第45章

'I am very glad I am here, for my machines are my own children, and Ilook on their little failings with a parent's eye, and lead them into the path of duty with gentleness and firmness. I am naturally in good spirits, but keep very quiet, for misfortunes may arise at any instant;moreover, to-morrow my paying-out apparatus will be wanted should all go well, and that will be another nervous operation. Fifteen miles are safely in, but no one knows better than I do that nothing is done till all is done.'

JUNE 11.--'It would amuse you to see how cool (in head) and jolly everybody is. A testy word now and then shows the nerves are strained a little, but every one laughs and makes his little jokes as if it were all in fun....I enjoy it very much.'

JUNE 13, SUNDAY.--'It now (at 10.30) blows a pretty stiff gale, and the sea has also risen, and the Elba's bows rise and fall about nine feet.

We make twelve pitches to the minute, and the poor cable must feel very sea-sick by this time. We are quite unable to do anything, and continue riding at anchor in one thousand fathoms, the engines going constantly, so as to keep the ship's bows close up to the cable, which by this means hangs nearly vertical, and sustains no strain but that caused by its own weight and the pitching of the vessel. We were all up at four, but the weather entirely forbade work for to-day; so some went to bed, and most lay down, making up our lee-way, as we nautically term our loss of sleep. I must say Liddell is a fine fellow, and keeps his patience and his temper wonderfully; and yet how he does fret and fume about trifles at home!'

JUNE 16.--'By some odd chance a TIMES of June 7 has found its way on board through the agency of a wretched old peasant who watches the end of the line here. A long account of breakages in the Atlantic trial trip. To-night we grapple for the heavy cable, eight tons to the mile.

I long to have a tug at him; he may puzzle me; and though misfortunes, or rather difficulties, are a bore at the time, life, when working with cables, is tame without them.--2 p.m. Hurrah! he is hooked--the big fellow--almost at the first cast. He hangs under our bows, looking so huge and imposing that I could find it in my heart to be afraid of him.'

JUNE 17.--'We went to a little bay called Chia, where a fresh-water stream falls into the sea, and took in water. This is rather a long operation, so I went up the valley with Mr. Liddell. The coast here consists of rocky mountains 800 to 1000 feet high, covered with shrubs of a brilliant green. On landing, our first amusement was watching the hundreds of large fish who lazily swam in shoals about the river. The big canes on the further side hold numberless tortoises, we are told, but see none, for just now they prefer taking a siesta. A little further on, and what is this with large pink flowers in such abundance?--the oleander in full flower! At first I fear to pluck them, thinking they must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green, set there in a little valley, whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours, such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor-vitae, and many other evergreens, whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all deep and brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse on the baked deposit at the foot of these large crags. One or two half-savage herdsmen in sheepskin kilts, etc., ask for cigars;partridges whirr up on either side of us; pigeons coo and nightingales sing amongst the blooming oleander. We get six sheep, and many fowls too, from the priest of the small village, and then run back to Spartivento and make preparations for the morning.'

JUNE 18.--'The short length (of the big-cable) we have picked up was covered at places with beautiful sprays of coral, twisted and twined with shells of those small fairy animals we saw in the aquarium at home.

Poor little things! they died at once, with their little bells and delicate bright tints.'

JUNE 19.--'Hour after hour I stand on the fore-castle-head picking off little specimens of polypi and coral, or lie on the saloon deck reading back numbers of the TIMES, till something hitches, and then all is hurly-burly once more. There are awnings all along the ship, and a most ancient and fish-like smell (from the decaying polypi) beneath.'

JUNE 22.--'Yesterday the cable was often a lovely sight, coming out of the water one large incrustation of delicate net-like corals and long white curling shells. No portion of the dirty black wire was visible;instead we had a garland of soft pink, with little scarlet sprays and white enamel intermixed. All was fragile, however, and could hardly be secured in safety; and inexorable iron crushed the tender leaves to atoms.'

JUNE 24.--'The whole day spent in dredging, without success. This operation consists in allowing the ship to drift slowly across the line where you expect the cable to be, while at the end of a long rope, fast either to the bow or stern, a grapnel drags along the ground. The grapnel is a small anchor, made like four pot-hooks tied back to back.

When the rope gets taut the ship is stopped and the grapnel hauled up to the surface in the hopes of finding the cable on its prongs. I am much discontented with myself for idly lounging about and reading WESTWARDHO! for the second time instead of taking to electricity or picking up nautical information.'

During the latter part of the work much of the cable was found to be looped and twisted into 'kinks' from having been so slackly laid, and two immense tangled skeins were raised on board, one by means of the mast-head and fore-yard tackle. Photographs of this ravelled cable were for a long time exhibited as a curiosity in the windows of Messrs.

Newall & Co's. shop in the Strand, where we remember to have seen them.