The Last Ship (54 page)

The beach at Lama, as we stepped out of the boat coxswained by Meyer with her hand Barker, yielded a reading on Selmon’s instruments that appeared to dash any slender hopes we may have had as to habitability here. It allowed us but four hours ashore. The expectation being so low, the disappointment was not great. I decided to proceed inland for a bit anyhow in order to make my own test of the littoral-over-inland habitability theory—personal knowledge of it seeming perhaps useful in our future search. Thus we penetrated into the bush lying just beyond the beach, single file, moving through vegetation and trees thick enough but not so much so as to require the machete ministrations of Preston and Brewster, Selmon and myself at the lead, our armed squad of eight strung out behind. Rather dark, now and then opening into a small clearing where we stopped for Selmon to take a fresh reading; at the third such clearing, this:

“It goes up, Captain. Very slowly.”

“But it goes up?”

“Oh, yes. It goes up.”

“Can we try a little more?”

“No problem yet. Still, not too far I’d think.”

“Frequent readings then.”

“Aye, sir. Frequent readings.”

The wild growth became thicker; Preston and Brewster, summoned forward to the lead, had to wield their machetes frequently now, their huge bodies making long slashing entries into it. Through these we emerged into another clearing.

The men having come up and gathered around so that we formed a cluster, we all stood still in the great beauty of it; grass so green and glistening it seemed to have been but recently sprinkled with dew, under our feet extending all the way across the clearing and guarded all around by a ring of great many-trunked trees, their long branches stretching protectively over it. Thurlow was the first to speak, in a quiet voice which fell upon the stillness.

“Those trees, sir. They’re the baobab. They’re supposed to be the oldest living thing on earth—twenty-five hundred years or so. The Africans say they’re the tree where man was born. If civilization started in Africa, one might like to think it started right here.”

Delaney, a religious man, embellished the idea.

“Aye, sir. A regular Garden of Eden.”

“Right now . . .” Selmon was looking at his counter. “We’d better get out of Eden.”

I had been here twice before—not the exact spot but similar ones in this same country. It all seemed familiar. And yet there was a difference, the nature of which I did not at first discern. Then I knew. It was the absence of sound. More than by any other characteristic, I had always associated Africa with sounds. Of millions of sounds of insects, the carrying sounds of birds, infinitely varying, of all the animals, of unnumbered thousands of living things, a marvelous cacophony, a great and mighty symphony of life itself. We heard nothing; not a single sound. Only a breathless silence, as if God—if indeed He did commence matters here—had created the setting of Eden but not yet got around to creating its fortunate inhabitants. And yet there seemed nothing peaceful in that arcane and transcendent quiescence; rather it seemed somehow a cruel stillness.

Then—it was as though my thoughts had been heard—from behind the bush and the trees on the far side of this clearing we were startled by a sound. A silence. Then another. Silences again. Then a number of sounds, differing all. I had always loved, immensely enjoyed, animals—had made those visits to Africa for that reason—and knew the sounds of most. These seemed to come from creatures I had never encountered. Sounds I had never heard. Something strange entered the air, invaded our souls, seemed to be felt among the men. A fear; a sudden caution; a foreboding.

“Let’s have a look,” I said. I spoke to Delaney. “Gunner, have the men put their pieces on ready.”

“Aye, sir.”

I heard the clicks as we proceeded cautiously across the clearing, where the bush began again. It was not thick here, no machete work necessary by Preston and Brewster. We had gone I would have judged a hundred yards when we broke again into a clearing far larger than any before, this one almost entirely occupied by what I knew as a wadi, a watering place for animals, surrounded again by stands of baobab trees. Ourselves coming again into a cluster, the source of the sounds stood before us.

The variety of them slammed overpoweringly at us. Perhaps fifty animals. Quickly I could make out a pair of lions. Three elephants. A giraffe. Some eland. Zebra, gazelle, wildebeest, kudu. I think it took us a little while to comprehend, overwhelmed as we at first were by the sight of so many different species, some of them natural predators of others so that it seemed strange for them to be gathered so peacefully together at one place. Then, as our eyes moved over them, something out of recent memory came to strike terribly at us. The animals seemed to have arrived at almost exactly the same state as had the human beings on the beaches of Amalfi. Chronologically this just about fit.

Some just lay, breathing hard, at the wadi’s edge, patently in a dazed state, occasionally looking at us as through blurred vision. Some were obviously blind. The same stigmata we had seen before. From all, large chunks of flesh had fallen away as though they had been viciously clawed, remaining flesh hanging in tatters, and as with the human beings we had encountered, this process seemed ongoing as if more loss were continuing to take place before our eyes; their bodies decomposing, slow bleedings everywhere; their coats gone mangy, great festering sores where hair or hide had been. A huge elephant tried to get up, succeeded in taking a step or two, fell down again with a mighty crash that shook the forest; weirdly, the other animals hardly seeming to notice, to hear. A great lion spasmatically staggered about, apparently trying to get closer to the wadi, then collapsed, just as had the inhabitants of the Amalfi beach. Mostly they did not move at all, as if hoarding dwindling reserves of strength. Their faces—and this was almost the worst part of all, sending a chill of horror and of unspeakable desolation through us—even their faces seemed to carry expressions highly similar. Looks—I do not think one imagined this—of bewilderment and stupefaction, and for the same reason, the immense mystery and inexplicability of what had happened, was happening, to them. Actually not that many sounds from them: low moanings most of all, heavy breathings as if choking for air; if bewildered by their fate, seeming acceptant of it. I do not know why it should have seemed so astonishing, and in itself so devastating to us, that these symptoms covered almost the exact same spectrum as those of the human beings we had seen on those other beaches. It was certainly not that we felt more sorrow in respect to the animals than we had with the human beings. Perhaps in our sadness a little of this: that none of these species who were before us had had anything to do with what happened. We stood in absolute muteness, the only sounds those the animals made; the sounds of suffering. From high overhead a slight wind came up, sending a mournful note whispering through the baobab trees that surrounded the wadi. It was as if the trees were crying.

It was Gunner Delaney, the farm boy, one growing up with animals, who first spoke.

“Captain?”

I did not need to hear the question. I was about to give the order when Bixby saw two of them coming toward us. As they approached, unafraid, they seemed in astonishingly good health. Fine coats, unstigmatized bodies. Two lion cubs, each a foot long. Bixby sat on her haunches, examined them. I watched her, the thin light of the clearing falling across her auburn, liquescent hair, something of tranquillity in that supple girlish figure whose knowing hands—fast as could be on the blinker light—now felt over these small creatures, one then the other, tenderly, expertly.

“They look fine,” she said. She looked up at me. “Captain?” She did not say it; she did not need to. The idea would have been to take them along, aboard ship, down the line to release them into some place habitable.

“Mr. Selmon,” I said.

He knelt alongside. Bixby held first one then the other while he ran his counter over them. He also looked up at me.

“Much too high, Captain,” he said. “We couldn’t risk it.”

Bixby set the last one down gently; stood away. They seemed to want to follow her. She picked them up, one in each hand, and carried them down by the wadi; returned.

“You may proceed, Gunner,” I said.

The eight spread out. All expert marksmen. The shots crashed through the jungle. Volley after volley. Soon all sounds ceased. It had taken a little while. We had had barely enough ammunition for some of those great creatures. In the great stillness, seeming more so than ever in the lingering echoes of the shots, we could see the curlings of smoke rising over the wadi, moving in soundless languor upward through the baobab trees.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said savagely.

We left Eden.

We made our way, hurrying as much as the thick growth would permit, back through the bush. Once, pausing briefly for Preston and Brewster to do some machete work, I remarked to Selmon, “I hear no birds,” and he replied, “Birds have the lowest tolerances of all. They would have been the first to go.” Soon we were emerging onto the beach where Meyer and Barker stood at their boat, waiting. Beyond across blue waters we could see the ship riding at anchor. We boarded and headed toward her. All the way out we sat with our unvoiced thoughts. Back aboard I gave orders for the ship to make its course at once, N. by N.E. as previously determined. I stood on the bridge wing watching Africa fade behind us. A thought would not leave me. Why we had had the mercy to put those suffering ones out of their torment but not to afford the same favor to the human beings on the beaches at Amalfi, the other places. Had it been a failure of compassion? As I watched the dying continent recede forever across our white wake, I wondered if the situation recurred, if we found any more human beings in that state, whether we should extend to them the same kindness we had shown the animals? Then thought: What would it do to us?

Then Africa was no longer to be seen and we stood surrounded only by the Arabian Sea, moving slowly through gentle waters bound for our first destination, India.

That very night happening to be the date for
Pushkin
’s surfacing at 2300 Greenwich, I reached him with no difficulty, informing him of the finality of Africa’s inhabitability, stating that we had transited Suez and were now standing east, giving him in detail our proposed course clear through to Pacific regions. He in reply telling us that he was skirting the Bay of Biscay and on a heading for the North Atlantic en route to the Norwegian Sea, thence to Karsavina and his mission, Thurlow bringing me the message, translating its Russian.

“Karsavina,” I said.

“Aye, sir. Karsavina.”

The word had become a beacon for us. Thurlow understanding all, our two hearts sailed with the Russian submarine far away, headed north, as the
James
pointed her bow toward far different, and faraway, waters.

P
roceeding at our creeping twelve knots, we had reached a point about forty miles off Bombay when the first intimation of the fate of the Indian subcontinent presented itself. We came on. Selmon standing at his repeater in the pilot house, giving frequent readings—eerily like a leadsman sounding out constant depth readings lest his boat hit shoals—I was still somewhat surprised when still fifteen miles away, he offered me a reading which left no alternative. Thurlow had the conn. I informed him.

“All engines stop.” I heard him give the order to the lee helm and presently the ship came dead in a placid sea.

We stood at the bulwark of the starboard bridge wing staring in wonder and incredulity across the waters of the Arabian Sea with that brilliant aniline blue that characterizes them; observing both the place where we knew by navigational fixes the city of Bombay to be and the littorals extending on a N.W. by S.E. bearing both ways from it. Below me along the lifelines I was aware of many sailors joining in these observations, gazing dumbstruck at it as at something transmundane. A great stillness lay over all. No winds stirred heavens or waters and from the men and women themselves I heard not a sound or a sigh. I was aware of a signalman standing nearby crossing himself. It stood there in a terrible brooding silence. I think it was the very size of it, its overpowering immensity, that more than anything brought our minds and our souls stilled, in a nameless fear—a quiet terror, I believe I could call it—and of a new kind. The immensity, I mean, of that black and monstrous mantle. Grotesque, hideous, it blanketed the entire eastern horizon, extending vertically from sea level to as high as the heavens went; horizontally from as far as the eye took you on the N.W. bearing to as far as it took you on the S.E. one. The mantle was at once brutal and eloquent, the first in the sense of the horror it emanated, the second in the sense of its true power made known. There was something absolutely anarchic about it, and utterly barbarous. Looking at it, one felt one had never known until now what fear was; one felt an invisible paroxysm pass through one, a motionless trembling of the body.

Sailors all, we were no strangers to nature’s great and humbling manifestations: the ferocious seas, the black howling nights of the Barents; dark massiveness of thunderclouds—we had seen these, many others. They seemed in memory casual things. This appeared in its hugeness, its dominion, an occupation force of the firmament itself. Something discarnate, otherworldly and mercilessly real, the very badge of the cataclysm. More black than gray, it gave the appearance of absolute opacity and seemed less gaseous than a solid and hard wall, impenetrable, permanent in character, as if it were here the earth came to an end. This part of the illusion at least was modified by looking through our Big Eyes which revealed the billowing, swirling nature of the mass, but further increased its emanation of ominous menace by a feature not seen by the naked eye: long lashings of lurid red flames licking now and then across its surface and through the pall, stabbing out from it like giant inflamed tongues. I raised up and looked again with the naked eye. Again that overpowering grossness of it, extending in a sinister shroud across half the visible sky, struck down upon us. Our silent and stopped ship seeming tiny, infinitesimal before it. The thing had an awful and tyrannical force to it. Even across this distance its smell carried, exhaling that absolute promise of infinite peril, virulent, harboring the new corruption, this no illusion, the knowledge of this weaponry it carried being the most frightening aspect of all to us—had it not spoken across fifteen miles of sea and, lest there be any misunderstanding, informed us of the very fact on Selmon’s instruments? A fair warning: Approach me not; not one inch farther. If it said anything it said that, and with all arrogance, confident of strict obedience, for it spoke the truth. We had learned: We stood in quite proper terror before it. I don’t know how long we just stood there watching it, appraising it. It was time for practical matters.

“Do you think they got a direct hit, Mr. Selmon?”

“God alone knows, Captain. No way to tell.”

Selmon had long since educated us: Even if the missiles and the bombs had been dropped elsewhere, sufficient dust and soot would have been injected into the atmosphere and massive quantities of pollutants released in the form of NO
x
, cyanides, vinyl chlorides, dioxins, furans, pyrotoxins—oh, yes, I had been a quick study as to the recondite terminology, it being absolutely urgent as to our own future—to inflict an equivalent punishment on lands and peoples quite far away and having nothing to do with the conflict, the winds transporting these toxins, shedding them, their radioactive fallout, and the attendant fires as they moved across land masses. We had once had a discussion, one I believe I could describe as philosophical in character, as to the two categories of victims: concluding that those killed immediately in target nations were more fortunate than those in countries which were in no way the object of direct attack by anyone, their inhabitants thereby enduring more lingering deaths from the process I have just described. We gazed at that thing across the blue waters.

“The winds have had more than enough time to bring it here,” Selmon said in that detached voice which I had come to consider as one of the more important ingredients of our salvation in circumstances where alarm of manner could have started its own fires and ones which would have consumed ourselves quickly enough. “Still, there’s no way to know to a certainty. Except ordinary reasoning telling you that no one had any reason to drop them on India.”

“Pakistan possibly.”

“That’s true. I’d forgotten about that fuss. And vice versa.”

First I, then Selmon, bent and looked again. Nothing but the tawdry sameness—the red flagellations across the solid black. We straightened up.

“I wonder if there’s anyone alive in back of all that.”

“Let’s hope not,” Selmon said. “But I’m afraid . . . there’s not been that much time. Quite a number still somewhere in there I’d judge. I’m glad we don’t have to see them, sir,” he said as if in thanks to that vast obscuring black purdah.

I asked for a reading. He stepped into the pilot house and brought it back. It had gone up slightly even without our moving, up from the reading which itself had prohibited any further advance. I looked north where the curtain extended, if anything more massively.

“Well, Mr. Selmon. Would you agree we’ve reached our northernmost point? No further in that direction?”

“Aye, sir. It could only be worse. We should get below the equator, sir. The north has nothing for us.” His tone had a rare urgency to it. “Except to harm us.”

Knowing that when I gave the order the ship would have reached as far north as she would ever in all her life go, I waited a moment.

“Mr. Thurlow,” I said then.

“Aye, sir.”

“Bring her about. One hundred and fifty degrees. Down the coastline. Fifteen miles off at all times. Unless Mr. Selmon allows us closer.”

“One hundred and fifty degrees, aye, sir.” And in a moment to the helmsman, Porterfield. “Right full rudder.”

“Right full rudder, aye, sir.”

“Steady on course one five zero.”

“Steady on course one five zero, sir. Checking one five five magnetic . . .”

I could feel the ship make her wide half circle and come about, something both real and forever symbolic, forever poignant, about it. We who had come from, lived there, would never again venture into northern latitudes. All the way down we could come no closer than the designated fifteen miles. All the way down the coastline unrevealed, clothed in the same towering dark cerements, rising thousands of feet into the atmosphere and now and then through it the same gleamings of red flames. Passing through the Gulf of Mannar and approaching Colombo we could see across the waters the identical phenomena, the city invisible, the entire land embraced in the thick billowing smoke, and the whole of the nation of Sri Lanka seeming on fire. Bending on our course around it, we proceeded in the coming days across the lower reach of the Bay of Bengal, across Ten Degree Channel, and entering the Strait of Malacca, Sumatra to our starboard, Malaysia to our port, we passed where our readings told us Singapore to be, also enshrouded in the great black pillars. A hush had fallen over the earth; the only sounds the occasionally heard crackling of fires in the distance, like dark death rattles. Moving ever southerly, we coursed the eastern littorals of Sumatra, finding something fractionally different. Slight liftings of the pall to give brief glimpses of empty beaches, the forests behind them engulfed in smoke and flames as of long duration.

It was as if we had passed through the gates of Acheron to bear witness to the immolation of the planet, a whole world on fire, smoldering, a charred earth. We did not linger. I chafed at the necessity of keeping our running speed at twelve knots, would have preferred to open her up and flee past these places. It was not that we did not feel compassion, not that we had become hardened. No, it lay more within the mind’s apparent ability, if sufficiently conditioned over a period of time, to accept almost anything as normal when verified by observation. At least it was at this state that we had now arrived. I was not surprised. Observing these cities, places, nations, consumed already or in the process of being consumed, become charnel houses, the very fact of there being nothing to be done about it, by us or anyone else, kept the emotions on a kind of hold, a certain sadness but no more. What else was there? One learned to ration compassion; to draw miserly on one’s not-unlimited bank account of feelings. Rather, and this was not a brutal thing, there was a desire to put them behind us, to see what better lay ahead: What lay ahead could not—so we felt then—be worse. A man who learns when not to weep is a stronger man, and certainly a more effective one, for that knowledge. Indeed, under conditions so final, weeping itself would have seemed to constitute a kind of sin, a sacrilege; most of all for the reason of being so inadequate. Passing by, we looked, then looked away. Passing by, we did not weep.

And so we moved, a solitary ship coursing through the waters which have always been kind to ships, letting them pass; moved past these funeral pyres, the men seeming after a while scarcely to notice them; our ship, our minds, our beings pointed only ahead; after a while glad of every single mile which placed them in our wake. We did what we could. Everywhere we went we bombarded the nearby country with communications in its own language, on every available frequency. Our nautical library afforded a considerable amount of translation of essential navigational material and calls of all kinds—identification calls, distress calls, “I require assistance” calls, “Do you require assistance?” calls, every call possibly needed by men to send or receive—into every language used where ships went, which meant the entire globe. Nothing came back to us.

One of these was China. Reaching our nearest point to it, in the South China Sea, we had turned all our frequencies loose on her. Nothing. We had wondered what had happened to China. It was too far out of the way to go have a look, we had not the fuel to spare; not a drop for sightseeing. Nothing suggested it would be any different. Worse, Selmon felt.

“All that land mass,” the radiation officer said, “the fallout coming directly at it, from right next door. Massive, unbelievably massive amounts of it—probably making what we’ve seen look like cloud puffs. They must have been among the first to go. By the same token, I suppose, a blessing of going quickly, very quickly—something rather comforting in that, isn’t there, Captain? It wouldn’t be too surprising if there wasn’t a single Chinese left by now. Not in China anyhow.”

“Yes. Well, I suppose we must take our comforts where we can find them.”

“My thoughts exactly, sir.”

Selmon had moved into a sphere of thinking which I sometimes envied, sometimes abhorred; knowing I was helplessly approaching the same sphere myself.

Sometimes we got glimpses through the pall, and in the case of one town, Maura in the Bangha Islands, a good deal more. It was a singular experience. Almost no smoke at all lay over it and Selmon’s readings enabled us astonishingly to keep approaching until we had reached a point no more than five miles off, where they attained a level that made us stop the ship. The word had passed quickly throughout the ship and all hands came topside to stare at this wonder, the sailors lining the lifelines. It was a fishing port I knew from an earlier Navy cruise, myself an executive officer on another destroyer; the town well-known throughout the world of sailors, ships putting in there because of its exceptional natural harbor, deep and embraced in long and protective encircling promontories; become in consequence a refuge from storms, a place of replenishment, a liberty port familiar to all Asiatic hands. The town had a certain charming aspect I had observed in only a few other ports on earth: The sea opened directly into the town. Curaçao in the Caribbean was like that, where you stepped off the ship almost straight into the main-street shops with their Dutch aura. By a coincidence this island was also originally colonized by the Dutch and seemed noticeably like its Caribbean sister, in neatness, in charm. From the stopped ship, now well within the harbor, we could see with absolute clarity straight down the principal street, see the buildings and the shops, none over two stories, each well cared for, see where the street went up a hill, see the houses on both sides, see at the very top of the hill the Catholic church. Everything well kept, shipshape—and undisturbed. The town appeared utterly intact, ready for business, even a couple of bars I remembered. We could see the merchandise in the unshuttered windows of the shops. One expected people momentarily to emerge from the shops, others to enter the bars. Everything ready, waiting; waiting in fact to receive the sailors of the
Nathan James.
For one blind second, a fleeting forgetfulness as to the new nature of things, it occurred to me I should turn my attention to liberty parties for my ship’s company, in extreme need of it, so long without it—in a breath of shock brought myself back to reality. Everything ready for such parties with only one difference from the time I had been here before: There were no people. That there were no live ones did not seem so strange as the fact that there were none of any kind. Not a body, a corpse, revealed anywhere under the sweepings of binoculars, of Big Eyes.