Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

As soon as he was in the cabin, and even while Killick and Padeen were taking away his wet clothes and bringing dry, even while a pot of coffee was being brewed, Stephen examined Jack Aubrey's wounds: the leg he passed - an ugly scar, no more -and the eye he gazed at without much comment, only saying that he would need a better light. Then, as they sat down to their fragrant cup, he went on, 'Before I ask you how the ship sails along, how you have done, and how all our people are, will I tell you why I came out to meet you in this precipitate and I might almost say temerarious manner?'

'If you please.'

'I had reasons for not wishing to call any official attention to the Surprise, but the chief cause for my haste was that I have some information that you might wish to act upon without the loss of a minute.'

'Oh, indeed?' cried Jack, his good eye lighting with its old predatory gleam.

'As I was leaving Peru because of the unjustified suspicions of a military man who misunderstood my examination of his wife -a deeply stupid but very powerful and bloody-minded military man - ' This was an explanation for some of Stephen's more bizarre movements that both of them understood perfectly: it was calculated, and very well calculated, to satisfy the minds of the seamen, who for a great while had looked upon the Doctor's licentious capers ashore with an indulgent comprehension. ' - a confidential friend came to see me by night, and knowing that I belonged to a British privateer he gave me an account of three American China ships sailing in company from Boston. This document he gave me as a parting present, together with details of their insurance, their ports of call and their estimated progress, in the hope that we might be able to intercept them. At that time and for some hundreds of miles after I paid no great attention to the matter, knowing the uncertainty of sea-voyages: and indeed of my own, by land. Yet no sooner had I reached Valparaiso than I received word from my friend's correspondent in the Argentine: the ships had cleared from Buenos Aires on Candlemas Day; they meant to traverse the Straits le Maire and to carry on, skirting south of Diego Ramirez by the end of the present month and then heading north-east for Canton. I looked at the Abbot's map, and it occurred to me that by spreading every sail and straining every nerve we might get there in time.'

'So we might,' said Jack, after a moment's calculation; and he left the cabin. Returning he cried, 'Oh Stephen, what are we to do with the balsa and all those innumerable boxes, chests and vile bundles that fill it to what would be the gunwale of a Christian boat?'

'Pray let them be brought aboard with the utmost care. As for the boat itself, let it be tossed off with a round turn, if you please, the cantankerous beast, though it is the clear loss of half a crown and eighteen pence for the sail, almost new. It came from the same yard and the same model as that which goes out on Thursdays for the monastery's fish, and the Abbot assured me that one had but to pull a given rope, the escota, towards the back to make it go faster: but this was not the case. Though possibly I may have pulled the wrong rope. There were so many boxes on the floor... indeed, there was so little room for me that I almost fell into the sea, at times.'

'Could you not have tossed the worst overboard?'

'The kind almoner had tied them down so tight, and the knots were wet; and in any case the worst, which sat upon three several ropes, held my grebe, my flightless Titicaca grebe. You would never have expected me to throw away a flightless grebe, for all love? But, however, the monks had promised to pray for me, and with no more than moderate skill I survived.'

Killick's insistent cough could be heard at the door, then his knock: 'Which your guests have arrived, sir,' he said; but his severity turned to an affectionate gap-toothed leer as his eyes wandered to gaze upon Dr Maturin.

'Could you possibly manage dinner, Stephen?' asked Jack.

'Any dinner at all,' said Stephen with great conviction: he was fresh from a monastery unusually ascetic at all times and now deep in a penitential fast; and in an undertone he added, 'Even one of those infernal cavies.'

Dinner wound on from fresh anchovies, still present in their countless millions, to steak of tunny, to a tolerable sea-pie, and so to an expected but still heartily welcome spotted dog. Stephen ate in wolfish silence until the very end of the sea-pie; then, being among old friends eager to hear, he leant back, loosened his waist-band, and told them something of his botanizing and naturalizing journey south from Lima to Arica, where he took ship for Valparaiso. 'But to reach Arica,' he said, 'we had to cross a very high pass, the Huechopillan, at more than sixteen thousand feet, and there my friend and I and alas a llama were caught in what in those parts they call a viento blanco and we should have perished if my friend Eduardo had not found a little small shelter in the rock. Indeed, the poor llama did die, and I was mortally frostbitten.'

'Was it very painful, Doctor?' asked Pullings, looking grave.

'Not at all, at all, until the feeling began to return. And even then the whole lesion was less severe than I had expected. At one time I thought to have lost my leg below the knee, but in the event it was no more than a couple of unimportant toes. For you are to consider,' he observed, addressing his words to Reade, 'that your foot bases its impulse and equilibrium on the great toe and the least: the loss of either is a sad state of affairs entirely, but with the two one does very well. The ostrich has but two the whole length of her life, and yet she outruns the wind.'

'Certainly, sir,' said Reade, bowing.

'Yet though the leg was spared, I could not well travel; above all after I had removed the peccant members.'

'How did you do that, sir?' asked Reade, unwilling to hear though eager to be told.

'Why, with a chisel, as soon as we came down to the village. They could not be left to mortify, with gangrene spreading, the grief and the sorrow. But for a while I was reduced to immobility; and that was where my noble friend Eduardo showed his magnanimity. He caused a framework to be made, fitting over a man's chest fore and aft - fore and aft,' he repeated with a certain satisfaction, 'and allowing me to be carried on his shoulders or somewhat lower, sitting at my ease and facing backwards. They call it an Inca chair; and in this Inca chair I was carried over those terrible Inca bridges that span stupendous chasms - hanging bridges that sway - and I was always carried by fresh and powerful Indians recruited by my friend an Indian himself and a descendant of the Incas too. He generally travelled by my chair, except when the path led along the rocky side of a precipice, which it did far, far too often, where there was no room for two abreast, and a great deal did he tell me about the ancient empire of Peru and the magnificence of its rulers. Surely,' he said, breaking off to listen to the run of the water along the ship's side and the general voice of taut rigging, masts, blocks, sails and yards, 'surely we are going very fast?"

'About eight knots, I believe, sir,' said Pullings, filling Stephen's glass. 'Pray tell us about the magnificence of Peru.'

'Well, if gold is magnificent, and sure there is something imperial about gold in the mass, then Eduardo's account of Huayna Capac, the Great Inca, and his chain will please you. It was made when the birth of his son Huascar was to be celebrated in a ceremony at which the court went through the motions of a formal dance, joining hands, making a circle and moving two steps forward, then one back, thus drawing closer and closer until they were at a proper distance for making their obeisance. The Inca however disapproved of this holding of hands; he thought it too familiar, quite improper, and he gave orders for a chain to be made, a chain which the dancers could hold, thus keeping their formation but avoiding direct physical contact, which might lead to irregularities. Naturally the chain was made of gold. The links were as thick as a man's wrist; the length twice that of the great square at Cuzco, which makes upwards of seven hundred feet; and its weight was such that two hundred Indians could only just lift it from the ground.'