Алексей Николаевич Толстой - The Garin Death Ray

From the east a dense black cloud with a leaden lining came rolling towards the yacht. The squalls increased in fury. Giant waves crashed over the vessel's decks. Soon there were no foam-flecked crests, the fury of the wind tore them from the waves and spread them in a blanket of fine spray.

"Go below," said the captain to Zoe and Garin. "In a quarter of an hour we shall be in the centre of the whirlwind and the engines won't save us."

The typhoon struck the Arizona in all its fury. The yacht rolled from side to side until her keel was out of the water, she no longer answered rudder or engines but raced round in rapidly diminishing circles to the centre of the typhoon, the "hole," as the sailor call it.

The centre of the typhoon is a "hole" often as much as three miles in diameter; winds of hurricane strength surge in all directions from this centre in their effort to restore equilibrium on the periphery.

It was into such a maelstrom that the frail shell of the Arizona was carried.

The black clouds were so low that they reached the deck. It was as black as night. The yacht's hull creaked and groaned, the people on deck hung on to any fixed object to save themselves from being blown or washed away. The captain ordered the sailors to lash him to the rail of the bridge.

The Arizona was lifted mountain-high on a wave, rolled over on her side, and slid down into the depths. Suddenly they came into a patch of brilliant sunlight, where there was no wind and transparent green water like molten glass rose in waves as high as a ten-storey house that crashed into each other with a terrific splash as though Neptune, the Lord of the Depths, was slapping his hands on the water in anger.

This was the centre of the typhoon, the most dangerous spot. Here the stream of air drove vertically upwards carrying the fine spray to a height of thirty thousand feet where it spread in the form of cirrus clouds, the heralds of the typhoon.

Everything had been swept from the decks of the Arizona, boats, hyperboloid towers, the funnel, and the bridge together with the captain.

The typhoon, surrounded by darkness and whirling winds, raced on across the ocean carrying with it on the tops of gigantic waves the yacht Arizona.

The engines had burned out, the rudder had been torn off.

"It can't stand it any longer," groaned Zoe.

"It must end some time. Oh, hell!" answered Garin, hoarsely.

They were battered and bleeding from being hurled against the walls and the furniture of the cabin. Garin had a bad cut on his head. Zoe lay on the floor holding on to the leg of the bunk. Together with the two people, suitcases, books that had fallen out of the bookcase, sofa cushions, life-belts, oranges, and broken crockery rolled about the floor.

"Garin, I can't stand it, throw me in the sea."

A terrific jolt tore Zoe from the bunk and sent her rolling. Garin tumbled across her and was brought up against the door.

Then came a crash and rending sounds—the thunder of falling water—human wails. The cabin fell apart and a gigantic torrent of water caught up the two people and hurled them into the seething, cold green depths.

When Garin opened his eyes, some four inches from his nose a tiny hermit crab, that had crawled half-way into a mother-of-pearl shell, stared at him and wiggled its whiskers in astonishment. Garin tried hard to understand: "Yes, I'm alive..." For a long time, however, he had not strength enough to get up. He lay on his side on the sand with his right arm injured. His face racked with pain, he made an effort to pull up his legs and sat up.

Near by stood a palm-tree, the wind bending its slim trunk and rustling its leaves. Garin got to his feet and staggered along the beach. All round, as far as the eye could see, were blue-green sunlit waves that broke with a crash on the low seashore. A few dozen palms spread their wide, fan-like leaves to the wind. Here and there on the beach lay fragments of wood, boxes, rags, ropes—all that was left of the Arizona that had gone down on the outer reef of a coral island together with her crew.

Limping painfully, Garin made his way to the interior of the island where there was high ground covered in low bushes and bright green grass. There Zoe lay on her back with her arms outspread. Garin bent over her, afraid to touch her body lest he should feel the coldness of death. Zoe, however, was alive, her eyelids quivered, her parched lips opened.

There was a tiny lake of rain water on the coral island, it was bitter to the taste but fit to drink. In the shallows there were several kinds of shellfish, polyps and prawns, all of which had once served as food for primitive man. Palm leaves could serve as clothes to keep off the heat of the midday sun.

Two naked people cast up on the naked earth could manage to live somehow. And they began living on that island lost in the watery wastes of the Pacific Ocean. There was not even the hope that some passing ship might see them and take them off.

Garin collected shellfish or caught fish with his shirt in the fresh-water lake. In one of the boxes thrown up from the wreck of the Arizona Zoe found fifty copies of a luxuriously printed edition of projects for the palaces and pavilions of Golden Island. In the same book were the laws and rules of court etiquette "drawn up by Madame Lamolle, ruler of the world. ..."

For days on end Zoe would lie in the shade of their palm-leaf tent turning over the pages of the book created by her insatiable fantasy. The other forty-nine copies, bound in gold-embossed morocco leather, Garin used to build a wind-break.

Garin and Zoe did not talk. Why should they? What was there to talk about? They had been isolated individuals all' their lives and now they had the most perfect isolation.

They lost count of the days and at last stopped trying to count them. When storms raged over the island the tiny lake filled with rain water, but there were long months when the sun burned fiercely in the cloudless sky and then they were forced to drink brackish water...

Maybe Garin and Zoe are to this day still gathering shellfish on that islet. Having eaten her fill Zoe sits down to turn the pages of the book with plans of marvellous palaces, where her beautiful statue stands amidst marble columns and gorgeous flower-beds while Garin, his nose buried in the sand, his back covered with his rotting jacket, relives the past in his dreams.

-- END --