Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 40

If at any time the captain tarried in his stateroom, instantly that fatal memory came to his mind.

"Esteban!... My son!..."

And his eyes were full of tears.

Remorse and wrath made him plan tremendous vengeance. He was convinced that it would be impossible to carry it through, but it was a momentary consolation to his meridional character predisposed to the most b.l.o.o.d.y revenge.

One day, running over some forgotten papers in a suit-case, he came across Freya's portrait. Upon seeing her audacious smile and her calm eyes fixed upon him, he felt within him a shameful reversion. He admired the beauty of this apparition, a thrill pa.s.sing over his body as their past intercourse recurred to him.... And at the same time that other Ferragut existing within him thrilled with the murderous violence of the Oriental who considers death as the only means of vengeance. She was to blame for it all. "Ah!... _Tal_"

He tore up the photograph, but then he put the fragments together again and finally placed them among his papers.

His wrath was changing its objective. Freya really was not the princ.i.p.al person guilty of Esteban's death. He was thinking of that other one, of the pretended diplomat, of that von Kramer who perhaps had directed the torpedo which had blown his son to atoms.... Would he not raise the devil if he could meet him sometime?... What happiness if these two should find themselves face to face!

Finally he avoided the solitude of a stateroom that tormented him with desires of impotent revenge. Near Toni on deck or on the bridge he felt better.... And with a humble condescension, such as his mate had never known before, he would talk and talk, enjoying the attention of his simple-hearted listener, just as though he were telling marvelous stories to a circle of children.

In the Strait of Gibraltar he explained to him the great currents sent by the ocean into the Mediterranean, at certain times aiding the screw-propeller in the propulsion of the vessel.

Without this Atlantic current the _mare nostrum_, which lost through atmospheric evaporation much more water than the rains and rivers could bring to it, would become dry in a few centuries. It had been calculated that it might disappear in about four hundred and seventy years, leaving as evidence of its former existence a stratum, of salt fifty-two meters thick.

In its deep bosom were born great and numerous springs of fresh water, on the coast of Asia Minor, in Morea, Dalmatia and southern Italy; it received besides a considerable contribution from the Black Sea, which on returning to the Mediterranean acc.u.mulated from the rains and the discharge of its rivers, more water than it lost by evaporation, sending it across the Bosporous and the Dardenelles in the form of a superficial current. But all these tributaries, enormous as they were, sank into insignificance when compared with the renovation of the oceanic currents.

The waters of the Atlantic poured into the Mediterranean so riotously that neither contrary winds nor reflex motion could stop them.

Sailboats sometimes had to wait entire months for a strong breeze that would enable them to conquer the impetuous mouth of the strait.

"I know that very well," said Toni. "Once going to Cuba we were in sight of Gibraltar more than fifty days, going backwards and forwards until a favorable wind enabled us to overcome the current and go out into the great sea."

"Just such a current," added Ferragut, "was one of the causes that hastened the decadence of the Mediterranean navies in the sixteenth century. They had to go to the recently discovered Indies, and the Catalan or the Genoese s.h.i.+ps would remain here in the strait weeks and weeks, struggling with the wind and the contrary current while the Galicians, the Basques, the French and the English who had left their ports at the same time were already nearing America.... Fortunately, navigation by steam has now equalized all that."

Toni was silently admiring his captain. What he must have learned in those books that filled the stateroom!...

It was in the Mediterranean that men had first entrusted themselves to the waves. Civilization emanated from India, but the Asiatic peoples were not able to master the art of navigation in their few seas whose coasts were very far apart and where the monsoons of the Indian Ocean blew six months together in one direction and six months in another.

Not until he reached the Mediterranean by overland emigration did the white man wish to become a sailor. This sea that, compared with others, is a simple lake sown with archipelagoes, offered a good school. To whatever wind he might set his sails, he would be sure to reach some hospitable sh.o.r.e. The fresh and irregular breezes revolved with the sun at certain times of the year. The hurricane whirled across its bowl, but never stopped. There were no tides. Its harbors and water-ways were never dry. Its coasts and islands were often so close together that you could see from one to the other; its lands, beloved of heaven, were recipients of the sun's sweetest smiles.

Ferragut recalled the men who had plowed this sea in centuries so remote that history makes no mention of them. The only traces of their existence now extant were the _nuraghs_ of Sardinia and the _talayots_ of the Balearic Islands,--gigantic tables formed with blocks, barbaric altars of enormous rocks which recalled the Celtic obelisks and sepulchral monuments of the Breton coast. These obscure people had pa.s.sed from isle to isle, from the extreme of the Mediterranean to the strait which is its door.

The captain could imagine their rude craft made from trunks of trees roughly planed, propelled by one oar, or rather by the stroke of a stick, with no other aid than a single rudimentary sail spread to the fresh breeze. The navy of the first Europeans had been like that of the savages of the oceanic islands whose flotillas of tree trunks are still actually going from archipelago to archipelago.

Thus they had dared to sally forth from the coast, to lose sight of land, to venture forth into the blue desert, advised of the existence of islands by the vaporous k.n.o.bs of the mountains which were outlined on the horizon at sunset. Every advance of this hesitating marine over the Mediterranean had represented greater expenditure of audacity and energy than the discovery of America or the first voyage around the world.... These primitive sailors did not go forth alone to their adventures on the sea; they were nations _en ma.s.se_, they carried with them families and animals. Once installed on an island, the tribes sent forth fragments of their own life, going to colonize other nearby lands across the waves.

Ulysses and his mate thought much about the great catastrophes ignored by history--the tempest surprising the sailing exodus, entire fleets of rough rafts swallowed up by the abyss in a few moments, families dying clinging to their domestic animals,--whenever they attempted a new advance of their rudimentary civilization.

In order to form some idea of what these little embarkations were, Ferragut would recall the fleets of Homeric form, created many centuries afterwards. The winds used to impose a religious terror on those warriors of the sea, reunited in order to fall upon Troy. Their s.h.i.+ps remained chained an entire year in the harbor of Aulis and, through fear of the hostility of the wind and in order to placate the divinity of the Mediterranean, they sacrificed the life of a virgin.

All was danger and mystery in the kingdom of the waves. The abysses roared, the rocks moaned; on the ledges were singing sirens who, with their music, attracted s.h.i.+ps in order to dash them to pieces. There was not an island without its particular G.o.d, without its monster and cyclops, or its magician contriving artifices.

Before domesticating the elements, mankind had attributed to them their most superst.i.tious fears.

A material factor had powerfully influenced the dangers of Mediterranean life. The sand, moved by the caprice of the current, was constantly ruining the villages or raising them to peaks of unexpected prosperity. Cities celebrated in history were to-day no more than streets of ruins at the foot of a hillock crowned with the remains of a Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine or Saracen castle, or with a fortress contemporary with the Crusades. In other centuries these had been famous ports; before their walls had taken place naval battles; now from their ruined acropolis one could scarcely see the Mediterranean except as a light blue belt at the end of a low and marshy plain. The acc.u.mulating sand had driven the sea back miles.... On the other hand, inland cities had come to be places of embarkation because of the continual perforation of the waves that were forcing their way in.

The wickedness of mankind had imitated the destructive work of nature.

When a maritime republic conquered a rival republic, the first thing that it thought of was to obstruct its harbor with sand and stones in order to divert the course of its waters so as to convert it into an inland city, thereby ruining its fleets and its traffic. The Genoese, triumphant over Pisa, stopped up its harbor with the sands of the Arno; and the city of the first conquerors of Mallorca, of the navigators to the Holy Land, of the Knights of St. Stephen, guardians of the Mediterranean, came to be Pisa the Dead,--a settlement that knew the sea only by hearsay.

"Sand," continued Ferragut, "has changed the commercial routes and historic destinies of the Mediterranean."

Of the many deeds which had stretched along the scenes of the _mare nostrum_, the most famous in the captain's opinion was the unheard-of epic of Roger de Flor which he had known from childhood through the stories told him by the poet Labarta, by the _Triton_, and by that poor secretary who was always dreaming of the great past of the Catalan marine.

All the world was now talking about the blockade of the Dardanelles.

The boats that furrowed the Mediterranean, merchant vessels as well as battles.h.i.+ps, were furthering the great military operation that was developing opposite Gallipoli. The name of the long, narrow maritime pa.s.s which separates Europe and Asia was in every mouth. To-day the eyes of mankind were converged on this point just as, in remote centuries, they had been fixed on the war of Troy.

"We also have been there," said Ferragut with pride. "The Dardanelles have been frequented for many years by the Catalans and the Aragonese.

Gallipoli was one of our cities governed by the Valencian, Ramon Muntaner."

And he began the story of the Almogavars in the Orient, that romantic Odyssey across the ancient Asiatic provinces of the Roman Empire that ended only with the founding of the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria in the city of Pericles and Minerva. The chronicles of the Oriental Middle Ages, the books of Byzantine chivalry, the fantastic tales of the Arab do not contain more improbable and dramatic adventures than the warlike enterprises of these Argonauts coming from the valleys of the Pyrenees, from the banks of the Ebro, and from the Moorish gardens of Valencia.

"Eighty years," said Ferragut, terminating his account of the glorious adventures of Roger de Flor around Gallipoli, "the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria flourished. Eighty years the Catalans governed these lands."

And he pointed out on the horizon the place where the red haze of distant promontories and mountains outlined the Grecian land.

Such a duchy was in reality a republic. Athens and Thebes were administered in accordance with the laws of Aragon and its code was "The book of Usages and Customs of the City of Barcelona." The Catalan tongue ruled as the official language in the country of Demosthenes, and the rude Almogavars married with the highest ladies of the country.

The Parthenon was still intact as in the glorious times of ancient Athens. The august monument of Minerva converted into a Christian church, had not undergone any other modification than that of seeing a new G.o.ddess on its altars, _La Virgen Santisima_.

And in this thousand-year-old temple of sovereign beauty the _Te Deum_ was sung for eighty years in honor of the Aragonese dukes, and the clergy preached in the Catalan tongue.

The republic of adventurers did not bother with constructing nor creating. There does not remain on the Grecian land any trace of their dominion,--edifices, seals, nor coins. Only a few n.o.ble families, especially in the islands, took the Catalan patronym.

"Although they yet remember us confusedly, they do remember us," said Ferragut. "'May the vengeance of the Catalans overtake you' was for many centuries the worst of curses in Greece."

Thus terminated the most glorious and b.l.o.o.d.y of the Mediterranean adventures of the Middle Ages,--the clash of western crudeness, almost savage but frank and n.o.ble, against the refined malice and decadent civilization of the Greeks,--childish and old at the same time,--which survived in Byzantium.

Ferragut felt a pleasure in these relations of imperial splendor, palaces of gold, epic encounters and furious frays, while his s.h.i.+p was navigating through the black night and bounding over the dark sea accompanied by the throbbing of machinery and the noisy thrum of the screw, at times out of the water during the furious rocking from prow to p.o.o.p.

They were in the worst place in the Mediterranean where the winds coming from the narrow pa.s.sage of the Adriatic, from the steppes of Asia Minor, from the African deserts and from the gap of Gibraltar tempestuously mingled their atmospheric currents. The waters boxed in among the numerous islands of the Grecian archipelago were writhing in opposite directions, enraged and clas.h.i.+ng against the ledges on the coast with a retrograding violence that converted them into a furious surge.

The captain, hooded like a friar and bowed before the wind that was striving to s.n.a.t.c.h him from the bridge, kept talking and talking to his mate, standing immovable near him and also covered with a waterproof coat that was spouting moisture from every fold. The rain was streaking with light, cobwebby lines the slaty darkness, of the night. The two sailors felt as though icy nettles were falling upon face and hands across the darkness.

Twice they anch.o.r.ed near the island of Tenedos, seeing the movable archipelago of ironclads enveloped in floating veils of smoke. There came to their ears, like incessant thunderings, the echo of the cannons that were roaring at the entrance of the Dardanelles.

From afar off they perceived the sensation caused by the loss of some English and French s.h.i.+ps. The current of the Black Sea was the best armor for the defenders of this aquatic defile against the attacks of the fleets. They had only to throw into the strait a quant.i.ty of floating mines and the blue river which slipped by the Dardanelles would drag these toward the boats, destroying them with an infernal explosion. On the coast of Tenedos the h.e.l.lenic women with their floating hair were tossing flowers into the sea in memory of the victims, with a theatrical grief similar to that of the heroines of ancient Troy whose ramparts were buried in the hills opposite.

The third trip in mid-winter was a very hard one, and at the end of a rainy night, when the faint streaks of dawn were beginning to dissipate the sluggish shadows, the _Mare Nostrum_ arrived at the roadstead of Salonica.

Only once had Ferragut been in this port, many years before, when it still belonged to the Turks. At first he saw only some lowlands on which twinkled the last gleams from the lighthouses. Then he recognized the roadstead, a vast aquatic extension with a frame of sandy bars and pools reflecting the uncertain life of daybreak. The recently awakened sea-gulls were flying in groups over the immense marine bowl. At the mouth of the Vardar the fresh-water fowls were starting up with noisy cries, or standing on the edge of the bank immovable upon their long legs.

Opposite the prow, a city was rising up out of the alb.u.minous waves of fog. In a bit of the clear, blue sky appeared various minarets, their peaks sparkling with the fires of Aurora. As the vessel advanced, the morning clouds vanished, and Salonica became entirely visible from the cl.u.s.ter of huts at her wharves to the ancient castle topping the heights, a fortress of ruddy towers, low and strong.

Near the water's edge, the entire length of the harbor, were the European constructions, commercial houses with gold-lettered signs, hotels, banks, moving-picture shows, concert halls, and a ma.s.sive tower with another smaller one upon it,--the so-called White Tower, a remnant of the Byzantine fortifications.