Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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The head disappeared. Memory now returned. I exactly recollected all that had befallen me down to the moment when, as I have already said, I fancied I beheld the faint color of the dawn lifting like smoke off the black edge of the sea. I gathered by the light in the cabin that it was morning and not yet noon, and conceiving that I might have been taken out of the water some half-hour after I had lost consciousness, I calculated that I had been insensible for nearly five hours. This scared me. A man does not like to feel that he has been as dead to all intents and purposes as a corpse for five hours, not sleeping, but mindless and, for all he knows, soulless.

I now heard a voice. “Give me the glass, Jim.” The man whose head had before appeared showed his face again over the edge of the hammock. “Drink this,” said he, holding up a glass of brandy-and-water.

I eagerly made to seize the glass, but could not lift my head, nor even advance my hands the required distance.

“Go and bring me the low stool out of my cabin, and bear a hand,” said the man, and a minute later he rose till his head was stooping under the upper deck. He was now able to command the hammock in which I lay, and lifting my head with his arm he put the tumbler to my lips, and I drank with feverish greediness. He then put a plate of sandwiches formed of white loaf bread and thin slices of beef upon the blankets and bade me eat. This I contrived to do unaided. While I ate he dismounted from the stool, gave certain instructions which I did not catch to his companion who, as he did not reach to the height at which the hammock swung, I was unable to see, and then came to the edge of the hammock, and stood viewing me while I slowly munched.