1492 - Mary Johnston (best novels to read in english txt) 📗

bowsprit Saint Elmo’s lights.

Our mariners shouted, “Safe—safe! Saint Elmo!”

Suddenly, over all the sky, were stars shining. The Admiral raised his great voice. “Sing, all of us!

‘Stella Maris— Sancta Maria!’ “

 

With the morning the Santa Clara and the San Juan, beaten about, some injury done, but alive! And the coast of Cuba, nearer, nearer, tall and blue—and at last very tall and green and gold.

Off Cuba and still off Cuba, the southern coast now, as against the northern that once we tried for a while. Sail and come to land, stay a bit, and shake out sails once more!

Wherever we tarried we found peaceable if vastly excited Indians. But still naked, but still unwise as to gold and spices, traders and markets. Cambalu, Quinsai and Zaiton of the marble bridges!

” `Somewhere,’ saith Messer Marco, `in part the country is savage, filled with mountains, and here come few strangers, for the king will not have them, in order that his treasures and certain matters of his kingdom come not into the world’s knowledge.’ And again he saith, `The folk here are naked.’—What wonder then,” said the Admiral, “that we find these things! Yea, I feel surprised at the incessancy, but I check myself and think, how vast is Asia, and what variousness must needs be!”

But we moved in a cloud of differences, and while on the one hand this world was growing familiar, on the other the sense increased. “How vast indeed must be Asia, if all this and yet we come not—and now it is going on two years—to any clear hint of other than this!”

He himself, the Admiral, began to feel this strangeness. Or rather, he had long felt it and fought the feeling, but now strongly it came creeping over.

We were among the hugest number of small islands. Starboard loomed, until it was lost in the farness, that coast that we were following, but the three ships were in a half-land, half-water world. We wandered in this labyrinth, keeping with difficulty our way, so crooked and narrow the channels, so many the sandbars. From deck it minded me of that sea of weed we met in the first passage.

Waves of fragrance struck us. “Ha!” cried the Admiral. “Can you not smell cinnamon, spikenard, nutmeg, cloves and galingal?” His faith was so strong that we did smell. From one of these islands, the Cordera lying at anchor and a boat going ashore, we took a number of pigeons. So unafraid were these birds that our men approached them easily and beat them down with a pike. We had them for supper, and when their crops were opened, the cook found and brought to the Admiral a number of brown seeds. The Admiral dropped them into clear water, then smelled and tasted. “Cloves? Are they not cloves?” He gave to Juan de la Cosa and to me who also tasted and thought they might be cloves. But we did not find their tree, and we saw no signs of ever a merchant of Cathay or Mangi or Ind.

Christopherus Columbus leaned upon the rail of the Cordera. In this islet world we lay at anchor for the night. “Do you know what it is,” he asked, “to have a word color the whole day long?” He glanced around, but none was very near. “My Word to-day is magic. I’d not give it to any but you, and I drop my voice in saying it. I’ll sail on through magic and against magic, for I have Help from Above! But I’ll not lay a fearsome word among those who are not so accorded! All say India hath high magic, and the Grand Khan takes from that country his astrologers and sorcerers. I have read that at Shandu, if there be long raining, they will mount a tower by the palace and wave it back, so that the falling rain makes but a pleasant wall around the king’s fair garden that itself rests in sunshine. Also that without touching them they cause the golden flagons to fill with red wine and to move through air, with no hand upon them, to the king’s table. That was long ago. We have had no news of them of late. They may do now more marvelous, vaster things.”

“And the moral?”

“I said, `They do them there.’ Perhaps this is there.”

“I take you!” I said and half-laughed. “We may be in Cathay all this while, under the golden roofs, with the bells strung from the eaves. Yonder line of cranes standing in the shallow water, watching us, may, God wot, be tall magicians in white linen and scarlet silk!”

He crossed himself. The cranes had lifted themselves and flown away. “If they heard—”

“Are you in earnest?”

He put his hands over his eyes. “Sometimes I think it may be fact, sometimes not! Sorcery is a fact, and who knows how far it may go? At times my brain is like to crack, I have so cudgeled it!”

That he cudgeled it was true, and though his brain never cracked and to the end was the best brain in a hundred, yet from this time forth I began to mark in him an unearthliness.

These islands we named the Queen’s Gardens, and escaping from them came again to clean coast. On we went for two days, and this part of Cuba had many villages, at sea edge or a little from the water, and all men and women were friendly and brought us gifts.

I remember a moonlight night. All were aboard the Cordera, the Santa Clara and the San Juan, for we meant to sail at dawn. We had left a village yet dancing and feasting. The night was a miracle of silver. Again I stood beside Christopherus Columbus; from land streamed their singing and their thin, drumming and clashing music. At hand it is rather harsh than sweet, but distance sweetened it.

“What will be here in the future—if there are not already here, after your notion, great cities and bridges and shipping, and only our eyes holden and our hands and steps made harmless? Or nearly harmless, for we have slain some Indians!”

He had made a gesture of deprecation. “Ah, that, I hardly doubt, was my fancy! But in the future I see them, your cities!”

“Do you see them, from San Salvador onward and everywhere, —Spanish cities?”

“Necessarily—seeing that the Holy Father hath given the whole of the land to Spain.” He looked at the moon that was so huge and bright, and listened to the savage music. “If we go far enough—walking afar—who knoweth what we shall find?” He stood motionless. “I do not know. It is in God’s hands!”

“Do you see,” I asked, “a great statue of yourself?”

“Yes, I see that.”

The moon shone so brightly it was marvel. Land breeze brought perfume from the enormous forest. “It is too fair to sleep!” said the Admiral. “I will sit here and think.”

He slept little at any time. His days were filled with action. Never was any who had more business to attend to! Yet he was of those to whom solitude is as air,—imperiously a necessity. Into it he plunged through every crack and cranny among events. He knew how to use the space in which swim events. But beside this he must make for himself wide holdings, and when he could not get them by day he took from night.

We came again to a multitude of islets like to the Queen’s Gardens. And these were set in a strange churned and curdled sea, as white as milk. Making through it as best we might, we passed from that silverness and broken land into a great bay or gulf, so deep that we might hardly find bottom, and here we anchored close to a long point of Cuba covered thick with palms.

We went ashore for water and fruit. Solitary—neither man nor woman! We found tracks upon the sand that some among us would have it were made by griffons. One of our men had the thought that he might procure some large bird for the Admiral’s table. Taking a crossbow he passed alone through the palms into the deeper wood. He was gone an hour, and when he returned it was in haste, with a chalk face and great eyes. I was seated in the boat with the master of the Cordera and heard his tale. He had found what he thought a natural aisle of the forest and had stolen down it, looking keenly for pigeon or larger bird. A tree with drooping branches stood across the aisle, he said. He went around the trunk, which was a great one, and it was as though he had turned into the nave of the cathedral. There was space, but trees like pillars on either side, and at the end three great trees covered to the tops with vine and purple grapes. And here he saw before him, under the greatest tree, a man in a long white gown like a White Friar. The sight halted him, turned him, he averred, to stone. Two more men in white dresses but shorter than that of the first, came from among the trees and he saw behind these a number in like clothing. He could not tell, now he thought of it, if they were carrying lances or palms. We had looked so long for clothed folk that it was the white clothes he thought of. The same with their faces— he could not tell about them—he thought they were fair. Suddenly, it seemed, Pan had fallen upon him and put him forth in terror. He had turned and raced through the forest, here to the sea. He did not think the white-clad men had seen him.

We took him to the Admiral who listened, then brought his hands together. “Hath it not—hath it not, I ask you —sound of Prester John?”

With the dawn he had men ashore, and there he went himself, with him Juan de la Cosa and Juan Lepe. The crossbowman—it was Felipe Garcia—showed the way. We found indeed the forest aisle and nave, and the three trees and the purple grapes, a vast vine with heavy clusters, but we found no men and no sign of men.

The Admiral was not discouraged. “If he truly saw then, and I believe he did, then are they somewhere—”

We beat all the neighborhood. Solitary, solitary! He divided the most determined of us—so many from each ship—into two bands and sent in two directions. We were to search, if necessary, through ten leagues. We went, but returned empty of news of clothed men. We found desolate forest, and behind that a vast, matted, low growth, impenetrable and extending far away. At last we determined that Felipe Garcia had seen white cranes. Unless it were magic—

We sailed on and we sailed on. The Cordera, the Santa Clara and the San Juan were in bad case, hurt in that storm between Jamaica and Cuba, and wayworn since in those sandy seas, among those myriad islets. Our seamen and our shipmasters now loudly wished return to Isabella. He pushed us farther on and farther on, and still we did not come to anything beyond those things we had already reached, nor did we come either to any end of Cuba. And what was going on in Hispaniola—in Isabella? We had sailed in April and now it was July.

It became evident to him at last that he must turn. The Viceroy and the Admiral warred in him, had long warred and would war. Better for him had he never insisted upon viceroyship! Then, single-minded, he might have discovered to the end of his days.

We turned, the Cordera, the