Читать книгу Lolóma, or two years in cannibal-land. A story of old Fiji онлайн

21 страница из 65

For a moment we are poised on the watery apex in mid air. At that instant I suffered a syncope of all my faculties. I did not lose consciousness, but was spell-bound with the fascination of the rabbit under the gaze of the rattlesnake. I even noticed without shuddering in that terrible sixtieth part of a minute, during which our vessel trembled at this dizzy height, that the sides of the column of malachite-green had a ghastly radiance caught from the sickly sun, that the interior rolled with the gleam of a sapphire, and that there were faint rainbow tints on the outermost edge of spray, while below the sea was churned into a thundering abyss in which it was impossible to distinguish the coral bank from deep water.

I involuntarily shut my eyes. I gasp for breath as the closing waters ring in my ears, crashing, and roaring, and booming with the voice of a thousand cannon. Now we are falling with incredible velocity. Falling! Falling! Oh God! Will the end never come?

My next recollection was that of being awakened by a hot sun playing on my face. To my amazement I found that I was lying with my head on a crown of cocoanut leaves, and that the deck of the schooner, which was quite uninjured, was half-buried in the thick green foliage of a tropical island. During the prolonged horror of the descent from the starry-pointing sea I had swooned. It was not all descent, for the vessel had been carried right through the avalanche of falling waters before she reached the natural level of the sea, and she had been driven on a tidal wave clear over the reef, high and dry on shore, and into a grove of bread-fruits and cocoanuts.^[1] All hands—with the exception of the master, the mate, and myself—had been swept away in the tumult of waters, and we never saw a trace of them again. Turner had been lashed to the rigging, and Cobb having got jammed between the rudder and the displaced binnacle, they outlived the adventure, though all but drowned in the hail of salt sea which had fallen on them.