The five whites on board lived amidships, isorecurved, and shining low in the west, was like a slender shavlated from the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck ing thrown up from a bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended its perfect level murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propel er turned of people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme days, stil , hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds as if fal ing into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the of water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her enclosed within their straight and diverging ridges a few white steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immenswirls of foam bursting in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few sity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated the surwithout pity. face of the sea for an instant after the passage of the ship, The nights descended on her like a benediction. subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular stil ness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hul remaining everlastingly in its centre. Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the silent 15

Lord Jim

aspect of nature like the certitude of fostering love upon the had made for their families shelters with heavy boxes and placid tenderness of a mother’s face. Below the roof of awdusty mats; the poor reposed side by side with al they had nings, surrendered to the wisdom of white men and to their on earth tied up in a rag under their heads; the lone old men courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and the iron slept, with drawn-up legs, upon their prayer-carpets, with shel of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting faith slept their hands over their ears and one elbow on each side of the on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in al face; a father, his shoulders up and his knees under his forethe dark corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled in soiled head, dozed dejectedly by a boy who slept on his back with rags, with their heads resting on smal bundles, with their tousled hair and one arm commandingly extended; a woman faces pressed to bent forearms: the men, the women, the covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with a piece of white children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty—

sheeting, had a naked child in the hol ow of each arm; the al equal before sleep, death’s sheeting, had a naked child in the hol ow of each arm; the al equal before sleep, death’s brother. Arab’s belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound of A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the broken outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great ship, passed steadily through the long gloom between the confusion of vague forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass high bulwarks, swept over the rows of prone bodies; a few pots, the foot-rest of a deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight dim flames in globe-lamps were hung short here and there scabbard of an old sword leaning against a heap of pil ows, under the ridge-poles, and in the blurred circles of light the spout of a tin coffee-pot. The patent log on the taffrail thrown down and trembling slightly to the unceasing vibraperiodical y rang a single tinkling stroke for every mile tration of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed eyeversed on an errand of faith. Above the mass of sleepers a lids, a dark hand with silver rings, a meagre limb draped in a faint and patient sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a torn covering, a head bent back, a naked foot, a throat bared troubled dream; and short metal ic clangs bursting out sudand stretched as if offering itself to the knife. The wel -to-do denly in the depths of the ship, the harsh scrape of a shovel, 16

Joseph Conrad

the violent slam of a furnace-door, exploded brutal y, as if stretch himself til his joints cracked, with a leisurely twist of the men handling the mysterious things below had their the body, in the very excess of wel -being; and, as if made breasts ful of fierce anger: while the slim high hul of the audacious by the invincible aspect of the peace, he felt he steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end of his masts, cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters days. From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged under the inaccessible serenity of the sky. out with four drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence the steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the were loud to his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: depths of the sea presented a shiny surface under the light of his eyes, roaming about the line of the horizon, seemed to a bul ’s-eye lamp lashed to a stanchion, a surface as level and gaze hungrily into the unattainable, and did not see the smooth as the glimmering surface of the waters. Paral el rulshadow of the coming event. The only shadow on the sea ers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the ship’s position at was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from the last noon was marked with a smal black cross, and the straight funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dispencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course of solving in the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, the ship—the path of souls towards the holy place, the promsteered, one on each side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone ise of salvation, the reward of eternal life—while the pencil fragmentarily in the oval of light thrown out by the binwith its sharp end touching the Somali coast lay round and nacle. Now and then a hand, with black fingers alternately stil like a naked ship’s spar floating in the pool of a sheltered letting go and catching hold of revolving spokes, appeared dock. ‘How steady she goes,’ thought Jim with wonder, with in the il umined part; the links of wheel-chains ground heavily something like gratitude for this high peace of sea and sky. in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would glance at the comAt such times his thoughts would be ful of valorous deeds: pass, would glance around the unattainable horizon, would he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary 17

Lord Jim

achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as vagueness, they passed before him with an heroic tread; they though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; the hinge of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was ful of and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak deference; but the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen of the wake drawn as straight by the ship’s keel upon the sea for the first time in a revealing moment, fixed itself in his as the black line drawn by the pencil upon the chart.