took form and *hape and character. The form and shape and character of a huge, black, human face. Its skin was dark as ebony ; its features gross and full of marks of vice ; its eyes were large, and fiery as the sun that beat upon its woolly head, and its grand expression, as it came so close within my view that I could trace its every separate lineament, was all a demon could have asked of a savage, treacherous beauty, for test of kingship in the world of Hell. The figure rose and stretched itself along the boat. It stooped, then rose again, lifting another figure — the form of a white man, slight, thin, emaciated — as helpless in his stalwart arms as a moth in the giasp of a Titan. I saw the negro grasp the white man's slender throat in his cruel lingers. I saw him, witli the other hand, strike to the white man's heart with a long, spare, glittering knife ; then draw forth the knife reeking with blood, and drop it into the waves. I saw him strip the dead man's body of its rings and watch and purse. And then I saw him lift the body in his anus, stark and gory as his hand had made it, and Ih'ng it into the silver-shining sea. And, as the waters closed and parted once to let the white man's face turn upwards to the blazing sunlight, that face was turned to mine, and I knew it for — My Owji Brother !