Weeping with an Ancient God

Chapter 1

"Yet a sailor's life is at best a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous." -- Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast 

Chapter 1

July 13, 1842 

Dripping. 

It is the dripping and the insensible voices which bring him up from the depths. Darkness and heat. He tries to feel the pitch of the sea, now as familiar as the expansion of his lungs, but there is no movement. Becalmed, he thinks. He cautiously sniffs the air, anticipating the stench of boiling fat. But there is a sweetness instead: thick, oily. 

He remembers. 

Panic begins to surge in him, like the ocean's surf, like the fever he has had . . . how many days? The number will not come to him. He wants to rise, to step over the darkshape bodies, to run outside, past the dripping cataract to the starlit ocean. 

It is all impossible. He heard their cannibal voices; at least two are awake. And Toby? He reaches out and touches the coarse cloth of Toby's shirt and he hears the familiar sleep breathing of his friend. Like so many nights in the belly of the Acushnet. The dripping and Toby's breathing take him back for a moment: the roll of the ocean, the stinking blubber, the footfalls above on deck . . . and something else. 

Toby moves in his sleep--perhaps he is fitful too--and Toby's hand brushes against his side. He lightly takes hold of Toby's arm, feels the hairs at the wristbone, the slow steady pulse. The rhythm of Toby's blood calms him. He tries to turn toward his friend, to watch his dark outline, but the pain in his leg will not allow it. Shards of agony vibrate through his leg, which has become like wood or stone. He tries to imagine dragging the swollen limb the many miles to the sea. It is impossible. 

The cataract and Toby's pulse become synchronous, and Melvill achieves a kind of sleep. 

It is daytime when he realizes the old man is talking to him. Melvill is the only one still lying on the floor of the hut, which is rectangular with a bamboo and thatched ceiling about fifteen feet high at its centered apex. Along the walls are baskets, earthen pots, woven mats. Toby is gone. It is unsettling again to see the fading ink on the old man's almost naked body: the bluegreen vines twisting along his still-muscular arms, the disintegrating bluegreen triangle on his forehead, the sinking ovals on his chest that make his nipples dark bull's-eyes. The old man repeats himself for perhaps the fourth time. Melvill understands only two words. "Hermes," the way they have decided to pronounce his name; and "Korykory," the young cannibal who seems to reside in the old man's hut. 

Melvill tries to stand but his leg provides him no leverage. He believes he may topple when he feels Korykory lift him to a standing position on his good leg then deftly turn and hoist him onto his back. Melvill is half a head taller and his bare toes nearly drag on the floor. Korykory's wavy brown hair is shaved in arcs over each ear and tapers to a point between his shoulder blades, where the shapes of longwinged birds in flight have been tattooed. 

Outside Korykory lifts him higher on his back. Men and women are calmly busy with the demands of the new day. All these many months around the islands of the south Pacific and the stark nakedness of the natives still surprises him. It seems the Typees prefer a short white cloth which hangs from their waist, or even more simply broad waxy leaves. Korykory carries him past the cataract to where the stream is calmer. Melvill is relieved to see Toby floating on his back in the clear water, his bare white chest bobbing like a seaduck among the other dark-skinned bathers. Melvill wants to call out to Toby but he does not want to do anything to provoke the Typees. Half a dozen somber warriors, with long spears and sharktooth necklaces, kneel on either side of the stream.