FOG.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3574, 25 February 1914, Page 8

FOG.

AND THE SONG OF THE SIRENS

First, you mus; have confidence in rhe captain. Secondly, you must uIL w the fatalist in you to speak a quiet word—and then the fog becomes a iic!i experience (writes Frederick Niven in die “Leader,” London). Under the bridge, on the upper deck, is perhaps, die best place to enjoy it. From that vantage, peering down, you can jiiit make out, in the very bows, two lookout men, craning forward, muffled, hands deep in coat pockets, motionless, staring into tlib nipping grey vapor. They look like a new kind of figuiehead. Up in the fore crosstrees, in the look-out barrel, are two heads dimly see if, one on each side of the mast, each in the attitude af a shot-sighted man peering into a small print time-table on a wall.

Step out from under the bridge and look up at it. The captain is canted against the front, coat-collar up, chin sticking out over the canvas dodger; at either end are sailors in the same attitude. Beside the lit'tle turretlike wheel-house is a., huddling stature facing the bows also, rigid, the fog swathing it.

“LIKE A GOD IN PAIN.”

The deck thrills so that one’s feet tingle and the siren roars out its plaintive deep note that goes on into a wailing crescendo. We have seen nothing for two days and two nights; but all the while the siren has roared its melancholy roar into the shuddering cold, coiling fog. What was that. Did you hear a sound? The captain’s headSmoves. He is giving ear. He turns and says something to the effigy behind and above him, and the deck rumbles again, and the siren roars its complaining roar—“like a god in pain.” The pauses between its roars are briefer now.

CALLING THROUGH THE MIST.

What is that sound in between our bellows ? Is is possibly an echo on some iceberg’s wan cliffs. It is cold enough for ice. Is it even possible that this fog is dense enough to give back an echo? Very, very faint is the sound—but there is no doubt about it now. And we are harcfly moving. The propeller whirls and desists, whirls and desists; the siren laments, and away off in that vapor, thick as smoke in a railway tunnel when a heavy freight train passes through coaling, a sai}, long bleat comes to us. There is no doubt about it now. It is another siren. After crawling through fog for two days and two nights, nosing carefully towards Canada (careful as a man in a dark corridor, who does not know whether there are, or are not, steps in it) we hear some other fumbling vessel. “Yes,” says a'voice behind, “didn’t you know??” It’s the City of . We have been in touch all day by Marconi. ■'Booh! Isn’t ittokl? Let’s get below again.”

SHIPS 'THAT PASS

Someone is playing a barcarolle in the drawing room. In the smokeroom a very fizzy soda water bottle lias been opened. “Pop!” it goes.

Our siren screams. Hearken! there is the response.

The unseen City of is now on the port bow, booming close. She is alongside booming—and we reply. Alongside still, but a little sternward. She wails a weird wail, and we answer with our moan and groan, and dying full of remorse. She is astern—roaring like the lost, and our siren roars a response. Fainter—fainter—a far liellow; fainter, fainter—a distant bleat as she noses out across the Newfoundland Banks seeking for the open Atlantic, with men in her smoking room, women in her drawing room-look-outs at her bows, cross-trees, bridge—and we never saw her. Longfellow’s “Ships that Pass in the Night” is hackneyed, and when one has passed one’s teens one is slow to quote the phrase—but it occurs now. Ships that pass in Atlantic fog, crying thus to each other, are memorable. I don’t seem able to forget this passing ship all day. “Yes, didn’t you know? We’ve been in touch all day by Marconi” does not make me dismiss the matter. I can’t even take the Marconi for granted. It "jrackles and crackles overhead, and down the slender wire out of the coiling greyness that one can stir up as if it was sour, and I can’t look upon it in the casual way of a sailing bill that has a footnote in small print: “All steamers fitted with wireless.”

ENTHRALLING MAGIC

The whole business is a tremendous and enthralling piece fo magic. It suddenly occurs to me that a man’s life, looked at by the gods, may be very .ale longer, after all, than an Atlantic passage.’' I think how fny life is as about as brief in the eyes of the gods as ,in mine, is the life of the match that I manage (after wasting two) to get a light just long enough to set my pine a-going. There, we have stopped! “Oh—ho —oh!” we roar again, and again, with hardly any pause Ixjtween them; and then—and: then the faintest, most pathetic little tin horn toot of a thing, as if on the end of a kitchen bellows, makes a-noise at us like a cat at a mastiff;, and very dim and ghostly, tike a diminutive Flying Dutchman, soars up on a wave, and-lslides down in a hollow, one of those wonderful Newfoundland cod-fishers, such as Kipling described in “Captain Courageous.” We are off the Banks.

A GREAT EXPERIENCE

No—l do not like the fog. It is a great experience to pass through it. It is very wonderful to come down out of it when the first bugle blows for dinner, and wash, and get one’s hair to look fairly respectable, and then go in to loaded tables and warmth and lights, and give and take a friendly “Good evening” with the blue-liveried steward who looks at me quickly to see if I am afraid—or hungry. I am thankful that he clearly sees that I am feeling fit and hungry. But if I had liot a deal of faith in the captain, and if I did not pay heed to the fatalist in me whispering narcotic words, I do not think I would find the Atlantic fog so splendid and wonderful. A great experience, but—well, there you are! ,