Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

But we men stood in a line all along the deck and we sang to them:

If birds still cried on the shore,

If there were horses galloping all night,

Love, I could turn to you and say

Make up the bed,

Put fire to the lamp.

All night long we would lie and hear

The waves beat in, beat in,

If there were still birds on the dunes,

If horses still ran wild along the shore.

And then we would wave each other out of sight, our tears lessening with each circuit, for we were set for our first sight of Them, and they, the women, were waiting with us, for on us their release depended, since they were prisoners on that island.

On this voyage there were twelve men on board, with myself as Captain. Last time I played deckhand, and George was Captain. We were four days out from shore, the current swinging us along fair and easy, the wind coming from the North on to our right cheeks, when Charles, who was lookout, called us forward and there it was. Or, there they were. Now if you ask how it is we knew, then you are without feeling for the sympathies of our imaginations in waiting for just this moment. And that must mean that you yourselves have not yet learned that in waiting for Them lies all your hope. No, it is not true that we had imagined it in just such a form. We had not said or thought, ever: They will be shaped like birds or be forms of light walking on the waves. But if you have ever known in your life a high expectation which is met at last, you will know that the expectation of a thing must meet with that thing—or at least, that is the form in which it must be seen by you. If you have shaped in your mind an eight-legged monster with saucer eyes, then if there is such a creature in that sea you will not see anything less, or more—that is what you are set to see. Armies of angels could appear out of the waves, but if you are waiting for a one-eyed giant, you could sail right through them and not feel more than a freshening of the air. So while we had not determined a shape in our thoughts, we had not been waiting for evil or fright. Our expectations had been for aid, for explanation, for a heightening of our selves and of our thoughts. We had been set like barometers for Fair. We had known we would strike something that rang on a higher, keener note than ourselves, and that is why we knew at once that this was what we had been sailing to meet, around and around and around and around, for so many cycles that it might even be said that the waiting to meet up with Them had become a circuit in our minds as well as in the ocean.

We knew them first by the feeling in the air, a crystalline hush, and this was accompanied by a feeling of strain in ourselves, for we were not strung at the same pitch as that for which we had been waiting.

It was a smart, choppy sea and the air was flying with spray. Hovering above these brisk waves, and a couple of hundred yards away, was a shining disc. It seemed as if it should have been transparent, since the eye took in first the shine, like that of glass, or crystal, but being led inwards, as with a glass full of water, to what was behind the glitter. But the shine was not a reflected one: the substance of the disc’s walls was itself a kind of light. The day was racingly cloudy, the sky half cloud, half sun, and all the scene around us was this compound of tossing waves and foam, and flying spray, of moving light, everything changing as we watched. We were waiting for strangers to emerge from the disc and perhaps let down, using the ways of humanity, a dinghy or a boat of some kind so that we, standing along the deck’s edge, grasping fast to ropes and spars, might watch Them approach and take their measure—and adjust our thoughts and manners for the time. But no one appeared. The disc came closer, though so unnoticeably, being part of the general restless movement of the blue and the white, that it was resting on the air just above the waves a few paces off before we understood by a sinking of our hearts that we were not to expect anything so comfortable as the opening of a door, the letting down of a ladder, a boat, and arms bending as oars swung. But we were still not expecting anything in particular when it was already on us. What? What we felt was a sensation first, all through our bodies. In a fever or a great strain of exhaustion, or in love, all the resources of the body stretch out and expand and vibrate higher than in ordinary life. Well, we were vibrating at a higher pitch, and this was accompanied by a high shrill note in the air, of the kind that can break glasses—or probably break much more, if sustained. The disc that had been in our eyes’ vision a few yards away, an object among others, though an object stronger than the others, more obliterating—seemed to come in and invade our eyes. I am describing the sensation, for I cannot say what was the fact. It was certain that this disc rose a little way up from the waves, so that it was level with our deck, and then passed over us, or through us. Yet when it was on us, it seemed no longer a disc, with a shape, but it was more a fast beating of the air, a vibration that was also a sound. It was intolerable while it lasted, as if two different substances were in conflict, with no doubt of the outcome—but it did not last more than a moment, and when my eyes had lost the feeling of being filled with a swift-beating light, or sound, and my whole body from having been stretched or expanded or invaded, as if light (or sound) had the capacity of passing through one’s tissues, but in a shape as definite as one’s own, then I looked to see if George, who stood nearest to me, was still alive. But he was gone, and when I turned in terror to see where he was, and where the others were, they weren’t there. No one. Nothing. The disc, which had again become a crystal disc, hovering over the waves on the other side of the ship, was lifting into the sky. It had swept away or eaten up or absorbed my comrades and left me there alone. All the ship was empty. The decks were empty. I was in terror. And worse. For all these centuries I had been sailing around and around and around and around for no other reason than that one day I would meet Them, and now at last we had indeed inhabited the same pace of air, but I had been left behind. I ran to the other rail of the ship and clung there and opened my mouth to shout. I might indeed have shouted a little, or made some feeble kind of sound, but to what or to whom was I shouting? A silvery shining disc that seemed, as it lifted up and away into the air that it ought to be transparent but was not? It had no eyes to see me, no mouth to acknowledge my shouting with a sound of its own. Nothing. And inside were eleven men, my friends, whom I knew better than I knew myself. Since we do know our friends better than we know ourselves. Then, as I stood there, gazing into the scene of blue and white and silver that tossed and sprayed and shook and danced and dazzled, sea and air all mixed together, I saw that I was looking at nothing. The disc had vanished, was no more than the shape of a cell on my retina. Nothing.

I was sickened with loss, with knowledge of an unforeseeable callousness on their part. To take them and to leave me? In all our voyagings we had never envisaged that we might simply be lifted up and taken away like a litter of puppies or kittens. We had wanted instructions, or aid, we needed to be told how to get off this endless cycling and into the Southern current. Now that this had not happened, and no instructions or information had been given, only a sort of kidnapping, then I wanted to scream against their coldness and cruelty, as one small kitten that has been hidden by a fold of a blanket in the bottom of a basket mews out in loneliness as it moves blindly about, feeling with its muzzle and its senses for its lost companions among the rapidly chilling folds of the blanket.

I stayed at the deck’s edge. For while the ship needed steering and the sails setting, and for all I knew we had already swung about, I could not handle this ship by myself. I already knew that I must leave her, unless I was to choose to live on board her alone, on the small chance that the Disc would hover down again and discharge my companions in the same way it had taken them off. But I did not think this was likely to happen. And I was afraid to stay.

It was as if that Disc, or Crystal, in its swift passage across or through the ship, across or through me, had changed the atmosphere of the ship, changed me. I was shaking and shivering in a cold dread. I could hardly stand, but leaned clinging to a rope. When the shaking had seemed to stop, and I stood clenching my teeth and waiting for the puppy-warmth of life to come back, then the shaking began again, like a fit of malaria, though this was a sort of weakness, not a fever. Now everything in the ship was inimical to me, as if the Disc’s breath had started a rot in its substance. To say that I had been terrified and was still terrified would be too much of an everyday statement. No, I had been struck with foreignness, I had taken a deep breath of an insupportable air. I was not at all myself, and my new loathing that was so much more than a fear of the ship was in itself an illness. Meanwhile the sails shook and flapped and bellied or hung idle above my head. Meanwhile the ship shuddered and swung to every new shift in the fitfully changing wind. Meanwhile she was a creature that had been assaulted and left to die.

I began making a raft, using timber from the carpenter’s store. I worked feverishly, wanting to get away. It never crossed my mind to stay on her, so strong was my fear. Yet I knew that to set off by myself on a raft was more dangerous than staying. On the ship was water, food, some shelter, until it foundered or crashed on a rock. Until then, it would be my safety. But I could not stay. It was as if my having been ignored, left behind, out of all my old comrades, was in itself a kind of curse. I had been branded with my ship.

I worked for many hours and, when daylight went, I lashed a storm lantern to a spar and worked on through the night. I made a raft about twelve by twelve of balsawood poles. To this I lashed a locker full of rations, and a barrel of water. I fitted a sail on a mast in the middle of the raft. I took three pairs of oars, and lashed two spare pairs securely to the timbers of the raft. In the centre of the raft I made a platform of planks about four feet across. And all this time I worked in a deadly terror, a cold sick fear, attacked intermittently by the fits of shaking so that I had to double up as if in cramp, and hold on to a support for fear I’d shake myself to pieces.

By dawn my raft was done. The sky reddened in my face as I stood looking forward with the ship’s movement, so I saw that the ship had already swung about and was heading back in the grip of the Guinea Current to the Cameroons or the Congo. I had to leave it as quickly as I could, and trust that I could still row myself out of this deadly shore-going current and back into the Equatorial stream once again. I put on all the clothes I could find. I let the raft fall into the sea, where it floated like a cork. And with all the sky aflame with sunrise like the inside of a ripening peach, I swarmed down a rope and swung myself on to the raft just as it was about to bob right out of my reach. I reached the raft still dry, though already beginning to be well-damped by spray, and at once began rowing with my back to the sunrise. I rowed as if I were making towards safety and a good dry ship instead of away from one. By the time the sun stood up in a clear summer-hazy sky three or four hand’s-breadths from the horizon, our ship’s sails were a low swarm of white, like a cluster of butterflies settled on the waves, and well behind me, and I was heading West on my real right course. And when I turned my head to look again, it was hard to tell whether I was looking at the white of the sails or at foam on a distant swell. For the sea had changed, to my advantage, and was rolling and rocking, and no longer chopping and changing. And so I rowed all that day, and most of that following night. I rowed and rowed and rowed, until my arms seemed separate from myself, they worked on without my knowing I was ordering them to. Then one day—I think it was three days after I last saw the sails of my ship vanishing East, there was a sudden squally afternoon and my clothes got soaked, and I lost my spare oars. And two days after that, a heavy sea dragged my last oars from me and since then I’ve been trusting myself to the current that curves West and North. And now I have all the time in the world to reflect that I am still engaged in the same journey in the same current, round and round and round, with the West Indies my next landfall, and poor Charlie’s Nancy and her song, just as if I had stayed on the ship with my comrades. And after the women’s song, just as before, around and around, past the Sargasso Sea, and around in the Gulf Stream, and around in the swing of the sea past the coasts of Portugal and Spain, and around and around. But now I am not in a tall ship with sails like white butterflies but on a small raft and alone, around and around. And everything is the same, around and around, with only a slight but worsening change in the shape of my hope: will They, or the Disc, or Crystal Thing, on its next descent, be able to see the speck of my raft on the sea? Will they see me and find the kindness to give me a hail or a shout in reply when I ask them, How may I leave this Current, Friends, set me fair for that other coast, I pray you?

Yes, I’ll hail them, of course, though now a new coldness in my heart tells me of a fear I didn’t have before. I had not thought once, not in all those cycles and circles and circuits, around and around, that they might simply not notice me, as a man might not notice a sleeping kitten or a blind puppy hidden under the fold of his smelly blanket. Why should they notice the speck of a raft on the wide sea? Yet there is nothing for it but to go on, oarless, rudderless, sleepless, exhausted. After all I know it would be a kindness to land on Nancy’s coast and tell her that her Charlie has met up at last with—what? Them, I suppose, though that is all I can tell her, not even how he felt as he became absorbed into the substance of that shining Thing. Will she sing her song to me on my raft, drifting past, will the women line up along the walls of their summer gardens and sing, and shall I then sing back how the time is past for love? And then on I’ll drift to George’s friend and shout to him how George has—what? And where? And then on and on and on, until I see again my Conchita waiting, dressed in the habit of a nun, where all my wandering and ailing has put her.

Man like a great tree

Resents storms.

Arms, knees, hands,

Too stiff for love,

As a tree resists wind.

But slowly wakes,

And in the dark wood

Wind parts the leaves

And the black beast crashes from the cave.

My love, when you say:

‘Here was the storm,

Here was she,

Here the fabulous beast,’

Will you say too

How first we kissed with shut lips, afraid,

And touched our hands, afraid,

As if a bird slept between them?

Will you say:

‘It was the small white bird that snared me’?

And so she sings, each time I pass, around and around, and on and on.

DOCTOR X. Well, how are you this afternoon?

PATIENT. Around and around and around …

DOCTOR X. I’d like you to know that I believe you could snap out of this any time you want.

PATIENT. Around and around and around …

DOCTOR X. Doctor Y. is not here this week-end. I’m going to give you a new drug. We’ll see how that does.

PATIENT. In and out, out and in. In and out, out and in.

DOCTOR X. My name is Doctor X. What is your name?

PATIENT. Around and …

I think he may very well have reverted to age eleven or twelve. That was the age I enjoyed sea stories. He is much worse in my opinion. The fact is, he never acknowledges my presence at all.