Typhoon eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 116 pages of information about Typhoon.

Typhoon eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 116 pages of information about Typhoon.

The coming of the white devils was a terror.  Had they come to kill?  The individuals torn out of the ruck became very limp in the seamen’s hands:  some, dragged aside by the heels, were passive, like dead bodies, with open, fixed eyes.  Here and there a coolie would fall on his knees as if begging for mercy; several, whom the excess of fear made unruly, were hit with hard fists between the eyes, and cowered; while those who were hurt submitted to rough handling, blinking rapidly without a plaint.  Faces streamed with blood; there were raw places on the shaven heads, scratches, bruises, torn wounds, gashes.  The broken porcelain out of the chests was mostly responsible for the latter.  Here and there a Chinaman, wild-eyed, with his tail unplaited, nursed a bleeding sole.

They had been ranged closely, after having been shaken into submission, cuffed a little to allay excitement, addressed in gruff words of encouragement that sounded like promises of evil.  They sat on the deck in ghastly, drooping rows, and at the end the carpenter, with two hands to help him, moved busily from place to place, setting taut and hitching the life-lines.  The boatswain, with one leg and one arm embracing a stanchion, struggled with a lamp pressed to his breast, trying to get a light, and growling all the time like an industrious gorilla.  The figures of seamen stooped repeatedly, with the movements of gleaners, and everything was being flung into the bunker:  clothing, smashed wood, broken china, and the dollars, too, gathered up in men’s jackets.  Now and then a sailor would stagger towards the doorway with his arms full of rubbish; and dolorous, slanting eyes followed his movements.

With every roll of the ship the long rows of sitting Celestials would sway forward brokenly, and her headlong dives knocked together the line of shaven polls from end to end.  When the wash of water rolling on the deck died away for a moment, it seemed to Jukes, yet quivering from his exertions, that in his mad struggle down there he had overcome the wind somehow:  that a silence had fallen upon the ship, a silence in which the sea struck thunderously at her sides.

Everything had been cleared out of the ’tween-deck—­all the wreckage, as the men said.  They stood erect and tottering above the level of heads and drooping shoulders.  Here and there a coolie sobbed for his breath.  Where the high light fell, Jukes could see the salient ribs of one, the yellow, wistful face of another; bowed necks; or would meet a dull stare directed at his face.  He was amazed that there had been no corpses; but the lot of them seemed at their last gasp, and they appeared to him more pitiful than if they had been all dead.

Suddenly one of the coolies began to speak.  The light came and went on his lean, straining face; he threw his head up like a baying hound.  From the bunker came the sounds of knocking and the tinkle of some dollars rolling loose; he stretched out his arm, his mouth yawned black, and the incomprehensible guttural hooting sounds, that did not seem to belong to a human language, penetrated Jukes with a strange emotion as if a brute had tried to be eloquent.

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Project Gutenberg
Typhoon from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.