‘It is by his orders,’ replied he, and turned once more to leave the cabin.
‘I don’t understand!’ I said, bewildered. ‘Mr Barlow is my friend, and this is my yacht! By what right do you dare to take your orders from him? Let me out!’
As I shouted the last command, I leapt from my bunk, and made a dash for the door, but the steward, so far from attempting to bar it, flung it open and stepped quickly through, thus allowing me to see that a couple of the sailors were stationed in the alleyway.
‘Get on deck at once! ’ I said angrily. ‘What are you doing down here?’
‘Sorry sir,’ said one of the men. ‘We’d take it kindly if you’d make no trouble. But we ain’t lettin’ you out, sir. Don’t make no bloomin’ error.’
I hesitated, then went to the table and sat down. I would, at least, do my best to preserve my dignity.
After an inquiry as to whether he could do anything further, the steward left me to breakfast and my thoughts. As may be imagined, the latter were by no means pleasant.
Here was I prisoner in my own yacht, and by the hand of the very man I had loved and befriended through many years. Oh, it Was too incredible and mad!
For a while, leaving the table, I paced the deck of my room; then, growing calmer, I sat down again and attempted to make some sort of a meal.
As I breakfasted, my chief thought was as to why my one-time chum was treating me thus; and after that I fell to puzzling how he had managed to get the yacht into his own hands.
Many things came back to me - his familiarity with the men, his treatment of me - which I had put down to a temporary want of balance - the fooling with the compasses; for I was certain now that he had been the doer of that piece of mischief. But why? That was the great point.
As I turned the matter over in my brain, an incident that had occurred some six days back came to me. It had been on the very day after the captain’s report to me of the tampering with the compasses.
Barlow had, for the first time, relinquished his brooding and silence, and had started to talk to me, but in such a wild strain that he had made me feel vaguely uncomfortable about his sanity for he told me some yarn of an idea which he had got into his head. And then, in an overbearing way, he demanded that the navigation of the yacht should be put into his hands.
He had been very incoherent, and was plainly in a state of considerable mental excitement. He had rambled on about some derelict, and then had talked in an extraordinary fashion of a vast world of seaweed.
Once or twice in his bewilderingly disconnected speech he had mentioned the name of his sweetheart, and now it was the memory of her name that gave me the first inkling of what might possibly prove a solution of the whole affair.
I wished now that I had encouraged his incoherent ramble of speech, instead of heading him off; but I had done so because I could not bear to have him talk as he had.
Yet, with the little I remembered, I began to shape out a theory. It seemed to me that he might be nursing some idea that had formed - goodness knows how or when - that his sweetheart (still alive) was aboard some derelict in the midst of an enormous ‘world,’ he had termed it, of seaweed.
He might have grown more explicit had I not attempted to reason with him, and so lost the rest.
Yet, remembering back, it seemed to me that he must undoubtedly have meant the enormous Sargasso Sea - that great seaweed-laden ocean, vast almost as Continental Europe, and the final resting-place of the Atlantic’s wreckage.
Surely, if he proposed any attempt to search through that, then there could be no doubt but that he was temporarily unbalanced. And yet I could do nothing. I was a prisoner and helpless.
Eight days of variable but strongish winds passed, and still I was a prisoner in my cabin. From the ports that opened out astern and on each side - for my cabin runs right across the whole width of the stern - I was able to command a good view of the surrounding ocean, which now had commenced to be laden with great floating patches of Gulf weed - many of them hundreds and hundreds of yards in length.
And still we held on, apparently towards the nucleus of the Sargasso Sea. This I was able to assume by means of a chart which I found in one of the lockers, and the course I had been able to gather from the ‘tell-tale’ compass let into the cabin ceiling.
And so another and another day went by, and now we were among weed so thick that at times the vessel found difficulty in forcing her way through, while the surface of the sea had assumed a curious oily appearance, though the wind was still quite strong.
It was later in the day that we encountered a bank of weed so prodigious that we had to up helm and run round it, and after that the same experience was many times repeated; and so the night found us.
The following morning found me at the ports, eagerly peering out across the water. From one of those on the starboard side I could discern at a considerable distance a huge bank of weed that seemed to be unending, and to run parallel with our broadside. It appeared to rise in places a couple of feet above the level of the surrounding sea.
For a long while I stared, then went across to the port side. Here I found that a similar bank stretched away on our port beam. It was as though we were sailing up an immense river, the low banks of which were formed of seaweed instead of land.
And so that day passed hour by hour, the weed-banks growing more definite and seeming to be nearer. Towards evening something came into sight - a far, dim hulk, the masts gone, the whole hull covered with growth, an unwholesome green, blotched with brown in the light from the dying sun.
I saw this lonesome craft from a port on the starboard side, and the sight roused a multitude of questions and thoughts .
Evidently we had penetrated into the unknown central portion of the enormous Sargasso, the Great Eddy of the Atlantic, and this was some lonely derelict, lost ages ago perhaps to the outside world.
Just at the going down of the sun, I saw another; she was nearer, and still possessed two of her masts, which stuck up bare and desolate into the darkening sky. She could not have been more than a quarter of a mile in from the edge of the weed. As we passed her I craned out my head through the port to stare at her. As I stared the dusk grew out of the abyss of the air, and she faded presently from sight into the surrounding loneliness.
Through all that night I sat at the port and watched, listening and peering; for the tremendous mystery of that inhuman weed-world was upon me.
In the air there rose no sound; even the wind was scarcely more than a low hum aloft among the sails and gear, and under me the oily water gave no rippling noise. All was silence, supreme and unearthly.
About midnight the moon rose away on our starboard beam, and from then until the dawn I stared out upon a ghostly world of noiseless weed, fantastic, silent, and unbelievable, under the moonlight.
On four separate occasions my gaze lit on black hulks that rose above the surrounding weeds - the hulks of long-lost vessels. And once, just when the strangeness of dawn was in the sky, a faint, long-drawn wailing seemed to come floating to me across the immeasurable waste of weed.
It startled my strung nerves, and I assured myself that it was the cry of some lone sea bird. Yet, my imagination reached out for some stranger explanation.
The eastward sky began to flush with the dawn, and the morning light grew subtly over the breadth of the enormous ocean of weed until it seemed to me to reach away unbroken on each beam into the grey horizons. Only astern of us, like a broad road of oil, ran the strange river-like gulf up which we had sailed.