happened. It was realler than I am.
I was very thirsty. It was worse than the hunger. You’d have thought with a wet ship like that, I’d have been all right, but it was all salt, apart from the fog. And the salt I’d swallowed getting on land made me thirstier than before. I don’t know how the Flying Dutchman managed. The only drink they had was the fire-water he had choked me with, and I think they saved that for using on people they’d fished out of the sea.
But as soon as I got high enough up the rocks and far enough inland not to hear nothing but sea, I could hear water trickling. You know that hollow pouring sound a little stream makes coming down through rocks. I heard that, and it made my mouth dry up and go thick. I was so thirsty I could have cried. I set out scrambling and slithering through the fog towards the noise.
That white wet fog confused everything. I think, if I hadn’t been so thirsty, I’d never have found it. The rocks were terrible – a total jumble. They were all hard, hard pinkish granite, so hard that nothing grew on it, and so wet that I was always slithering on to my face. That hurt at least as much as scraping up the side of the Flying Dutchman’s ship. You know how granite seems to be made of millions of grains, pink and black and grey and white – well, every one of those grains scratched me separately, I swear.
After a while, I had got quite high up somewhere, and the lovely hollow pouring sound was coming from quite near, over to the right. I slithered over that way and had to stop short. There was a huge split in the granite there, and a great deep hole, and I could hear the pouring coming from the other side of the split.
“Unprintable things!” I said – only I didn’t say that. I really said them. But I hate to be beat. You know that by now. I went down into the hole and then climbed up the other side. I don’t know how I did it. When I dragged myself out the other side, my arms felt like bits of string and wouldn’t answer when I tried to bunch my fists up, and my legs were not much better. I was covered with scratches too. I must have been a sight.
The pouring was really near now, from the other side of a lump of crag. I crawled my way round it. It was a great rock sticking up at the top of the hill, and there was a ledge on the other side about eight feet wide, if that. And there I had to stop short again, because there was a man chained to the crag, between me and the water.
He looked to be dead or dying. He was sort of collapsed back on the rock with his eyes shut. His face was tipped back from me – I was still crouching down, weak as a kitten – but I could see his face was near on as hollow as the Flying Dutchman’s, and it looked worse, because this man hadn’t a beard, only reddish stubble. His hair was reddish too, but it was soaking wet with him being out in the fog and the rain like this, and you could hardly tell it from the granite. His clothes, such as there was left of them, were soaking too, of course, greyish and fluttering in strips in the sneaking chilly wind there was up there. I could see a lot of his skin. It was white, corpse white, and it shone out against the rock and fog almost as if it were luminous.
The chains he was locked up in – they were luminous. They were really queer. They shone. They were almost transparent, like glass, but whiter and stonier-seeming. A big link of the chain between his right arm and leg was lying on the rock just in front of me. I could see the grains of rock magnified through it, pink and black and grey and white, bigger through the middle of the link than at the edges, and with a milky look. It was like looking through a teardrop.
He didn’t move. My strength came back a little, and I couldn’t see him harming me in that state, so I got up and started to edge my way along the ledge in front of him to get at the water. When I was standing up, I was surprised to find how big he was. He was about half as big again as an ordinary man. And he wasn’t quite dead. The white skin was up in goose pimples all over him, with little shivers chasing across it. That was why I said what I did about Art, earlier on. He must have been frozen. But I could tell he was pretty far gone. He had a serious wound round on his left side, a bit below his heart. I hadn’t seen it till then, and I didn’t want to look at it when I did see it. It was a real mess, gaping and bleeding, with bits of his torn shirt fluttering across it and getting mixed up in it. No wonder he seemed to be dying.
I was almost right in front of him, trying not to look, when he moved his head and looked at me. “Be careful not to touch the chains,” he said.
I jumped, and stared up at him. He didn’t speak at all like someone who was dying. There was a bit of a shiver caught at him as he said it, but that was not surprising, considering how cold he must have been. But his voice was quite strong and he was looking at me like someone with sense. “Why mustn’t I touch them?” I said.
“Because they’re made to act like the Bounds,” he said. “You won’t get your drink if you do touch them.”
I shuffled backwards an inch or so. I didn’t dare go further, for fear of falling off the ledge. “What are they made of?” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”
“Adamant,” he said.
That is a sort of diamond – adamant – the hardest thing there is. Granite must be almost the next hardest. I could see the big transparent staples driven into the granite on either side of him, holding him spread out. “You must be awfully strong, if it takes that to hold you,” I said.
He sort of smiled. “Yes. But there was meant to be no mistake.”
It looked that way to me too. I couldn’t think why he was so much alive. “You’re not a Homeward Bounder, are you?” I asked doubtfully.
“No,” he said.
I went on staring at him, trying to keep from looking at that wound of his, and watching him shiver. I was cold myself, but then I could move about to keep warm. He was chained so that he could hardly move a foot in any direction. And all the while I stared, that water ran and poured, away to one side, with a long hollow poppling which had me licking my lips. And he was chained so he could hear it and not get to it.
“Are you thirsty?” I said. “Like me to get you a drink?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d welcome a drink.”
“I’ll have to get it in my hands,” I said. “I wish I’d got something to hold it in.”
I went edging and shuffling round him, keeping well away from the chains. I could see the stream by then, pouring down a groove in the rock, just beyond the reddish spiked thing that all the chains were hooked into. The ledge got narrower there. I was thinking that it was going to be difficult to climb over that spike on the slippery rock without touching a chain, when I realised what the spike was. I went close and leant over it to make sure. Yes it was. An anchor. One spoke was buried deep in the granite and all of it was orange wet rust, but there was no mistaking it. And all the chains led through the ring on the end of the shank.
I spun round so fast then that I never knew how I missed the chains. “They did this to you!” I said to him. “How did They do it? Why?”
He was turned to look at me. I could see he was thinking about water more than anything. I went climbing over the anchor to show him I hadn’t forgotten. “Yes, it was They,” he said.
I put my hands under the
