The Death Ship by Traven B

Author:Traven, B [Traven, B]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

31

THE LAST WORD on Stanislav on leaving me had been that it would cost life-blood if grate-bars fell out. He had meant one bar. Now six had dropped.

I soon learned that to put them back into their berth not only cost blood, not alone flesh torn off, large pieces of skin scorched, but cost bleeding sperm, shredded tendons, and painfully twisted entrails. The joints of all limbs cracked like broken wood. The marrow in one’s bones appeared to flow out like hot lava. While we worked like Egyptian slaves to bring the bars in again, the steam was falling and falling. Ahead of this hard work we saw already, crawling upon us, the hard work that was to follow to bring the steam up again to its full pressure. The longer we had to work with the bars, the lower fell the steam. I may justly say, though, that since that night, my first night with grate-bars in the ash-pit, I feel myself standing above the gods. I am free. Unbound. I may do now whatever I wish. I may curse the gods. They cannot punish me any more. No human law, no divine commandments, can any longer influence my doings, because no longer can I be damned. Hell is now paradise. However horrible hell may be, it cannot frighten me any more. There is nothing under heaven or in hell that can be compared with putting back fallen-out grate-bars on the Yorikke.

To know what it meant makes anyone understand that the swearing of my fireman was not swearing at all, but in fact only a sweet love-song. His language, rich as it was, could not meet the situation. No language, not even the Chinese, could possibly express in words the feeling any sane person simply had to have when confronted with a problem like setting in dropped grate-bars in the stoke-hold of the Yorikke.

Paradise, whatever it may mean, was for the black gang of the Yorikke not the opposite of hell, but was simply freedom from the obligation to set in their place dropped grate-bars.

The skipper never came into the stoke-hold; neither did the two mates. I have never heard that one of them ever even went below to the engine-hold. They even avoided passing too closely to the hatchway that led below to the stoke-hold.

The engineers dared enter the stoke-hold only when the Yorikke was snugly lying in port and the black gang was wiping and greasing and doing odd jobs about the boilers and the engine. Even then the engineers were soft-footed with the blacks. The firemen and the drags on the Yorikke were always, even in port, in a state of exaggerated anger, ready any second to throw at the engineer a hammer or a wrench. Prison, hangman, or the like did not mean a thing to any of the blacks. It would have been only liberation from the grate-bars of the Yorikke.

The engine was set up in a hold which was so small that the engineer on watch had to move about carefully to avoid being caught by the engine.

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