FICTION IN BRIEF.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2403, 24 September 1892, Page 4

FICTION IN BRIEF.

THE ADVENTURES OF THREE SAILORS. ( Cmtinved.) cnlar cushion of stout pins in my pocket, such as a sailor might carry, and with them we brought the squares cl the shirts together, and seized the corners to one of the oars by yarns out of an end of painter we cut off, then stepped the other oar, and secured it with another piece of the painter; and now we had a sort of sail, the mere sight of which, even, was a small satisfaction to us, since the shirts being white they must needs make a good mark npon the water, something not to be missed, unless wilfully, by a passing vessel. The morning passed away, and a little after twelve o’clock the water in the south was darkened by the brushing of a wind, which drove the hovering masses of vapour before it; and presently they had totally disappeared, leaving a sky with rents and yawns of blue in places, and a clear glass-like circle of horizon, upon which however, there was nothing to be seen. The boat moved slowly before the wind, which blew hot as a desert breeze; I steered, and Jackson and Fallows sat near me, one or the other from time to time getting on to a thwart to take a view of the ocean, under the sharp of his hand. In this fashion passed the afternoon. The night came with a deal of fire in the water, and a very clear moon floating in lagoons of velvet softness betwixt the clouds. The weather continued quiet; the long swell made a pleasant cradle of the boat, and the night-wind being full of dew, breathed refreshingly upon our hot cheeks ; whilst our ears were soothed by the rippling noise of the running waters which seemed to cool the senses, as the breeze did the body. It was almost a dead calm, however, at daybreak next morning. The atmosphere was close and heavy, and there was a strange strong smell of seaweed, rising off the ocean, which caused me to look narrowly about, with some dim dream of perceiving land, though I should have known there was no land for leagues and leagues. Whilst we were munching a biscuit, I observed an appearance of steam lifting off the water, at a distance of about half a mile on the starboard side of the boat. The vapour came out of the water in the shape of corkscrews, spirally working, and they melted at a height of perhaps ten or fifteen feet. I counted five of these singular emissions. Jackson said that they were fragments of mist, and we might look out for such another thickness as had lost us the brig. Fallows said " No ; that’s no mist, mate ; that is as good steam as ever blew out of a kettle. Are there places where the water boils in this here ocean ?”

As he said these words, an extraordinary thrill passed through the boat, followed by a sound that seemed more like an intellectual sensation than a real noise. What to compare it to I don’t know ; it was as though it had thundered under the sea. An instant later up from the part of the water where the corkscrew appearances were, rose a prodigious body of steam. It soared without a sound from the deep ; it was balloon-shaped but of mountainous proportions. *' A sea-quake 1” roared Jackson. “Stand by for the rollers." But no sea followed. I could witness no commotion whatever in the water; the light long swell flowed placidly into the base of the mass of whiteness and there was nothing besides visible on the breast of the sea, save the delicate wrinkling of the weak draught of air. Very quickly the vapour thinned as steam does, and as it melted off the surface, it disclosed to our astonished gaze what at first sight seemed to me a fabric of a great ship, but after viewing it for a moment or two, I distinctly made out the form of an old-fash-ionedhull with the half of much such another hull as she, alongside, both apparently locked together about the bows ; and they seemed to be supported by some huge gleaming black platform; but what it was we could not tell. The three of us drew a deep breath as we surveyed the floating objects. The steam was gone ; there they lay plain and bare ; it was as though the wand of a magician had touched the white mass, and transformed it into the objects we gazed at. "Down with the sail,’ , says I, " there’s something yonder worth looking at." We got the oars over, and pulled in the direction of the Fabrics. As we approached I could scarce credit theevidence of my own sight. The form of one of the vessels was perfect. She was of an antique build and belonged to a period that I reckoned was full eighty years dead and gone. The other — the halt of her I shon Id say —showed a much bluffer bow, and had been a vessel of some burthen. But the wonder was the object on which they rested. This was no more nor less than the body of a great dead whale ! We first needed to lose something of our amazement ere we could reasonably speculate upon what wo saw ; then how this had happened grew plain to par minds. Ihe two cralt, God knows bow many long years before, had been in action and founded in conflict. The smaller vessel—l mean the one that lay whole before us, might have been a privateersman: she had something of a piratical sheer forward, there were no signs of a mast aboard either of them, one had grappled the other to board her I dare say and they had both gone to the bottom linked. The vessel of which only half remained may have broken her back in settling, and by-and-byethe after part of her wasted away leaving the flead bows still gripped by the dead enemy alongside. But how came the whale there ? Well, we three men reasoned it thus, and I don’t doubt we were right. At the moment of the sea-quake the whale was stemming steadily towards the two wrecks resting on the bottom. They were lifted by the explosion, which at the same time killed the whale; but the impetus of the vast form slided it to under the lilted keels where it came to a stand. A dead wha.e floats as we Know. This whale being dead was bound to rise, and the bouyancy of the immense mass brought the two cralt up with it, and there they were, poised by the gleaming surface of the whale, which was depressed by their weight, so that no portion of the head, tail, or fluke was visible.

"It’s them vessels being connected, ” says Jackson, "as keeps them afloat. If what holds them together iorrard was to part they’d slide off that there slippeHnsss and sink.” We rowed close, the three of us greatly marvelling as you may suppose, for never had the like of such an incident as this happened at sea within the knowledge of ever a one of us, and Fallows alone was a man of five and forty, who had been using the ocean for thirty-three years. It was as scaring as the rising of a corpse out of the depths; as scaring as if that corpse turned to and spoke when his head showed—to see those two vesselslying in the daylight after eighty, aye and perhaps a hundred years of the green silence hundreds of fathoms deep, locked in the same posture in which they had gone down, making you almost fancy that you could hear the thunder of their guns, witness the flashing of cutlasses, and the rush of the boarders to the bulwarks amidst a hurricane note of huzzaing and shrieks of the wounded. They were both of them handsomely crusted with shells, not of the barnacle sort, but such as you would pick up anywhere in Ceylon or the Andaman, some of them finely coloured, many of them white as milk, of a thousand different patterns; and there was not one of them but what was beautiful. " Let's board her,” says Jackson. "Ah, but if that whale be alive!” says Fallows. "No fear of that,” said I, " if he was alive there’d be some stir in him. The whale’s not the danger ; it’s the lashing which may part at any moment. It should be in a fair (lo he continued.)