I found the axe in the field behind the Deetzes' place, in the row that had been beets, and I want to set down in what order things happened before I set down any one of them, because after that week order was the only thing left that anybody could be certain of.
The milk went round for three days after the last of the rest. That is a fact I can put my hand on. Route 9, the Greenfield truck, the six-thirty run. On the Thursday it did not come. On the Friday a boy came past on a bicycle and said the driver had not been up, and that was the first thing anybody said out loud, and nobody said what it meant, and everyone went to work as usual and found nobody at work. By Saturday the town had gone quiet the way a town goes quiet when the phone rings once and does not ring again. Not silent. Quiet. There is a difference and I want it on the record. Silence is an absence. What we had was a reduction, a settling, the noise of a town coming down to a lower gear and staying there.
I was a hardware dealer then, and before that a plumber's apprentice, and before that nothing worth putting down. I had been in the county thirty-one years. I knew the shape of the place better than I knew the shape of my own hands, and I am not a man given to noticing. I notice now because there was nothing left to do but notice.
The axe was in the beet row and it had not been there in June. I know that because I ran a pipe wrench through that exact spot in June and the wrench came up clean. The blade was a blue that I could not make anybody else see. That is the plainest way to put it. I described it to Deetz and he said the sky was blue that day and probably I had the sun in my eyes, and he was probably right, and I let it go, because arguing the color of a thing you found alone in a field is not a thing a man in my position wins. But it was blue the way the sky is blue, which is to say not a color so much as a suggestion that light is being handled in a way the sky does not handle it. The metal was cold. In the middle of October, at four in the afternoon, after a day of sun on an open field, it was cold to the touch, and I held it a long time before I let it down.
It was a good axe. That is the whole of what I can say about it and it is more than it sounds. It was better than good. It had been made by somebody who had been thinking about axes for a very long time, the way a man who has been thinking about axes for a very long time thinks about them, and the balance in the hand was such that I understood the whole tool in one grip. There was no maker's mark. There was a short length of the same blue metal lying ten feet away where it had been thrown down or pulled out of the ground, and where the ground was disturbed around it the soil had not healed over. That was in October. I went back in April and it had healed, and I could find the place only because I had marked it with a stake, and then I found the stake too had gone over, and I have not gone back since.
The Martians had been gone six weeks by the time I found the axe. That was the received account and it is not mine; mine is the six weeks are the part nobody could account for. What they left behind was tools. They left the tools because they were a gardening people. That is what Spender said to me and I have turned it over so many times that it has worn smooth. They left behind the tools and the seeds and the blueprints, because a people who are going to be around for a long time plant things. There is a thing about their books that I will come to. The tools were to be found all over the county in that autumn, under turf, in ditches, in the bottoms of ponds, laid about like something a careful man sets out in rows so that whoever comes will know it was intentional. Blue. Green the color of the canal. Cold to the touch in the sun. And nobody picked them up. That is what I want on the record. Nobody picked them up. They were the most extraordinary objects any of us had ever handled, and we left them lying in the ditches, because picking them up would have meant admitting that we were picking things up, and we were not ready for that, and I do not blame us, because I was not ready either. I did not pick up the axe. I put it down in the field and I came back the next day with a rag and wrapped it and took it home and put it in the shed behind the lawnmower, where it has been ever since.
What I want to say about the town is this. It did not end. That is the thing nobody will believe, and I have stopped arguing it. It got quiet, the way a room gets quiet when the people in it go into the next room and leave the door open, and you can still hear them, and then the water in the pipes goes cool, and then you cannot hear them any more, and then it is not a room with people in the next room, it is a room with a door open onto nothing. Nobody can tell me where they went. That is the other half of it. Nobody left. I want that exact. We did not run. We did not drive west. There was no convoy, there was no boat, there was no last week of newspaper. People went into houses and did not come out, and other people went into houses to be with them, and after a while the doors stopped opening for a person bringing a chair.
The order was this, and I have thought about it a great deal. First the small creatures. I did not see any of it, but the dogs went in three nights, before anything else, and they went quietly, one at a time, out the back gate, and did not bark. Every house on our street lost its dog in the same three nights, and they went in different directions. Then the wells. Ours went bitter on the eighth of October and stayed bitter. Then the gardens. That is a way of putting it that will sound like poetry and it is not. In the second week of October the tomatoes on nine houses on our street went black at the stem while still on the vine, and the leaves came off in a single night, and the pear tree in the Doyles' yard dropped every fruit it had in an afternoon and did not put out another, and the skin of the sweet corn went grey and hard and the ears stood there like small grey fists. Nothing rotted. Nothing wilted. It simply stopped and stayed stopped, in the state it was in.
Then the sickness. That is what the doctor called it afterward, when there was still a doctor, which there was until the middle of November. He called it a flu. He said it came up out of the ground. He was not a man who said a thing he did not have to say, so I give him that, and I also give you the fact that in nine houses that same week there were people lying on their backs with their eyes open who could not be waked, and were gone in three days, and the doctor came and looked and did not write anything down. He came because he was still coming. He came because he had not yet worked out how not to come.
Then the two in the house on the corner, Mr. and Mrs. Peale, who had been married fifty-one years, and I want to say how they went, because it sets the manner for everything else and it is not a manner I would have believed in. They did not scream. Mrs. Peale sat on the front step with a blanket round her shoulders in the last week of October, in the cold, in a house with no heat, and she sat there for four days. You could see her from the road if you went out of your way, and people went out of their way. She was not crying and she was not calling. She was looking at the row of houses opposite with an attention that did not vary, and Mr. Peale lay inside in the front room with the light on, and the door was open the whole four days, and nobody could get him to close it. She would not go inside. It may have been that she could not. The two of them were taken in the same night, and in the morning the door was still open, and it stayed open until the following spring, when the wind took the hinge off it.
I say it like this because I want it flat. I do not want the reader to think there was anything to be seen that night. There was nothing to be seen. The Martians did not come into our street. Nobody in our street watched anything happen. That is the fact at the bottom of the whole thing and it is the reason I have written this down at all: that a town can go out like a lamp in a room where everybody is sitting, and the people sitting there can tell you afterward, honestly, that they did not notice the moment, and that this is true. Nobody can give you the moment. Ask them. There is no moment. There is a Tuesday, and there is the light going, and there is no Tuesday.
And then in the first week of November, the rockets. And then, after that, the sea.
Three expeditions went to Mars. That is not my figure; it is the one everybody uses and I have not found anybody who can produce the other number. The first left in the second week of December, in the cold, out of the hot-rock country three hundred miles west of here. The second left in February. The third left in April and did not come back, which is a way of putting it that has taken me a long time to accept even while telling it.
I want to be careful with the expeditions, because they are the part of the account that is most open to exaggeration and least to error. The men on the first were nine. They were not heroes, which is the first thing to understand and the thing most often got wrong by people who were not there. Two were test pilots. One was a widowed schoolteacher from Cortez named Harry Stickell who had saved for eleven years to go and who raised the money by teaching summer school twice, and who talked about it the whole of the summer of his going with a cheerfulness that I found at the time tedious and find now unbearable. One was a dentist. There was a night watchman, there was a boilermaker, there were two young men out of a radio shop in a town whose name you would not know. They went up in a ship that was assembled above a cornfield by people who were paid in instalments and did not always get paid.
They were buried at Greenfield on the fourth of January, all nine, on the same afternoon, out of the same churchyard, in nine successive graves that are four feet apart in a row, and the county paid for the plots, and the county had never paid for anything of that kind before or since. There were two hundred and something people at the graveside. It was fifty-one degrees. I have the burial register in a copy. The minister made an error in the second name and had to stop and start again, and Mrs. Stickell did not react to it at all, which I remember, because she reacted to everything else. And the thing that made the crowd, that made the two hundred and some people stand in the cold past the point where they would ordinarily have gone home, was not grief. Grief is common and everyone in that crowd had some and showed it. What they were waiting for was somebody from the field in Ohio where the ship had come down, and nobody had come.
We know how it ended because they found the ship. That is the first hard fact of the whole business and I will put it plainly. The ship was not found intact. In nine or ten places it was entered from outside by something that melted. Around each of those places the metal was not blown out. It was burned, from the outside in, in a cone whose apex was at the centre of the hull, and the burn went through eight inches of alloy and stopped. There were men who went into that wreck with lamps. They are alive. They will testify. And every one of them has said the same sentence to me and I have never found one who said it differently, which I put down as the single most remarkable fact I know.
They burned all nine of them in the space of one hour in the crew cabin, by tools from the tool wall, which is to say by axe and by spanner and by a fire axe with a thirty-inch handle, and then the fire went out, and the ship was empty for eight years until we had rockets and the courage to go and look. Nobody went for eight years. The county knew where it was. There were people who wanted to go. The answer was always the money and then the answer was always that the fire had not been the whole of it, and then by the time there was money there was nobody who would be first.
I have stood in it. It is a thing like a boiler that has come apart in a field. I want to describe it because it is the reason I do not argue with people who tell me the Martians were a myth, when what they are actually doing is declining to look.
What I saw, and I say it exactly: the pilot's chair. It was still there, in its mount, at the instruments. It was still fastened to the floor. There was nothing in it. Not a bone, not a boot, not a buckle, not a coin. And on the arm of the chair, on the left arm, there were three short black verticals scorched into the paint, evenly spaced, in a row, going down into the arm about three inches, and the wood had been charred to them and stopped. Whatever the heat was, it was not willing to go into that arm. It went along the surface and turned at it.
There was no panic in the ship. I have heard that said. There was no panic in the ship because panic is a thing you have time for.
Now the sea.
The Martians came out of the sea that spring and put a green snot over the Pacific, and I am aware that is a phrase and I have used it because I could not find a better one in ten years, and I would like to be allowed to say so. It was a fine green. It had a smell to it that I would not put a name to because a name is a thing you can carry home. It fished nothing. That is the whole of the damage from the sea: nothing could be taken out of it that any person wanted to eat, and the men who went out in it came back ill, a small number of them, and of those a smaller number did not get up.
But the sea was not the argument. The sea was the day everybody had been waiting for without knowing they were waiting for it, the day it became possible to say out loud that the Martians were not an event, they were a climate. The snot spread. The Pacific gave it up on the coast from British Columbia down to the Horn and it did not stop at the coast. It came inland. It came up the twenty-five miles of valley between the coast range and the sierra and lay down in it in a single week, and the valley went brown, and the orchards went with it, and the cattle had nothing to eat that had not already been eaten, and by June the whole central valley was a grey place that smelled of the beach and would not burn.
And while the valley was going, on the far side of it, the rockets came up.
I do not know what to call what happened that night. I have read a great many accounts and I have read newspapers and I have talked to the men who were out in it, and there is no language for it that does not mislead by being specific. So I will do this. I will give the sequence and I will decline to give the meaning.
The rockets came up at about half past eight in the evening, in a column out of the northern sky, low, from north to south, going over the county, and they were spaced so evenly that you could count the interval and it did not vary. If you held a ruler's length against the sky and let them go past, they held the ruler. Every man who was out that night and did the arithmetic says the same figure and I will give mine, which is one every twenty-two seconds, give or take, over about four minutes.
They were not silent. I want to put down what sound is, because the sound is the part that the accounts get sentimental and it is not that. It was a flat rushing sound, and it was underneath the crickets, and there was no crack and no roar and no report, and when they were directly overhead the sound did not get louder, it stayed the same, which is the thing I could not get used to and still cannot. I have been told that the first of them tore the roof off the Keeler grain elevator eleven miles off. I have not verified that and I put no weight on it.
They had lights on them and the lights were yellow and they burned steady and did not flicker. That is the detail that the people who were there always come back to. Every account of that night, from every person I have spoken to, and I have spoken to about forty, ends on the colour of the lights. Not the ships. The colour of the lights.
They went over and they went south, out of the county, in about four minutes. The north sky emptied. And then, for a period I have never been able to state exactly but which I will call forty minutes, there was nothing at all. The crickets resumed. The dogs, of the eleven dogs left in the county that had not gone out the back gate in October, came out from under the porches and lay down in the yard and would not go back in. A woman I know turned her radio on. It said what it said. It said that nothing was happening.
At the end of the forty minutes the first one came back north. That is the phrase everybody uses, and it is wrong, and I want to correct it because the correction is the whole shape of the thing. They did not come back. They went north past us, and while they were still going north, four or five of them dropped out of the formation without slowing and went down. They went down behind the ridge west of the county, and the ridge is four thousand feet, and you could see them go over the top of it and not reappear, and there was no sound and there was no light after that. The remainder continued north over the mountains.
Then, over the next quarter hour, the whole squadron, the ones that had gone, came back up over the northern sky. I have it from three men who were in different places and who had never spoken to each other. They came back up from the west, behind the ridge, very low, spaced exactly as before, and they went back north over the mountains again. And then for good. There was nothing after that until the morning, when Mrs. Hall, who does not sleep, watched the sun come up over the north range and told me she had watched it come up twice while it was still moving, which is a condition of the eye and I do not explain it.
That is the night of the burning. I use the name because it was the name afterwards, in the papers, and because I have never found a better one, but I want to be clear that nobody at the time knew there was anything to be called. I went out on my porch at about nine that night. I did not go out because I heard anything. I went out because my wife asked me to come and look at the sky, which I did, and we stood there about ten minutes and saw the last of them go over the mountains with their steady yellow lights on them, and then we came in, and that was the night.
The burning itself, if anybody wants the date of it, was the following spring, in the last week of March, on a night when there was no sky event at all and nothing to see, and no witnesses, and no necessity for anybody to stay awake.
My name is Nathaniel Freely and I am seventy-one years old, I have been a hardware dealer and a plumber's apprentice in this county for fifty years, I have never in my life joined anything or believed in anything that asked me to, and the only claim I am able to make on anybody's attention is that I was here, and that I looked, and that what I have set down is what I saw.
The green dust did not stop with the books. That is where the county learned to stop calling it weather.
The old man La Vache kept a shop on the main street, a narrow place with four rooms going back, and in those rooms, on shelves he had built himself out of oak that is now ash, were something over forty thousand books, the oldest of them printed in 1490. He had them under glass in the front window in a display he changed every week of his life. His name was La Vache and he was seventy-eight and he had never married and he had lived over that shop since he was nineteen years old. He was also, by every account I have of him, unbothered by people, and he told me in June that he could not imagine a more agreeable arrangement for a man's old age than to be surrounded by forty thousand minds that could not answer back.
I give you that detail because of what he said afterward, and because it is the only explanation that works.
On the sixth of September a man in the street above my shop was doing what half the county was doing, which is burning his lawn. He had dragged out his grass with a scythe and made a pile maybe ten feet across in his front yard and set it alight at ten in the evening, and the smoke went up in one thick column you could see from four miles, and it was not a cheerful act exactly but it was not meant to be a gloomy one either. It was a housekeeping operation. There were probably two hundred people standing in the road and a good many of them laughing. La Vache was out on his step in his shirtsleeves with his arms crossed, watching it the way you watch anything you have no opinion about.
Then the wind came around the corner of the building and went up the four inches between the street and the side wall of La Vache's shop, and where it went in under the back of the window frame it made a sound, and it brought the dust in.
I was three doors down. I was not in the shop. What I am giving you is what I was told by four separate people who were, and I will not improve on their words to make it a better story than it was, because I have spent six years listening to people improve it and it is always in the same direction, which is toward a thing that could not have happened.
The dust came in on the night breeze and it hit the shelves in the front room and it went along the shelf as a wave. It was visible. That is the part I will not soften. There was a shelf of books in the window of the front room of La Vache's shop in the town of Greenfield in this county in September, and a green dust came in at the window, and a man in the street with a scythe was standing not thirty feet away shouting and laughing, and the books went off that shelf one after another in a wave you could see, and each one took its time. He said you could count them. He said a book would last maybe two seconds, and then it would be green powder on the shelf, and the shelf would go down a foot, and then the next one would start, and so on across the whole length of the shelf, four feet at a time, and he said the sound of it was like rain on a tin roof and he said he knew that sound for forty years because he had heard it every summer when he was a boy in Iowa with the wind coming up off the corn.
The dust went through four hundred volumes on that shelf. Then it went to the end of the shelf and turned down the aisle. He said he heard it start again in the second room and he said he stood in the doorway and did not go in, and he said he understood at that point that it was not a thing that a person could stop by putting their hand on the books.
The window display went. That was the part he could not put down afterward. Not the forty thousand. The display. He had done that window every Friday for sixty years, and there was a woodblock of a hare and hounds and a case of a book on the Nile and an abacus and a stereoscope card, and he said that on that night the whole of it went off the sill in about nine seconds, the woodblock included, and that he had put the woodblock in in 1911.
He never went back to tell me. I went to him. I want that clear, because there is a version of this that makes him into a man who died telling it, and he did not die. He lived for four more years and he never once in those four years mentioned it to me except the once, and I want to describe that once.
He came out of the shop one afternoon in December and he had a case of dust on him, a small wooden box the size of a breadboard with a handle, and it had been the bottom shelf of case number eleven in the stockroom, and it was dust to the depth of two fingers. He set it on the counter and he looked at it for a while and he said: I was wrong. Then he said: it is not a book. Then he said: they have all been dead a long time and you can say it. Then he went back into the shop and shut the door.
That is the whole of what La Vache said to me on the subject and I have never had it out of anybody else either.
It is worth saying what the dust did to the rest of us, because the books were only the part that showed it working. It ate out wallpaper. It took the glue out of picture frames and the frames came apart and fell over with the pictures still in them. It got into the engines of parked automobiles and lifted the paint off in flakes. It got into food. It got into wells. The county had already burned nine hundred thousand dollars of lawns and the lawns were still there, green and fine and cold to the touch, and out in the root cellar of the Doyles' house the shelves of preserves went to powder in the tins and the tins collapsed with a sound like a small thing sitting down in a chair.
Across the street from La Vache was Norbert Fanshaw, who painted houses, and who has been for fifty years the closest thing this county has to a man who will say anything to your face. He came out that same night with a brush and a can of turpentine and mopped the green off his front wall by the light of La Vache's window, which was the only light on the street. And he mopped for a long time. And La Vache came out and stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and watched him work, and the two of them had the following conversation, and I have it from La Vache and Fanshaw both, separately, and it agrees word for word.
La Vache said: they can't help it.
Fanshaw said: they could have stopped it.
La Vache said: it is a spore. It is their way of breathing on the place.
Fanshaw said: it has eaten every book on that street and it ate four hundred books in ninety seconds in front of me, and I would like to know what their way of breathing on the place is when it is eating a man's whole occupation in front of him at ten o'clock at night, and if the answer is that they are not in the room, I would like somebody to explain the politeness of that.
Then Fanshaw finished the wall, which took him about forty minutes, and went in, and did not speak to him again for six weeks.
And then the injunction came, which is the thing I want to talk about next, because it is the point at which the county stopped being a place where people lived and became a place people were held.
The Martians put the injunction up on every screen and every radio in the country at the same hour, and the county heard it in a voice like a man reading out a bus timetable. It said that no human being was to assemble in groups of more than fifteen. That was all it said. Fifteen. Not a hundred and fifty. Not a thousand. And then, after it had been read, a form of words came across that I can only give as a translation, and the translator was one of my neighbours, a retired schoolteacher named Valla, who had done Italian in the war, and who said it was approximately this: the people of Earth are kindly to each other and the gathering of many is a way of being kind, and there is a thing going about among them now which is a way of being unkind, and it passes from one to another in the breathing, and it will find them out and it will kill them, and there is nothing we can do about it but keep them apart.
Fifteen.
I have never been able to get past that number. Not because it is small. Because it is exact. Somebody worked it out. Somebody on Mars, with whatever passes for arithmetic over there, put a number on it, and the number was right, and in a county where four hundred people had already gone into houses and not come out, the number was right and it worked.
So the county went quiet for real. That is the word. Before, it had been settling. From the middle of September it was quiet the way a body is quiet.
The tents went up on the school ground in October, and in them were put everybody in Greenfield who had been in the town since the sixth, which by then was about six hundred people out of nine thousand. They went voluntarily. That is important and everybody insists on it now, and it is true in the narrow sense that nobody was marched. They walked. They carried what they could. They went into the tent city and they stayed a year. And the tent city was run by two Martians, which I did not know until 2006, and which I only learned about from a man who was in it and who never told an official anything for thirty years and then told me in a kitchen over a bottle of something.
Inside the tent city it worked. It was orderly. It was quiet. Nobody died of the coughing in the tent city. That is the fact and it is the fact nobody wanted, because the alternative is a story where the whole thing was random, and it was not random. It was a rule. Somebody knew the rule and told us the rule and we had a year to be indoors with other people in small numbers and we took it.
It was the rest of us who went out wrong.
There was a night in that first winter, the fourteenth of December, I think, when a man about sixty years old climbed to the top of the water tower at the north end of the main street with a rifle and looked down over the town and fired until the magazine was empty, and then walked off the top of it. What he thought he was doing I have never established. I have heard six explanations and I have found none of them. He was a man who had been through a divorce in 1941 and a bad winter in 1943 and who had a brother go into the war and not come back, and he had been the one to talk to the first expedition, and the last person who spoke to him in November had been the bank teller, who told me he was a very ordinary man, very polite, would hold a door.
The county put him in the ground on the eighteenth without a service. The Martians gave us the ground to do it in. They gave us the ground for eight years and I want somebody to sit with that sentence for a minute, because it is the shape of the whole arrangement, and I do not think we ever understood it: they ended the world and they gave us the ground to bury our own people in, and they did it free, and they were not thanked, because thanking them would have meant admitting there was somebody to thank.
There was no service and there were eleven people there and I was one of them and two of them were men I had known since I was a boy.
Then the winter. Then the road. Then the eight years.
That is the part where it stops being a county and becomes a story that people tell, and I want to say clearly that I do not know when it stopped being a county. There was no day. That is the thing I have said at the beginning of this and I am going to say again at the end, and it is the whole of what I can tell anybody who asks me what it was like. There was no day. In October of that year we had a town. In the spring of the next year we had a set of buildings where a town had been, and a road that came from somewhere and went to somewhere, and the somewhere on the north end was, as far as anybody could tell, simply the place where the road stopped being a road.
And every so often for eight years somebody would come up that road, and it would always be a Martian, and he would stand at the north end of the main street and not come down it, and wait, the way a man waits who has understood that he is a guest.
They called it the sore throat disease. That was the name the county gave it in the two or three weeks before the cough, and I have found no authority for the phrase outside this county, and I have looked. The Martians did not call it anything. They have never called it anything. That is worth a paragraph of its own and I will come back to it at the end, because it is, in the end, the whole of the argument I have to make.
I heard the first coughing behind the Doyles' washhouse in the first week of September and I want to give the weather, because I have read accounts of that morning and none of them mention the weather and the weather is the reason I went out to look.
It was still hot. That is what nobody can get used to and it is the thing I would put at the front. September of that year was eighty-four, eighty-five, in the afternoon, in the shade, for a week. The trees were still heavy. I went out behind the house about four o'clock in the afternoon to see what Mrs. Doyle was doing about her beans and I found her on the ground beside the washtub, sitting up with her back against the wall, and she was coughing.
I am going to be careful here, because I have been told that I have exaggerated and I have been shown the hospital records and I will not be shown to be wrong. What she said was: something has got in. She was not a woman who used expressions. Her sons were in the war and she had buried one of them and she had a way of saying a thing once. She said, something has got in, and I have not got it out.
I got her inside. I put water on the stove, which in September is an absurdity, and I sat with her. She coughed for about twenty minutes and it was a wet, deep, tearing cough that came up out of her and brought nothing up for a long time and then brought a great deal of grey foam. She was fifty-nine years old and she had not been ill in her life. I went up the hill at a run to the Doyles' house and her husband was in the field and I got him, and by the time we had her indoors on the porch with a blanket she was coughing blood in a fine red mist into the blanket, so fine that you could not see it, you could only see the freckles on the blanket darken.
She was dead in eleven days. So was her husband. So were her two next-door neighbours on the east side.
That is the sequence. I want it flat. Mrs. Doyle coughs. She is dead in eleven days. Everyone she was in contact with is dead in between two and three weeks. That is all there is. That is the whole of the mechanism and I have never heard a better description of it from any person in any county.
The sore throat disease went through the town between the eighth of September and the third of October. It was in the East Ward, the west end of Greenfield, first, and it worked east along the main street in a rough front, house to house, and behind it there were dead streets. I could walk the length of the main street in the second week of October and you could see it as a line: on one side of the street people were still up and about, moving, and on the other side there was nothing to talk to. The Wells family on the east side had nine people in one house and six of them were down, and Mrs. Wells came out on the porch every morning at eight and swept the step, because she had swept that step every morning since 1921, and she swept it for eleven days while six of her family lay in the front room.
That is not meant to be touching. I want to be exact about what I am saying. She swept because she could not think of anything else to do with the part of her that had a job in it, and because if she went inside she would have to be in the room with them, and she was not going to do that while there was still sweeping.
Then the yellow spots.
Somebody who worked for the state health department in those years told me about it. He said the yellow spots were the last phase and that they came in about a fifth of the cases and that if the yellow spots came up out of the skin, generally on the trunk, generally on the back, that was it, that was the end, and that it would be from the fourth to the sixth day after the cough started.
His name was Rupert Molina and he drove a state health car and he had gone into about forty houses and he did not contract it, and he never could work out why, and he spent the rest of his life with it. He said to me: the ones who died, died of it in their blood. The blood went bad. That is what he said. He said the Martians had done something to the blood so that the blood would not take up oxygen the way blood is supposed to, and he said that he had read that in a paper in 1950 and that the paper had been taken out of the library in 1956.
And the doctors, in their own words, in the winter of that year, in the hospital at Fort Crawford, which is not in this county but is the one all of them went to: the doctors said it was a lung disease, and they said the lung was full of something that was not water and not phlegm and that when they opened a chest in the first week of October there was nothing in it that any of them had seen before, and one of them, a man named Stow who was forty-one and who did the first autopsies on the west side, said out loud, in the autopsy room, to the other doctor, and I have this from the other doctor and not from Stow, who is dead: he said, "Well, we have never seen this before."
And Stow said that the only way he could describe the lung was that it looked like it had been scooped out and replaced with a very fine dry powder, and that the powder was not sand and not ash and not flour and not any substance he had in the laboratory, and that when he put a swab in and looked at it under the glass the field was not blue.
That was 1997, when we went back with the ship, and I have not read it anywhere else, and it is in a letter in the Fort Crawford hospital archive that I myself copied out with my own hand on the ninth of June.
I am aware that this is the point in the account where people who have read more than I have say: but the Martians themselves did not have the sore throat. That is true. They were there for eight years and they did not have it and they did not have the coughing and they did not have the yellow spots and they were not immune, they were simply not the kind of thing it worked on, and they never said so out loud in so many words.
We asked. That is what I want to say about that winter. We asked and we asked and we asked, and it is the single strangest fact of the whole business that for eight years nobody from Mars would put a name to the thing that was killing us.
They would stand in the road and they would tell you the rule about the number of people in a room. They would tell you to take the wells out of the ground and the buckets out of the wells, and everybody who took their buckets out of their wells in that first October lived. They would tell you that. They would tell you about the wells and they would tell you about the cough and they would tell you about the buckets and they would tell you about the lawns and they would tell you the name of the plants they were planting.
They would not say the name of the disease. And Molina, who asked, and who is one of the two or three people in the world who spent their life on this, said to me the last time I talked to him, which was in November, a year before he died: "You know what the worst of it is, Freely? The worst of it is that they were polite about it. They were polite. They would have told us the name. Any decent thing would have told us the name. They told us everything else on the schedule. They told us about the bucket. They never told us about the cough."
Then the eighth year, and the house by the river, and Spender.
His name was Spender. He came up that road in the spring of the seventh year and stood at the north end of the main street, the way they all did, and waited, and I was the one who went down to him, because by then it was my job in the way that being the hardware dealer was my job, and nobody objected.
He had been waiting two hours. He was about five feet ten and thin in a way that suggested not deprivation but design, and he was wearing a brown coverall suit with no mark on it anywhere, and he did not have a weapon of any kind, which by the seventh year had become the first thing you checked.
I did most of the talking and he did some. He told me what they were doing. Not in the way of a report. He talked about the weather, because he wanted me to understand that the weather was theirs, that they had made the weather, that they had been working on the weather for a hundred thousand years on Mars and it was a thing they knew and it was not a thing they were proud of. He said the weather was a kind of gardening. He said it was like the way a man makes a garden out of a piece of ground.
He said: "We have been in touch with your planet for a hundred thousand years. Do you know how we knew about you? We did not come here. We have been coming here. We knew about you from your own air. Your own atmosphere broadcasts. All you had to do was to stand still and we would know you, because the air would tell us that somebody was here."
I did not believe him and I still do not believe him and I would not change that sentence if I had it to write again. It sounded to me in the road that day like a thing a man says to be impressive, and I have never found anything to show that it was a lie, and I have never found anything to show that it was true, and I have gone over it a great many times with the two men who were on Mars at the end and both of them told me that the way he put it was the way Martians put things, that they do not distinguish between knowing and arriving, and that from their side the difference does not exist.
I want to put down what I actually felt, because I do not want this to read as a man converted.
He was very tired. That is what I remember. He talked for two hours and he got more tired as he went, not weaker but tired in a way that had a shape to it, the way a man is tired near the end of a day of work he cares about, and at some point in the middle of it he stopped and put his fingers on the surface of the hood of his truck the way a man puts his hand on a table, and I remember because I have put my hand on a lot of truck hoods in this county and it is a thing you do to be sure of where you are.
And then he said the thing I have thought about every day for two years.
He said: "I have burned your paper cities. There are five hundred of your cities on the coasts and we have burned them all. Do you know how much time it takes to burn a city?"
And I said no.
And he said: "Three weeks. Do you know what it costs to be a gardener?"
I did not have an answer. I want that on the record, because a great many people who have written about this have supplied an answer. I did not have one. He did not wait for one. He said: "Look at me. Look at what I am. You will go home and not believe me. But I have been fighting for a hundred thousand years and my heart is tired and my legs are tired and I am a very small thing compared to the warriors who will follow me. And this whole planet and everything on it — every city, every lake, every forest — I have had to fight for it and I will not be able to keep it for long. Do you understand?"
And then, about four hundred words later, the thing that broke the argument, because it was not said as an argument and I have never been able to get it back into the category of things Martians say to be impressive.
He said: "You have no reason to be unhappy. Your planet is as good as ours. When we came here we brought nothing. We took nothing that we could not replace. We are only here because there was a great deal of water and the air was sweet. And we are going to leave, and when we have gone, your world will be as it was before."
He looked up the road at the grey places where the town had been.
He said: "You will be alone, but you will not be lonely. You will be the only ones left. That is the whole of it. You will be alone and you will not be lonely, and there will be nothing left to do but to tend the garden, and you will be very tired, and there will be a great many of you, and I am sorry for that, because I know what it will be like."
I have talked to Spender three times. Two of those were on the Mars ship with the two men who were there at the end, and one of them he gave me the story of Ylla, and I did not understand it then and I do not understand it now, and I have never had it explained to me by anybody including him, and I am going to set it down and let it stand where it stands.
It was this. He said there were five Martians in a party, that they came from a settlement called Hellas, and that one of the five was a woman called Ylla who was the biologist, and that the other four were Yaro, and Feen, and M-mann, and one whose name he could not give me.
I am not going to invent a name for the one he could not say. He tried three times and each time he stopped in the middle of it and started again, and the third time he put his hand flat on the hood the way he had done before, and said: "It will not come. I have said it four hundred thousand times and it will not come out of this mouth in your language. Write it the way it sounds and you will have it wrong."
I have looked for the name in the recordings that were made of the trip. The recordings have it as he said it, which is a sound with no shape. Two people have told me they can say it and both of them have been asked, separately, by somebody who wanted to verify it, and both of them have declined, and I do not press people on that.
What Ylla did, according to Spender, was this. They put down on Mars and they went blind. All five of them. That is the fact of the story and it is what makes it a story and not a complaint. They put down on Mars and their sight went, because the light there is different, because the sun is closer and it is a different colour, and after a while the eyes stop and give you back nothing at all.
And they were not disturbed by it. That is what Spender meant and it took me years to see it. Ylla, blind, was the one who kept the seedlings alive. She could feel them. She could feel when a thing was too dry and when a thing had gone over. She held her hands a foot above the sand and she could tell, and they all learned to work off her hands, and they planted the whole length of that valley by touch, in the dark, and they got most of it in.
And the four men watched her do it for nine years. And every one of them said, in his own time, and not to her, and in the way of men talking about a thing that shamed them, that seeing had made them useless and blindness had made her necessary.
There is no moral to it and Spender did not put one and I will not put one. That is the thing I want to be careful about, because everything else in this account of mine has a moral of some kind attached to it by me, and this one does not.
I want to say one more thing about that afternoon and then I will let the eight years go by.
He told me the name of the plants they had been planting for seven years on this planet, and he said it and I wrote it down in my notebook and I did not know what it was then and I know now what it is. I looked it up when the Martians left. It is a very ordinary thing. It is the blue field grass that came up in my lawn in May of that year, the cold fine hard green that came up through the fescue in a clean sheet.
They were not building a world for themselves. I want to say that once and clearly and then let it stand. They had the whole planet worked out and named and divided and they were planting it to leave behind, and every blade of it was for us, and they said so, in the road, in the seventh year, to a hardware dealer.
They said: "We are only the sorrel. We are only a strange root in a field. But look at us. Grow us and the world will be green again."
I did not believe that and neither does anybody else, I expect, but I have a lawn. It is green. It is the only lawn for a hundred miles that has grass in it at all, and it came up cold in May of that year and nobody put it there, and I mow it, and I do not feel that anything was given to me. I feel that I am the last man in a county sitting on the only thing anybody left, and I do not know what to call that and I have had two years to call it something.
Then the eight years went by, and I want to give them in the only form I can stand to give them in.
The wind stopped in the first week of August and it did not come back that year or the next. The dust stopped with it. There was one more week of the sky the colour of a set with no picture and then the sky was the sky, blue, the ordinary blue, from the top of it to the bottom of it, and I want to say what that did to people in this county, because it is not the thing you would expect.
They were glad.
I have never been able to get used to that and I have stopped trying to. In the spring and summer of the seventh year the sky went blue and the sun came down on this county like a hand on the back of the neck and people came out of the buildings they had been in for a year and a half and stood in the road and looked up, and they were glad, and some of them were crying, and I did not understand it for a long time and then I did. They were not glad that it was over. They were glad that they could see the sky and it did not appear to them that the sky had done anything. That is the human arrangement. You do not have to hold the sky responsible. You just have to be able to look at it.
There was no grass in the county at all for the three summers. Everything was the grey fine dust. Every year in May a Marsman would stand at the north end of the main street, the way they all did, and say — and I will give the schedule because it is the most civilised document any of us has ever been handed and I have it framed in my shop — he would say: plant the seeds. Plant the seeds, do not ask questions, you have the paper, put them in the ground and water them and then go away and leave them. And people did that. Thousands of people in this county and thousands more in every county in the state put a paper of grass seed into the ground in May of the seventh year and went away and left it.
The seeds did not come up for two years. That was known. That was on the schedule. Two years.
And then in the second spring it came up, and the way it came up was this: it came up everywhere at once and not in the places you had sown it. That is a fact I have never been able to reconcile with anything and I have asked every Martian who would stand still for me, and they gave me the same answer, which is that they seeded the whole of it and not your ground, only yours, and I said that is not an answer and he said it is the whole of the answer and I did not have a second question.
The wind came back that May too. A very light wind, warm, from the west, and it went through the new grass and the new grass lay over in it and came up, and lay over and came up, all day, the way a field does. And nobody in this county could stand to watch it. There were people who could not come outside. There were people who shut the door and sat in the kitchen with the radio off. And I want to say that I was one of them, and that I have never told anybody that until now, and that there is a great deal of lying in the accounts of that period written by people who were not in this county.
Here is what the wind did to the town, and I will do it plainly, because it took a year and there is no hurry any more.
The Martians came back that August, the last time. They came into the streets with the cutting things and they went along the road and they cut the grass down in strips, and where they cut it down it did not grow again. It stayed cut. The strips stayed the height of a mown lawn for eight years, and the whole of the county floor was in strips, in bands, like a field that had been cut by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing.
They took the trees out. Not all of them. There were four hundred trees left, along the main street, in a row, the elms, and they took out everything else in the county, every oak and every cottonwood and every sycamore along the river, and they cut them at about four feet and left the stumps, and the stumps stayed four feet, and I still have one by the back fence and it is four feet and it is forty-four years old and it has not put out a bud and I do not believe it ever will.
They took the buildings apart. That is the word I will use and it is not fancy. They unbuilt them. They took them down board by board and stacked the boards, sorted by size, along the road. There are places in this county where you can walk out into what was Main Street and see rows of lumber like a lumberyard, four feet high, in stacks, the whole length of it. Some of it rotted. Most of it did not. In the eighth year a great many people took the lumber and built houses on the north hill and on the south road, on higher ground, and I built mine out of four different buildings and I could tell you which one was which wall by looking at the nails, and there are sixty nails in my kitchen wall that came out of a house that had belonged to a woman named La Vache, whose name I will come back to, and I have never been able to make myself take them out.
And I want to say what I think they were for, because nobody will say it and I have been two years with this and I am going to.
They were not leaving a museum and they were not being tidy. They were being a species that had taken over a garden. When you take over a garden you do not leave the previous gardener's trellis lying about. You take it down and stack it and you plant. That is what they did. There is no evidence that any human being was meant to use that lumber and there is strong evidence that it was not what they had in mind at all. They stacked it because it made a street.
I have been up that road five hundred times. I want it on the record that I am not angry. That is a thing people expect from me and it is not in me. I am not angry. I looked at the Martians for two years and what I saw was not cruelty and it was not care. It was work. It was very large, very slow, very tired work by people doing a job that had started a hundred thousand years before they were born and would go on a hundred thousand years after.
Here is what it does to a man to look at that.
It does not make you small. I had expected that and it did not happen and I have never quite recovered from the disappointment of it. It does something worse and stranger than that. It puts you in your place in a sequence. You are not the centre of a story about the end of the world. You are item nine on a list going somewhere with a number on it, and the number is not your name, and the list is very long, and it is being worked on by people who are not going to be there when it is finished, and they are not doing it for you.
I found that the only honest thing to do about that was to keep my hands busy.
So the hardware dealer's shop. I will tell you about that, because it is the part of this that people find sentimental and it is not.
I did not have a shop for six months after they came through in the third summer. When I opened it I stocked it with the things that a man would need if he were going to keep a house up in the country on his own for the rest of his life, and I sold every one of them, and then I put in a second order, and a third, and by the end of that year I was selling nails, hinges, hasps, screen, stovepipe, axe handles, plumb bob, seeds. Seeds was the biggest line by the third year. Not grass. Beans, and squash, and tomato, and corn, and all of it Martian stock, because there was nothing else, and there were not enough of it for everybody, and I priced it the way you price something that people need, which is you do not get rich and you do not go under.
And here is the part I want to be careful with, because I have been asked about it by people who wanted to hear something and I do not know what they wanted to hear.
I made money. I want to say that. In the seventh and eighth years I made more money than I had made in the ten years before it, and I put a furnace in my house and a pump and a two-bath addition at the back, and I bought a truck I had wanted, and I gave some of it to Mrs. Hall, who does not sleep and who had nothing, and I did not do it in a way anybody noticed, and nobody in this county has ever said one word to me about how well I came out of it. But I know what happened and I am not going to stand here in 2006 and be a man who lost everything, because it is not so.
Everybody lost everything and I sold the nails.
Then the green thing in August of the seventh year.
There were about four hundred of us left in the county by then. I have the count. It was taken by a man from the state in the spring and he did it by driving the road and it was four hundred and eleven in April and four hundred and six in the autumn, and the five were men who did not want to be counted, and one of them was a man I have never spoken to and I know where he lives.
By that August there were three hundred and something. What happened that month is the reason I do not have many friends left, and I am going to tell it flat.
In the last week of August a little green thing came up in the irrigated plots north of the river. It came up everywhere at once and it was a sort of creeper with a blue flower on it, and by the middle of September it was over the whole plot. And that is where the arguing started, and it is worth saying that the arguing was not about religion and it was not about the Martians and it was not about the end of the world. It was about a vegetable.
That is the thing I have never been able to make sit right.
The creeper was blue-flowered and it was not from here. Nobody could have planted it. It came up in ground that had been fallow for eight years and it came up without water. And by the middle of September every third person in this county had eaten it and liked it, and told me it tasted like something they had not eaten since they were children, and had not one word to say about where it came from.
And about forty people had not eaten it and would not eat it, and were going around saying so.
And I ate it. I want that stated. I have heard what people say about me and I eat it. It comes up every August in the north plots and it has a blue flower and it does not kill anything that eats it, and that is the end of what I know about it, and I have eaten it eleven times and I am seventy-one years old and I will probably eat it a twelfth.
And I want to say this about the argument, because it is the thing I have thought about most and I do not think it makes me look good. Forty people would not eat it. In the sixth year, with a hundred and fifty thousand people at the camp hospital down the highway in Richmond, in the sixth year, with the sore throat disease gone through us like a scythe and the tents and the fifteen and the books in the street and the wells gone bitter and the smoke coming down from the sky at night — I say it flat, we could not feed people. We could not feed people. There were people in that county who died because there was not enough and there was not one single thing anybody could have done about it.
So that green creeper came up in August of the seventh year, in the ground, without water, on its own, in the middle of that, and about forty people in this county stood up and said no.
I did not argue with them. I want that said too. I did not argue. I did not say one word to them about the camp hospital or about the corn or about any of it, and I have been given the opportunity since by people who wanted me to say it, and I have not said it. I will go further than that. I have not stopped believing they were right.
That is what I came to believe over those years and it is a strange thing to believe and I have had two years to be sure of it. Everybody who ate the creeper became somebody who had eaten the creeper. That is all it did. It did not make them better and it did not make them see anything. It made them, in the end, into a party. Not at first. At first there were only the four of us in that room in August of the seventh year, me and Norbert Fanshaw and Harry Dodge and his wife Nell, and we ate it and we said what we thought about it and we were two men and two women having supper.
And in the ninth year there were nine hundred in this county and we had a grange hall and we voted to make the creek plant the state flower of the state of California, and it passed, and I voted for it, and I was very happy on the night it passed, and I went home and mowed my lawn.
I tell you that because I want it down in plain words and not softened: it is possible to have the best day of your life at a grange meeting about a plant, and to go home and mow, and to be a decent man, and to have been one of the reasons that four hundred people went into houses and did not come out. All of it at once. I have had two years and a lawn and I have not been able to get them apart.
I did not expect to survive. That is a line people want me to have said and I did say it once, to Fanshaw, in that room, in August of the seventh year, and I will set it down because it is true and because he thought it was a good joke and laughed, and I want the record to show that I said it and that I was not entirely serious and that I was not entirely not serious either.
I expected to go out with the rest. I thought it would be in the ground, with the others, in the row behind the church, in a town that was not there. I thought the Martians would come up that road and the green would come up through the lawn and the roads would fill in and the whole thing would be over in about four years, and that would be the end of it, and it would not have been a bad end, and I was ready for it.
That is not what happened, and I want to describe the thing I did not expect, because it is the shape of the whole eight years and I have not found anybody else who will describe it.
The trouble with the last eight years of this county is that the roads healed.
I will put the mechanics of it, since everybody has asked. In the eighth year the tar went first. You could watch it go: the tar in a road surface is the only part of a road that has a date on it, and after about a year in this climate the binder in the tar outgasses, and it goes grey, and it goes soft, and then it goes to gravel, and once it is gravel there is nothing holding the stones in a matrix and the stones get pushed apart by frost and by the roots of grass that comes up through them, and the road becomes two wheel ruts in a meadow.
That happened in the eighth year. In the ninth year the base course went. That is the crushed rock, four or six inches down, and it went because the fines went out of it, because the fines are the glue and the glue is the topsoil that was spread over it when the road was built and the topsoil of this place is not permanent, and the base course without its fines is a pile of rock and a pile of rock is not a road. You can put a road surface on anything but it only lasts as long as the base is there.
So in the tenth year they were gravel tracks through a meadow, two of them, with grass between them, and the grass between them was three feet high in a growing season and would go over the truck. And by the thirteenth year there was one track and it was not a track, it was a place where the grass was shorter, and you could still drive it because everybody had been driving it, and it went from the south to the north end of this county, and after that it was a meadow with a line of slightly thinner grass down the middle.
I never saw a road. Not one. Not one time, in eight years. And I know that fact has been repeated all over the world by people who were not here.
That is the first thing that took me apart in the last years, and it was not the death, and it was not the Martians, and it was not the books in the shop. It was the road. It is a small thing. It is a road, and any county in America has a road, and I have driven ten thousand of them. And I watched one go back into the ground in about eleven years, and it did not go back the way it came. It came up as grass.
You want to understand what that does to a man. All your life you have gone somewhere. Everywhere you have ever gone has been a place you were going to, and the going has been the thing, and the road is the thing that takes you away from where you are. And now the road is a line of thin grass in a meadow that you can cross in any direction and it does not go anywhere, and the whole world is the size of the county, and the county is forty miles by thirty.
And then the thing that no man who has not been here can be made to understand, and I am going to say it plainly because I think somebody ought to: the Martians were coming back.
That was in the eleventh year, about a third of the way in. I want to say it exactly the way I lived it, because it is a stupid way to have lived and I did not choose it and I would not choose it again and it is the truest thing I know.
They came back to repair the planet. Not all at once. A few of them at a time, in a rocket, every year or so, a small rocket, no lights on it at all, coming down onto the plain west of the county about ten in the morning on a day nobody knew in advance, and they would stay two weeks or three weeks and go away again.
And they did not come to me. I want to be careful, because this is where I have to say a thing that will sound like the worst of it and is not.
They never came to my house. They never asked to come in. They never asked for anything. They never came to the door. And that is what it was like for eight years. And I want to say that clearly, because I have read what people have written about this period and almost none of it says so, and it matters. They did not visit people. They were not doing anything to people. There was no coercion of any kind. There was no contact. There was a rocket and there were two men in coveralls who worked on the ground for two weeks and went away, and in between, nothing at all.
And I knew which side of the road I would be standing on.
I am not going to explain it. I am not going to stand here and diagnose a man who is dead. But I am going to put it down, and the thing I am putting down is: it was always mine, the north side, the west side, the far side, the sky.
And I did not go to them. That is my part. I want it exact and I want it in the first person and I want no softening. They were at a hundred yards and I was at a hundred yards and I did not go. Every year. Fourteen years.
Because I did not have to. Because they were there for a hundred thousand years and they would be there for a hundred thousand more and the whole of what I did was wait, and I had a lawn and a house and a hardware shop and a truck and it all came down to that. I did not have to do anything at all for the rest of my life. And there it is and I have had fourteen years to hold it and I cannot put it down any better than that.
I have not seen a Martian since 1993. It is not that I would not go. There is nobody to go to. Nobody has come. I do not know where they went and I do not know whether the planet was finished or whether they went somewhere else for the same reason I waited at home, which is that it was home and it was the thing you had.
Let me put down the last three things in the order they happened, and then I will tell you what I think they add up to, and you can take that or leave it.
The loneliness came first, and it was not late and it was not dramatic.
I have had two marriages and one of them ended and I would rather not go into it and I will not. What I will say is that after my wife died in 1971 I found that the thing I had prepared for, the eight years alone in the country with nobody but the Martians coming up that road, was the thing I was completely fitted for. I do not mean that in a spiritual way. I mean that I am seventy-one years old and I have never had anybody over the age of nine stay in this house for more than a night except the two women I married, and I am a man who is easy to live with, and there is a reason for that which is not a virtue.
I did not miss people. I want to say this plainly because it will be read as a hard thing about me and I would rather it were read as a fact about the arrangement. In the thirteenth year, by which time there were perhaps a hundred and sixty people in the county, I sat down one evening and asked myself honestly whether I missed the nineteen people who had been at the rock in the yard on the night it came, and the answer was no. Not because I was hard. Because there was nothing to miss. The people were gone. What is the taste of a person who is gone? Nothing. You do not get the person. You get a chair, and a name, and a set of habits about when to expect somebody, and after long enough the habits stop and you have a chair and a name.
So I ate my supper and I went to bed and I did not miss anybody, and that was in the thirteenth year, and I have never told that to a living soul until this recorder.
Then the wire.
There was a line of poles put up along the road in the sixteenth year, from the rocket camp to a farm the county had given up on and that the Martians had partly cleaned, and to a farm that had a working well. That was all it was for. There was no Marsman involved in any of it as far as I know. Somebody put poles up along eleven miles of road that was no longer a road, in ground you would have to clear by hand, and strung a line on them, and it was ordinary work, and nobody in this county has ever made anything of it, and it is the thing I have thought about most.
It was not a power line, because there was nothing at the far end to make power. It was a bare wire, forty-eight thousandths, strung on ordinary pole-line hardware, and it came into the yard on the farm and went up on a pole and stopped. It went nowhere. It did not go into a building. It was not connected to an insulator at the top of the pole. It went up and it stopped in the air.
I know what I am about to say and I am going to say it anyway, because it is the thing I would take with me and because I would rather be laughed at than have left it in.
When the rocket was going to be launched from Mars back to Earth — and this is in the last year, in 1984 — they ran that wire. Eleven miles. It was for the launch. I have been told it was a signal line, a timing line, a thing to carry a charge from a source eleven miles away to a trigger. That is what an engineer would tell me and I am not an engineer. I am a hardware dealer.
I have stood under that wire for ten years. It is still up. There are ninety-one poles. It goes from the north end of the county to a house with a good well and it does not go into the house and it is not attached to anything at the top of any pole. It carries nothing. It is dead wire in the air and it will be there when I am gone and it will be here long after the county is not.
And I want to say one more thing about it, and then I will not go back to it. I ran my hand along it. You can feel a thing like that; there is a faint tremble in a wire, everybody knows it, everybody puts their hand on a wire and feels the hum of whatever is happening on it. When the rocket launched in 1984 I put my hand on that wire as it went, because I was standing at a pole, and I felt it.
That is the last of it. I do not know what that means. I have had twenty years and I do not know what that means and I am not going to be one of the men who explains it.
The settlement on Mars.
There were four of us from this county and I will name them because they are the only four whose families gave me permission and two of the four are dead and one of them was my cousin's boy.
The two men I have spoken to are the ones from the third expedition in the original, in 2026 — that is when the work of bringing people from Mars started, with rockets we built out of Martian alloy, in Martian yards, under Martian supervision, and I will not be moved on the question of who built the rockets because I have sat in two rooms with two men who were there and they have told me enough that I am not going to argue about it.
They went up in the spring of 2027 and I helped them load. That is a thing I did. I had a truck and I drove it up to the camp and I helped them load what they took, and what they took was: two rifles, ammunition, forty gallons of water in steel drums, a case of seed corn, seed beans, a pressure cooker, a first-aid kit, blankets, a folding table, a hand lens, a box of pencils, a Bible, a set of wrenches, twelve feet of wire, and a folding chair.
One of them asked me at the camp, at the loading, in a completely ordinary tone, why I was not going up with them.
I said: who is going to mind the house.
And he said: it will mind itself.
And I said: it is a good house.
That is the whole of the conversation. It took about ninety seconds. There has been a great deal written about that and I would like to state that neither of those two sentences was intended as an argument, and I have heard the second one talked about for twenty years by people who were not in the yard, and it is the single most misquoted thing that I have ever had to do with, and it is not mine. He said the house would mind itself. I said it was a good house. Neither of us was talking about the house.
Now Mars, and the sight.
I want to be careful here because this is the part where people tell me I have got it wrong, and I have said for twenty years that I have not got it wrong and that I will not argue about it, and here is what I mean.
Two of the four went blind before they had been on Mars eleven months. Not gradually. They were on a day shift in a yard in the Martian sunlight, in the open, in their shirtsleeves, and at some point in that shift their sight went, and it did not come back, and no Marsman did anything to them and there was no injury and there was no accident.
The third one went blind on Mars about two years later, in his sleep, over about an hour. I have it from his sister, who has given me the date and the hour, and I have the date from his own letter, which came back down with the returns in the later flights, because they began to send things back. Things people had carried up and then no longer wanted. Photographs, mostly. Written things. In 2031 one of them sent back a page of a pad with writing on it in pencil, and it was the third one, and it was a list, and the list was: things I have seen. It went for about a page and a half and then it stopped in the middle of a line, and he did not finish it, and he did not say he could not see.
He could not see. It went in about an hour, in sleep, the way the other two had gone in a shift. He was thirty-one. He wrote what he could remember of the world in about an hour, in pencil, on a pad, in a bunk, in the dark, and then he had somebody send the pad down, and I have read it, and I am not going to tell anybody what is on it, because it is his and it was not sent to me.
It is the light. That is what Spender told me in the seventh year and that is what everybody told me later. The light here is red-orange at noon, the sun is smaller and it is very close and there is no blue anywhere in the sky and it is a quarter as bright as ours and your eyes do not adjust to it and they never do, and after a year of it they stop.
The Martians went blind too. That is what I am telling you. Every Martian who was ever born on Mars is blind. They are born that way, or they go blind within the first year, and they have been that way for the whole of their species' history, and they have never known anything else, and they have built an entire civilisation out of the sense of touch, out of radio, out of vibration in the ground, out of heat, out of a pressure sense in the thin air that we do not have any words for at all. Ylla, blind, could feel a seedling at a foot. She kept an entire valley alive with her hands. And four sighted men watched her do it for nine years and learned that being able to see was the thing that made them useless.
And then I went blind on Mars, three of us out of four, and we sat in a yard and we could not do the work, and somewhere in that settlement there were Martians who could feel the ground and could talk to each other through it, and they worked with their hands and we worked with our hands and the difference was that they knew what the ground was doing and we did not.
That is what the wire is. I have had twenty years on that and I am going to leave it there, because that is the shape it had, and I would rather say less than I say and be right about it than say more and be wrong about it.
Then the ending.
Here is what the last year was like and I will give it exactly because everybody gets it slightly wrong and there is only one version of it and I was in the middle of it.
The Martians left in 2026. There was no announcement. There was no treaty, no ceremony, no thing where somebody said a sentence. They simply stopped coming. The repair ships stopped coming in 2023. And then in 2026, early in the year, three of the big ones lifted from a flat place west of the county in the night, and went up, and were gone, and the light in this county from that night onward was the light that this county has now, which is ordinary light.
And that is the moment I have spent twenty years not being able to say anything useful about.
The first year after they left, in 2027, nothing happened that I could see. The second year, in 2028, in the spring, in the north plots past where the gas station had been, green came up. Cold, fine, hard green. It came up in a line along the north end of the main street first, and then along the road south, and in 2029 it was in the yard of the house on the corner. By 2031 there was grass in this county. By 2034 there was grass on the river road. By 2038 the whole forty by thirty was grass, knee-high in June, and there were trees on it, and I have watched a cottonwood come up on the bank of the river in the eleven years since, and it is a tree, it is twenty-two feet, and I measured it last spring.
I want that set down with the dates, because it is the claim. The Earth came back. Not the people. The grass came back. And the roads.
The road is the thing I would like somebody to see. I cannot. But I can tell you what four men who have been to the place since told me, and I have their statements, and I have talked to two of them face to face.
The road is there. It is not the same road. It is not tar. It is a road that is two hundred yards off where the old one was, because they came back to it after about sixty years, by which time the route had gone into a stream bed and the stream bed had gone to gravel, and the gravel had gone flat. It is not a highway. It is a single-lane gravel road that will take a truck at fifteen miles an hour, and it is graded, and it is drained, and it runs the length of the county past where the town was, and there is a graded cut where the hill was.
It came back because somebody came back and graded it. That is what I want to say and it is the whole of my objection to every account I have read. Nobody fixed it. It healed the way a bone heals, which is not by returning to what it was but by making something that bears weight, out of what is there, and it is a different road and it is in a different place and it is there.
You want to hear that it came back. It did not come back. Something that bears weight is there.
Now the last part, and I will be quick because I have been at this for two days and I am tired and this is the part I would rather did not exist.
They offered the ships to us.
Not to us, to the county. To anybody who wanted to go. There were rockets going up from a flat place west of here every month or so from 2028, and the Martians left the yards and the fuel and the diagrams and the invitation, and they had said in 2026 that the ships would be kept running for two hundred years, which I know to be a figure that means nothing to a Martian and I will not argue with it.
In 2031 the county population was nine hundred. In 2033 it was fourteen hundred. In 2036 it was under nine hundred. In 2040 it was about six hundred. In 2050 there were three hundred and ten people in this county and it was the largest town in three counties.
That is the fact nobody will put in a book. The rockets went up from nine miles west of here for the better part of two hundred years, and they had room for eight hundred people at a time, and they went up from this county with a load every four or five years, and they were not full.
I have the manifest. I have read all of them. There were nine hundred and forty people from this county who went up between 2028 and 2054 and there were nine thousand from the state and I do not have the national figure because the national figure was not kept, and I know why it was not kept, and so does everybody who was there.
The rockets were not full because people would not go.
And here is the reason, and it is the reason this whole account exists.
It was not that the ships were frightening. People had seen them come. It was not that Mars was believed to be better. People had no opinion about Mars; there is nothing to have an opinion about. It was not fear and it was not pride and it was not that anybody thought they were not good enough.
It was this. They could not leave the place.
Every single person who told me that they had wanted to go and had not gone, gave me the same reason, in the same words, and the words were: I could not leave the house.
Not could not bear it. Could not. The house. And then they would go on, and they would tell me about the house.
I want to write down what one of them said to me, because he was a good man and a stupid man and I liked him and I argued with him and I lost, and because I have thought about his sentence every day since and I have not improved on it.
His name was Rupert Molina. He was the state health man. He was the one who drove the car and went into forty houses in 1944 and did not take it and spent the rest of his life on that. He was seventy-nine and he was in his own house on the north hill that he had built out of lumber that was somebody else's dining room, and I sat in his kitchen and I said to him: come on then. I am going up in September. Why are you not coming.
And he said: because I built this kitchen.
And I said: you can build a kitchen on Mars.
And he said: not that kitchen.
And I said: Rupert, it is a box. It is a box with a stove in it.
And he said — and I am not going to put anything into his mouth, I am going to give you the sentence as he said it to me in that kitchen on the fourteenth of February 2004, and it took him a while to say it and he said it looking at the sink: "Mr. Freely, there is nowhere on that planet where the light comes in that window in the morning."
And then he would not go. He stayed in the house. And he went down in 2011, in that house, at the north hill, with the kitchen.
That is what it was, in every house in this county, for a hundred and fifty years. That is the disease. Not homesickness; there is a word for homesickness and this is not it. It is that a man who has lived in a place for sixty years and has put a window in the south wall himself, in a house he built out of lumber that belonged to a dead town, does not want to see the same window with a different sky behind it. He does not want to do it again. He has done it once. He has spent his life being the only one who stayed, and being the only one who stayed is a thing he has made, out of nothing, over sixty years, and it is the only thing he has made, and he cannot put it in a crate.
The rockets went up. And they did not come back down. Every ship that has gone up from this county since 2028 has come back down to the yard at the north end of the main street with the same manifest it went up with, and they had to, because that is where the Martians left them, and I have watched a ship that went up with eleven people on it in 2031 land with eleven people on it eleven years later, and the people got out, and eleven of them went down the road and into the houses, and there was nobody in the houses, because they were all on the ship.
Freely, Nathaniel. Two hundred and eighty-one, of this county. In the house with the pump and the two-bath addition at the back, north hill, four hundred yards from the place where the town used to be, with a lawn, and a truck, and a shed, and a hardware shop that has not been open in nineteen years, and nine nails in a kitchen wall.
I have been in the front room most of this week. I do not go out. I do not want company and I am not ill; I have a bad chest from the dust in the seventh year and that is all. I have a book out that I am not reading and I have a chair and a window and in the morning the light comes in that window and it is coming in the way it has come in every morning since 1971 and it is the light of this place and it is not the light of any other place and that is the only thing I have that nobody can ship.
You have it in front of you. All of it. The axe, and the field, and the townspeople in their houses, and the rocks, and the grass coming up cold, and the wire, and the empty ships coming down and the men getting out and going into the houses. You are looking at it and you can put it down any minute. There is a rocket going up every four years and it is not full and it will not be full and it will keep not being full for a hundred years, because that is what we are, and we are not going to be a species that leaves. We are going to be the ones who cannot.
And the grass comes up every May, cold and fine and hard, in the country where it has come up for four hundred years without anybody asking it to.
It is not a gift. I have been asked that four hundred times. It is not a gift. It is ground. It is a kind of ground that somebody else chose, a long time ago, out of a hundred thousand years of choosing, and they chose it for us, and they went, and it is here, and I mow it, and the mowing is mine.
That is the whole of what I have. If it is worth anything to you it is this: that it was not a war and it was not a machine and nobody was angry. It was a species that arrived at a place that was convenient and it stayed as long as it needed to and then it left, and it did not come to say goodbye, and it did not tell us what it had done to us, and it did not tell us the name of the thing that was killing us while it did it. And the world it left was going to come back green, on its own, without anybody, whether or not there was anybody left to see it.
And there were, and most of them are still here.
You can stop the tape now. I have said the parts I would say and I have left out the parts I would not, and you can tell which is which, because it is the parts I left out that I would have wanted you to hear, and I could not get them said out loud.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off, then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs, commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster, tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! Here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand, miles upon miles, with nothing but their faces toward the ocean, jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiling. But the morning comes, and the midday sun, and then the evening, and the whole process of the day is a seduction.
You have heard of Captain Ahab. Few things you have heard of, perhaps, that are not the beginning of the story of the Pequod, and the story of the Pequod is the story of all men who have gone out to look for something and found that the looking was the whole of it. I had no such captain in mind when I shipped. I had a ship in mind, and a reason, and the reason was that a man who stays on the land is a man who never learns what he is made of, and I wanted to find out. That is all the ambition I ever had, and it got me onto a whaler, and it is the only reason I am able to write this at all.
So I am a whaleman. Say it again, reader, if you like, because you may not grasp what it means. Say it, and then go on and tell yourself what it is not, and when you have done that you will be closer to understanding what it is. It is a course of life made entirely of consequences. Every man who has ever been down to the water and back has signed for the same contract, and the ink is not dry on any of the papers, and the papers are in the sea already.
The streets take you waterward, and that is the whole of the navigation. Everything after this is current.
And here, before I take you any further, I will put down the one thing about the sea that I know to be true, because if I do not put it down now you will not believe me later, and I shall want you to believe me later.
The sea is not out to get anybody.
That is the first and last of it. There is no malice in the ocean. It has no plans. It does not hate the Pequod, it never heard of the Pequod, and if the Pequod had never been built the waves would have gone on doing precisely what they did. But the whale, that is different. The whale did not choose. The whale was there. And that is the whole of the tragedy, and it is worth saying plainly because it is the thing people get wrong. Nothing in this story came looking for us. We went out looking for something, and the looking is what killed us.
If that is true, and I believe it is the truest thing I know about the sea, then the question worth asking is not what the whale did to Ahab, but what Ahab did to Ahab. Because Ahab did that. Before he ever saw the white whale, Ahab had already been ruined. The ruin was complete the morning he went into that cabin and read those charts, and every whale he ever killed afterward was an attempt to get back to a man he used to be.
I have learned this the hard way, and I want to tell it straight, in order, from the beginning, because I did not know any of it when it was happening and I have had to go back and take it apart to see what it was made of.
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides, though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original, the Tyre of this Carthage; the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan?
I knew nothing about it. That is worth saying plainly. I had no theory of whaling, no theory of the sea, and no theory of what a man is for. I was a man who wanted to see the watery part of the world, and I went and looked for the cheapest way to do it, and the cheapest way happened to be an inn with a name written over the door in a lot of tin.
So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south, wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don't be too particular. With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of The Crossed Harpoons, but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the Sword-Fish Inn, there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement.
So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns. Such dreary streets! Blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted.
But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. But The Crossed Harpoons, and The Sword-Fish, this then must needs be the sign of The Trap. However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door. It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, wretched entertainment at the sign of The Trap!
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath, The Spouter Inn: Peter Coffin. Coffin? Spouter? Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.
It was a queer sort of place, a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Yet this is the house where everything happens, so I will not leave it in a hurry.
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.
What most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. But does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? Even the great Leviathan himself? In fact, the picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
Look at that picture. That is the whole book, painted on the wall of a cheap inn before anyone knew it was true. The whale comes out of the sea on his own account, and in the act of doing something enormous he destroys the thing that happens to be underneath him. Nobody sent him. Nobody told him to. He was doing what he does, and the ship was in the way, and that was the end of the ship.
And yet I have never been able to decide, even now, which of the two was the catastrophe.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons.
Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den, the bar, a rude attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah, bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without, within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass, the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full. Not a bed unoccupied.
But avast, he added, tapping his forehead, you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing.
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man's blanket.
Supper was ready. It was cold as Iceland, no fire at all, the landlord said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind, not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
My boy, said the landlord, you'll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.
Landlord, I whispered, that aint the harpooneer is it?
Oh, no, said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't, he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare.
I began to feel suspicious of this dark complexioned harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on. Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees.
They seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale's mouth, the bar.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.
When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. And then I was another man, and he was still the same.
And then I was another man. That is the plain way to put it. Nothing happened to me that night. I got into a bed and a stranger got into the same bed, and by morning I was a different person, and the reason is not in anything he did. It is in the fact of the sleeping.
I have thought about this a great deal since, and I have never found a way to explain it that satisfies me, which is not the way of a man who has spent thirty years lying about the reasons for things. He had an arm thrown over me in the morning, and I did not take it away. That is the entire event. I did not take it away.
In the morning I came out and Queequeg was sitting on the edge of the bunk with his back to me, and I put my hand on his shoulder before I had thought about it. His skin was covered in writing. Look at his arm. It was sleeves of a script, the squares and triangles of it running up from the wrist to the shoulder, and no two parts of the same shade, and lying there on the patchwork counterpane it looked for all the world like another piece of the quilt, and it was only the weight of it that told me he was there at all.
I want to be exact about the mechanism of it, because everybody has this backwards. It is not that I saw a man covered in writing and accepted him. It is that I slept in a bed with him, and a man who sleeps in a bed with another man has been past the point of judgement, and by morning his arm was on me and I did not take it off. Whatever else is true about men and how quickly they decide things about each other, this much I know from my own body. It is slower than that. It is much slower than that. The decision was made at two in the morning while I was asleep and neither of us was there to make it.
Then he asked me, in the same easy tone in which he asked me what money was, whether I thought the harpoon used in catching whales was sharp. And I told him it was not sharp, but barbed, which is worse. And he said, yes, and then he reached over and took his harpoon out of the corner where he had propped it, and gave it to me to feel, and I felt the barbs come up under my thumb, and the point was not sharp, and the thing in my hand was not a fishing rod.
That was the moment the whole thing began, and nobody was present at the time. There was no thunder, and no music, and no oath taken by anybody. There was a man in a sail-loft in a New England town holding a harpoon upside down and not quite understanding it, and asking a stupid question, and being answered kindly by somebody who did not have the same idea of what a question is that I did.
The Spouter-Inn had a table and a fire and a bar and a pulpit in one long low building, and the whole of the whale voyage was decided inside it in the space of about eleven hours.
Now I want to tell you what the rest of the men were, because the ship was the argument and the crew was the argument, and if you want to know why a catastrophe happened you had better know who was standing on the deck when it did.
There is no end to the sea. That is the first thing. Every mile you go there is another, and it is the same sea, and the same whales, and men will pay a great deal of money to be told that there is an end to it somewhere. That is what the Nantucket men went down for, every year, in boats that cost more than a house, chasing something they could not catch and could not explain and could not put down. The law of the fishery gives it a shape. If you find a whale, the whale is yours. If you get a line in it first, it is yours, and if somebody else had it first and it comes to you, it is yours. That is the whole of the law, and it is very short, and it is very clear, and it settles every argument about money that will ever be had at sea.
The sea does not make men equal. It makes them hungry, and then it gives them a rule.
Ahab had been at sea forty years. That number did the damage. Not the losing of the leg; the forty years. A man does not get to forty years at sea by being reasonable, and by the time he has done it the thing has stopped being a pursuit and become a condition, and there is no more distance between a man and his purpose than there is between a man and his own name.
I understood none of this then. I want to be plain about that, because it would be easy to pretend I understood, and it would be a lie and it would make everything after it into a lesson, and it was not a lesson. It was a thing that happened to a great many people, and I was the one who got away to write it down.
What I want you to understand, and what took me thirty years to understand, is this. Not that Ahab was mad, which is a word that explains nothing. That a crew of men followed him for three years across six oceans toward something that was not going to be found. That they were not deceived by him; they were not under his power; they were men who had looked at what he was looking at and wanted it too.
And that is the thing nobody tells you about the sea. It does not need to deceive you. It will hand you something real, and be silent, and wait.
Then, after the year had turned and I had been at sea some weeks, I came to a place where a man stood at the head of a barrel with a harpoon and told us what we were after, and I understood the rest of it.
I will tell you what a whale is, before I tell you what happened, because the second story is unintelligible without the first.
And it is a strange thing to have to say, that after a month of whaling I am not sure that any of us knew what a whale was, including the men who had been killing them for a living for thirty years. There was a chart in the cabin. There was a book about them that a man had written who had never seen one. There was a set of terms for every part of them, and the terms were good, and they made a shape that you could carry in your head, and it was a lie in the way that all arrangements of words are a lie when they are used for a thing that will not hold still.
What a whale actually is, is not a fact about an animal. It is a fact about you. That is the thing I did not know and could not have been told, because it is only true at the end of the voyage. By then you are not the same man who left, and the whale is not the same whale, and the argument between the two of you has been going on for three years in about four hundred thousand spoken words, most of them shouted, some of them not spoken at all.
You can learn the parts. You can learn that it is warm-blooded, which no fish is, and that it breathes air the way you do, through a hole out of the top of its head, and that it has a chamber in there like a church, and that it comes up to the surface to think. You can learn all of this and it will not help you, and it is all true.
You can learn that it is not a fish at all, which was the great discovery of my own century and the reason men had spent a hundred years being surprised that a whale had a mother. It breathes air. It is warm. It brings its young into the world alive, the way we do, not in eggs, not in spawn, and the little one comes out of the mother as large as a man, and there is nothing about the way it is made that you could hold up to anybody who came from a tree.
You cannot get your mind round that. You cannot get your mind round an animal the size of a church that is warmer than you are, and kinder, and lives in a world with no night in it and no cold in it and no thought of going anywhere at all, and has no enemies except one, and that one is us.
And then you are out there in a boat with a line in it, and you find out which part of your education was real.
Here is what the books did not tell me. They told me it was a fish and I was wrong; they told me it was a mammal and I was right; and neither of those was the information that mattered. The information that mattered was this: it is bigger than the boat.
Not larger. Bigger. In the sense that a cathedral is bigger than the door of it. You can be in the same ocean with a thing and be in a different world from it, and there is no way to get from one to the other, and the whole of the men who go out after whales go out knowing this and go anyway.
I did not know it for a fact on the first day. I knew it in the only way it can be known, which is to have a line in your hand and feel something at the other end of it that you are entirely unable to hold in your mind, and to go on holding the line.
That is the whole book. Everything else is weather.
I have said I would tell you what a whale is, and I have not told you, and you will not notice that I have not, because you will have been thinking about the ship.
So let me try once more, in the only terms I have left, and then I will go on to the wreck, which is the part you came for.
There was a reason they called it cetology, which is the science of whales, and they called it a science, and I want to tell you what the science was, because it is the most honest thing anybody ever said about them. The men who knew most about whales said they knew nothing.
Scoresby, who had been out here and had the best of it, said that no branch of zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology. Beale, who had been a surgeon on a whaler and had written the best book on the subject, said there was not his intention to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families, and then said the only true thing anybody had said on the subject: utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal.
The great Cuvier said the whale was a fish. John Hunter, who dissected them, said something else. And between the two of them there was nothing, and every generation since has been filling the space with better words instead of better knowledge, and there is still no answer to the question, and there never will be, because the question is not well formed.
And this is what I have come to think, and I put it plainly because it is the only thing I know that the men with the books did not know: there is no answer to the question of what a whale is, because it is the wrong question, and it has been the wrong question for three hundred years, and it is the wrong question for the same reason it is wrong for a man to ask what a man is.
A whale is not a thing that can be defined, because it is not a kind. It is a whole world, and a whole world cannot be put inside a definition any more than a country can. The books classify them by size, into the folio, the octavo, and the duodecimo, and that is true and useless, exactly like dividing men by height. When the sperm whale comes up out of the water off the Line, it is not a large animal that has come up. It is another climate that has come up. And the men who strike it do not go back a different man because they have killed something. They go back a different man because they have been down into another country and come out again.
And you cannot make this small again. That is what I did not understand at seventeen and could not have understood. Everything that happened afterward happened because I did not understand it.
One of the men in the boat with me in the first days was a small man who did not talk much, and who used to look at the water in a way I did not then understand. He was from the Cape and his name was Stubb. He had a pipe and he had a song for everything, and he was the calmest man I have ever been on a boat with, in circumstances that would have made me insane. And I asked him once, in the first week, how he could stand it. How he could stand being out there in a small boat with a whale coming up.
He thought about it a while, and then he said that he had been doing it a long time, and that the thing that had happened to him was that he had stopped thinking about it. And that he had found, when he stopped thinking about it, that he was happy. And that this was a very lucky thing that had happened to him and that it had probably ruined him for anything else.
I did not understand that then. I think about it now more than I think about the wreck.
And there was a man named Ahab, who had been out here forty years and who had lost a leg. And a man named Starbuck, who was the first mate and who had a boy of his own waiting at home. And a man named Queequeg, who was a harpooneer and who had come three thousand miles and had an arm made of writing. And a black man who went by the name of Fedallah, who never slept and watched the sea from the masthead by night, and who everybody said was not quite right in the head.
The cook was an old black man named Fleece, who was ninety years old and who could not cook. Not would not not cook. Could not. He cut the meat wrong and boiled it wrong and served it up wrong, and Stubb gave him a lecture on the deck of a whaler about how to cook a piece of whale, standing in the middle of the crew in the middle of the night, and it was one of the funniest and most dreadful things I have ever seen, and I have never been able to forget it, and I have never been able to work out whether he was laughing.
That is the crew. That is who it was. Thirty men and more. A carpenter who made a leg out of a piece of wood and a nail for a man who could not be saved. A blacksmith who made the irons that went into the whale. Two mates who did not agree about anything. And thirty men, most of whom had no particular reason to be there at all, and who went there anyway.
That last part is the one I cannot make fit into anything. Thirty men with no reason. Not one crusade. Not one protest. They went because it was a long voyage and there was money at the end of it, or because they were young and the sea looked bigger from the shore, or because they had been in a place where there was nothing and this was the next place. And then somewhere out in the Pacific the reason stopped mattering, and they were all doing one thing together, and they could not have told you what it was.
Look at it from the water. A ship, a small one, and in it thirty men, all pulling in the same direction for a thing they cannot see. That is what a mob is. That is what a religion is. That is what a country is. There is no difference between them except that one of them has a name for what it is doing, and the other three have to write a book about it afterwards to work out what happened.
And the sea goes on. And a year later another thirty men go out.
Here is the whole of what I saw, and I set it down plainly because I have no time for a fancier way of putting it. In a place called the Pacific, which is a real ocean and not the largest thing in the world but very large, a ship was put out of commission by an event that nobody aboard had any hand in. Thirty men and one leg between them went down. Of the people who went down, one was a man who had been out here forty years and who had lost a leg and who had a wife at home. One was a man who had a son. One was a black man from the Cape who had been on the water for forty years and who never once went below the horizon.
And there was one man who got away. He was a young man who had signed on for three-and-a-half shares out of a full hundred, which on the best day of the voyage was about enough money to buy a coat. He lay for a day and a night in a black water under a black sky with a half-dead man beside him, and there was nothing whatever to be done about any of it.
And of all of them, he was not the strongest and not the purest and not the best, and he had not been chosen for anything. He had been chosen by a series of accidents, each of which was smaller than the one before, the last of which was that he had gone to bed early.
I have had thirty years to think about what that means, and I have come to the following conclusion, which I set down without apology because I do not have a better one.
What survives a catastrophe is not the worthy and not the strong. What survives is whatever was standing slightly outside of it, for whatever reason, at the moment the two collided.
And that is not a lesson about virtue. It is a fact about how catastrophes work, and it is exactly the sort of fact that people do not want to hear, because it means that every one of us is walking about on ground that is thin, and we do not know the thickness of it, and the thickness is not a matter of character.
I found that out on the water and I have been carrying it since, and it is the reason I can sit down and write this, and the reason I start every time with my own name.
Not because I was brave. Because I was asleep.
And that is the only way anybody ever survives anything, and I have never been able to get past it, and I do not think it is meant to be got past. It is just true, and it is a very strange thing to have to say, and it is the one sentence in this account that I would ask anybody to argue with if they wanted to argue.
You have been listening to a man talk about the sea for some minutes now, and you have not heard the whale described, because the whale cannot be described, and the reason is the reason the whole book exists. But if you want to know what a whale is, you have to know how to ask the question.
Ask it this way. There is a man in a boat on the Pacific, and a white thing comes up out of the water where he is. It is white. That is the first thing about it, and it is the last thing, and if you take hold of that one fact and never let it go you will have understood more about the sea than all the books together.
In a hundred years of men writing about whales, nobody has written down the whale and nobody ever will, and I did not think of that sentence at seventeen and I thought of it standing in a boat with a line in my hand and an old man watching the water.
Here is the whole story, then, and it is short enough to hold in the head.
A man went to sea because he wanted to see the watery part of the world. He found a ship. The ship had a captain who had been at sea forty years and had lost a leg to a whale and wanted to kill that whale and only that whale. The captain told the men about it. The men agreed with him. That is the whole of the mechanism of the catastrophe. Nothing else happened. There was no conspiracy, there was no madness that can be named, there was no evil man. There was a man who wanted one thing very badly for a very long time, and thirty men who agreed with him because he said it with conviction and they were tired, and that is a thing that has happened in every country that has ever existed and it will happen again this year.
They sailed for three years. They killed every whale they could find, and killed them well, and made a great deal of oil, and by the end of it they had a ship full of oil and a captain who was still not satisfied. And the oil was in the hold, and it was worth more than everything else they had, and the captain said it was worth nothing.
Because the reason they were there had been one whale, and they had not found him, and the captain had understood the arithmetic. Thirty men and two mates and five harpooneers had agreed to go out for one whale, and had agreed to kill all the whales they met along the way to get at him, and the whaling had been the price of the hunt, and there was still one whale to be taken, and now there was a ship full of oil that they could not sell, because the sale would have meant going home.
That is what happened. Not madness. Arithmetic.
And the men who had agreed to it were not to blame, and neither was Ahab, and the only person in that story who was right was a man named Starbuck, who stood on a deck in the Pacific and said out loud, in front of the only witness who was still alive to hear it, that it was not too late, even now, on the third day, to stop. And he said the true thing, the whole thing, the only diagnosis that was ever offered:
See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!
Read that sentence again. That is the entire catastrophe in eleven words, and they were said by the man who had the least to gain by saying them, on the third day, when it was already too late, and nobody on earth heard them but me.
And I did not act on them either.
I have had thirty years to say why, and I have a reason, and the reason is not flattering, and I am going to give it because this is the only place I am ever going to be able to tell it.
I did not act on them because I was twenty-two years old, and because the whale was still in front of me, and because I was in the middle of the ocean, and because the sentence would have required me to do something I had never done in my life, which is to turn around.
That is all. That is the whole reason. Not cowardice; I want to be exact, because cowardice is a story and this was not a story. Turning around requires you to know what you are turning back to, and I did not know, and neither did anybody else on that ship. There was nothing to turn back to. There was a young man with no money and no trade and no reason to be anywhere in particular, and the world behind him was a place he had left because it had nothing in it, and it was not going to have anything in it tomorrow either.
So he stayed.
And that is what I would say to anybody who asks me what it is like to have been on the Pequod. It is like being in a town where everybody is going one way, and you know it, and you have no destination of your own, and so you go with them. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is how streets fill up. It is how crowds happen. It is not a special condition of men at sea. I have seen it on land since, in other clothes, in other decades, and it always looks the same from the inside, and it never once looks like madness to the man in it.
The Pequod's captain did not have a following because he was persuasive. He had a following because he was certain, and because certainty in a group is contagious in a way that argument is not, and because thirty men who are tired will take the certainty of a man who is not tired and use it as a spare leg to stand on.
And this is the thing I want to leave in your mind, if you take one thing out of this account. The apocalypse of the Pequod did not come from outside. It was manufactured, entirely, out of an agreement, in a cheap inn, in about eleven hours, by men who all of them, at the moment they made it, thought they were doing something reasonable.
Which brings me to the part of this I have not been able to put down in twenty years.
I do not remember the wreck. That is the truth and I have stopped trying to hide it. I was in it and I have the ordinary souvenirs of it, a rope, a leg, an hour of clear water in the sun with nothing moving, and after that there is nothing at all. I have been told what happened by men who were not there and by men who were there and were elsewhere, and I have read it, and I cannot make it stand up as memory. It comes to me now the way a place you lived as a child comes to you, which is to say in pieces that do not join, with the light wrong.
What I have instead is this. The last clear thing. A whale came up, enormous and white, out of the Pacific, and it had a great many people on it, and they had all agreed to be there, and I was one of them.
That is the whole of what I saw and the whole of what I know, and I have never been able to improve on it, and I have never been able to explain why it has taken me this long to say it.
I was not a hero. I do not claim to have been on the side of the angels, because there were no angels on either side, and the angels, if there were any, were watching, and the watching is the thing that lasts.
Because here is what nobody tells you about the end of the world: when it comes, it is not loud, and it is not sudden, and there is no moment at which you know. It is quiet, and it takes years, and everybody in it is busy, and the whole thing runs on ordinary decisions made by ordinary people on ordinary days, and at the end there is a moment on a boat when the rope stops paying out and you look up and the thing you have been following all your life has been there the whole time, bigger than the boat.
And the whale was not bigger than the boat. That is the part I got wrong when I was young. The boat is always smaller than the thing you are in. The water is always bigger than the boat. That is not the news. The news is what we do about it.
I have written this out at the end of a long life, and I have no reputation to protect and no party to keep, and I am telling you the thing that cost me everything to learn.
There is a ship. It is very small. It is going out over very deep water, and there are a good many people in it, and all of them have agreed to be there, and not one of them is lying to anybody.
And out in front of the ship there is something enormous and white that has been there all along, and the ship is going toward it because the ship decided to, and it is not coming back, and the sea is not going to stop it.
And nobody on that ship is going to be able to say afterward that they did not know.
And here is the thing I have never been able to get past, and I will put it plainly because everything after it depends on it.
So they put me in the boats. There were four boats on a whaler, three of them went out for the fish and one stayed with the ship, and the men who stayed aboard were the men who were not wanted in the boats. That is what I was, for a while. And that is where I learned the only useful thing anybody taught me on that ship, which was that a man who is not in the boat is a man with nothing to do but watch, and that a man with nothing to do but watch will learn more in a week than a man in the boat learns in a year.
The boats went out. And here is the method of it, because the method is the argument.
You row out. You sit low, so that the gunwale is level with the sea, because a whale sees a boat as a shape on the water and does not always see the shape of a man. You go out in a circle, wide, so that the current does not tell the fish which way you came from. You go slowly, because a whale can hear a rowlock, and men used to row with greased blocks to keep the noise down. And when it comes, you do not row at it. You sit and wait.
And then the line goes into it, and the boat is going four miles an hour, and the men in it are silent, because a whale under a harpoon will run down the line and feel what is at the other end of it, and if it finds six men it will go straight at them. That is why the boats are so quiet. It is not discipline and it is not fear. The fish can tell how many are in the boat.
That is the part of it I could not have invented, and I did not, and it is the reason I have never been able to write about the sea as though it were a story about men. The men are passengers. They are passengers in a world that was here first and will be here after, and the whole of their business is to learn the manners of it fast enough to be allowed to stay.
Then the sea showed them what it had.
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more the universal cannibalism of the sea, all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this, and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land, and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life.
That is the passage I would give to anybody who wants to know what the world was like before we arrived, and it is worth reading twice, because the man writing it is not describing the sea. He is describing the fact that the sea was full before we got there and was not waiting on us, and that everything in it was already going about its business, and that our arrival was an event in the history of that ocean and not the other way round.
And the sentence in the middle of it, the one about a green and docile earth and a soul with an island in it, is the truest thing anybody wrote about me, and I did not understand it until I was the only one left floating in it.
I did not understand that at the time. I was busy being one of the thirty.
Then, one night, in about the middle of the voyage, I came up on deck and there was a young man standing on the forecastle rail with his back to me, and he was not looking at anything. He was a small boy, a black boy, a boy of about sixteen, and they called him Pip, which was short for Pippin, and he had a tambourine he was not playing. He had been in a boat with Stubb and he had been dropped out of it, and he had been in the water a long time, and the sea had given him back, and he had been asleep for a day and a half.
There are men aboard who take in the shipkeepers, the ones not wanted in the boats, and a boy who is small and frightened is exactly what they take. He had been put in as a spare because he was spare. And then the whale had struck the boat, and the line had gone taut, and Stubb had cut it.
I want to be exact about Stubb here, because it is the kind of thing that gets told wrong. Stubb did not enjoy it. Stubb did not hate it either. Stubb made the only decision available to him in about half a second, and he made it the way a man makes a decision at sea, which is without any argument in it at all. The line was in the whale and the line was around a black boy and there was one of them he was going to lose.
He said one word, and then the whale was gone and the boy was in the boat.
And after that, the boy could not stop crying. Not for long, and not loudly, but for hours, and then for weeks, and then for the rest of his life, in the way that a thing like that goes on in a man who has no way of putting it down. And people on that ship told him, quite kindly, that he was not to take it so hard, and that it was an accident, and that the whale had gone anyway.
And he said, over and over, for days, that he was going to desert Ahab. Not run. Desert. He said it the way a man says a thing he has thought about for a long time. He said that when the whale was killed he was going to walk away, and that he would rather have been in the water again.
And then, a little while afterward, he went and sat down next to Ahab and stayed there.
I have never been able to account for that, and I have stopped trying, and I am the man who should know. It is the only thing on that ship that I could not have predicted and could not have explained afterward. Everything else on that ship follows from what the men believed. Pip did not follow from anything.
You want to know what survives a catastrophe. I will tell you, and it is not what anyone would like to hear. It is not the strongest and not the purest and not the best. It is whatever was standing a little outside of it, for no reason at all, at the moment the two things collided.
And I have had thirty years to work out what to do with that, and here is what I have done with it. I have taken it as a fact about the size of ground people are standing on, and not as a fact about anybody.
Because that is the actual scale of it. Not one man in thirty being noble while the rest are fools. Every one of them on that ship, every ordinary man in that boat, was one small piece of luck away from being the one who was under the water, and most of them were several pieces away, and the whole arithmetic of who died and who lived came down to where people happened to be standing and how tired they were and which rope was in their hands.
I have thought about this a great deal and I have never been able to make it into a lesson. A lesson says: be good and you will be saved. There is no such rule. A lesson says: be watchful. And I was not watchful; I was twenty-two and asleep. A lesson says: be loved. Pip loved that old man and it put him in the water anyway.
What it actually is, is this. The ground is thinner than anybody tells you. Nobody has a claim on it. And you get to keep it this morning.
I have never found a way to say that without sounding like a coward, so I will say it another way. If I had been braver I should have been dead, and I was not brave. If I had been better I should have been dead, and I was not better. The thirty men who went down with that ship were not worse than the man who got away, and any account of this that requires them to have been worse is an account that is not about the sea.
Now the voyage itself, because it was three years long and almost nothing happened in it, and I want to describe the nothing, because the nothing is the whole story.
We went out of the harbour on a Christmas Day. Three days out we were at the equator, and then we crossed the Cape of Good Hope, and then we went south, far south, to a place called the Nantucket Shoals, which is where the whales were, and which was four thousand miles from anywhere and further from help.
And there we stopped. And that is what nobody understands about whaling. The ship went out twenty thousand miles to find a whale. Then it stopped. Then it waited. And then when a whale was reported, in about forty minutes a great deal happened, and then the ship stopped again for three weeks.
For three years, a ship of thirty men sat in one place on the Pacific and waited for an animal to come to it. And the waiting was the life. The waiting was better than any shore, better than any town, better than anything any of them had known, and they were men who had been poor and cold and bored and they spent three years being warm and comfortable and bored in a way that put them all to sleep.
I have never seen men so contented and never understood it so well. They were living the only life that any of them had ever wanted. The whales came in from the north in bands, in February, and then they went, and the ship went south with them and waited again, and in between the ship was the whole world, and they had rigged it up with things they had made out of spare timber because they were going to be in it a long time.
Nobody was saving for anything. Nobody had anywhere to be. A man could stand at the rail for an hour and not be bored, because there was something coming that he was waiting for, and a man who is waiting for something is not idle, whatever the rest of the world thinks about it.
And this, I think, is the part of the story that has been left out of the story. It is generally told as a story about a mad captain. And it may be; I will not argue with you about Ahab, who is a very particular man and not a general type. But the three years on the Pacific with nothing to do is the part I remember, and everybody was happy.
And it was that happiness that made the end possible.
And you cannot understand what happened afterward if you do not understand that. A man who has spent three years in a state of perfect contentment and then is told to stop does not leave the ship. He cannot leave the ship. There is nowhere to go and no reason to go. If you have been happy for three years and somebody tells you that the reason for it is going to be taken away from you, you do not hear that as bad news, because there is nothing in your life for it to be bad news about.
That is the trap. It is a very good trap and it works on almost everybody. You do not have to be trapped by a man. You can be trapped by three years of being all right, which is what most of us are actually trapped by, and most of us never notice because we like it.
Ahab had been at it forty years. That is the length of time it takes. Not a month, not a year. Forty years of the same work, and then a leg, and then the leg made it into a reason, and then the reason made it into a purpose, and then the purpose ate the next forty years of his life and Starbuck's and mine.
And I want to say this about Ahab plainly, because he is the man everybody remembers and nobody understands.
He did not know he was doing it. I want that first. He was not a villain and he was not a madman and he was not obsessed in any way you could see from outside. On the first day I saw him he came out of his cabin and looked at the men and asked them whether they would come with him and hunt a whale, and when they said they would he shook their hands, and that is the whole of his recruitment. There is no scene, no speech, no persuasion.
What happened to him was this, and I have thought about it for thirty years and I believe it is exact. He decided, somewhere around the age of a man of forty, that the thing that had happened to him was not a thing that had happened to him. It was a thing that had happened to the world. And he was the one it had happened to.
And then, and I say this without any irony, he was wrong about one thing and right about everything else.
He was right that a whale had taken a leg off him. He was right that the sea does this, and does not apologise, and does not learn, and will do it again on the next man who goes out with a line. He was right about that when nobody would listen to him and when the only people who agreed with him were the men who worked for him and would have agreed with anything.
And he was wrong that it was the same whale, which is the whole of his error and the whole of the catastrophe, and I will come back to it, because I have been wrong in the same way and so has everybody who ever went looking for an explanation.
Look at what the whale is in that sentence. Not a man, not a devil, not a judgement. A whale. It had a leg in it that had come off another man, and so it was the whale that had done it, and so it was the same whale, and so it could be killed and the thing could be undone.
That is not madness. That is how it works, in everyone. You do not get an explanation from the world, so you make one, and the one you make always has the same shape, whatever the particulars: something took something from me, and I will follow it, and if I catch it the account is squared.
I have caught myself doing it since. It is not a special kind of man. It is what happens when a person is hurt and has no other way to talk about it.
Now the crew, because they were the best part and the only part that was doing the right thing.
There was a first mate named Starbuck, out of Nantucket, a Quaker by descent, who was about forty and who had a boy at home he had not seen in three years. And he was not a weak man, and that is the thing; he had been in the extremity of the Southern fisheries and had come back, and I have never in my life seen anybody carry himself with more dignity than he did on that ship.
He was the only man aboard who was not afraid of anything, and he used it in exactly one way, which was to be the one who went and argued. He did not argue for his own life. I want to be exact, because it matters, because a reader is entitled to know that Starbuck was brave and that it made no difference at all.
He argued about the oil. On one occasion, in the middle of the Pacific, with the ship full and a good season's work in the hold, he went to Ahab and told him the truth: this is leaking, we are going to lose it, we have to stop and do something. And he was right, and it was losing them the voyage's profit, and Ahab told him to let it leak.
And Starbuck said a thing that I did not understand until years afterward. He said: the only real owner of anything is the ship's commander. And Ahab said his conscience was in the ship's keel.
And that is the entire religious content of that book, and I have never found it better stated anywhere in my life: a man's conscience is his ship. Not his heart, not his church, not his intentions. His ship. What he is made out of and what he has done to it. Ahab said it and he believed it and he was entirely correct, and it is the reason he could not be talked out of anything, because he was not arguing from a position that was separate from his own body.
And the second mate was a Cape Cod man named Stubb, who had a song for everything and a pipe and no fear of anything at all, and who was the most cheerful man I ever met, and who did not want to kill a whale and was perfectly willing to do it every day of his life. He was, in the whole three years, the only person aboard who was having a good time, and I have thought since that he was also the only one who had not signed on to anything, and that is why.
He had never been in a boat that went to the bottom. He had never lost a leg. There was nothing in his past that was asking to be paid back. And that is not nothing, and I have never been able to stop noticing it. The men who were destroyed on that ship were all of them carrying something. The one man who was perfectly fine was carrying nothing.
And there was the harpooneers, and I will not insult them by calling them a chorus, because they are not a chorus, they are five men and they are strange.
There was a huge black man from the Cape who could not read and who had been coming out on these voyages since he was nine years old, and who took no notice of anybody. He had a wife and three children and he had never seen them since he was nine. He was a religious man and his religion had about four hundred saints in it. He was the only person on that ship who was not in the least disturbed by Ahab's purpose, because he was thinking about something else entirely.
There was a small man who was the best sailor in the boat and who had a way of singing that made the work go, and who was the first one in the water every time and the last one out. There was a man who was not entirely right in the head and who was known for that, and who had been at it so long that it had become a sort of steadiness.
And Queequeg. Of course.
And here is the thing about Queequeg that I have never been able to make fit into anything. A man comes three thousand miles across two oceans from an island in the South Seas, and it is a fair guess that in the whole of his life nobody ever protected him from anything, or explained to him why something had happened to him, or apologized. He was the crew of a boat belonging to somebody else on a journey somebody else wanted. And I want to tell you how the story treats him.
Nothing happens to him. For most of the book nothing happens to him. He is there, he is good at his work, he is the best harpooneer on the ship, and he is the one the reader is not supposed to be thinking about.
And then a man who has been to sea since he was nine years old, and who has four hundred saints, and who has never once been given a reason for anything, catches a fever in the hold of a whaler between the keel and the waterline, in a smell that cannot be described, working fourteen hours a day in the dark.
And when he thinks he is dying he asks for one thing, and the thing he asks for is a coffin.
Not a hammock, which is what you are given at sea, and which is the sea's way of putting you back in the water. He asks for a canoe. The kind they use in his own country, where they put the dead in a boat and send them out with the current, because his people believe the stars are islands.
And there is a scene where Starbuck and the carpenter build him a coffin out of spare timber in the middle of the night and he gets down out of his bunk and lies down in it and says goodnight to his friend.
And then he does not die.
He gets well. That is what happens. The fever breaks and he gets well and he comes back into the world and he is the same man, and nobody ever speaks about it again.
And I have never been able to get over it, and I am going to say the thing I think about it, and I have never said it out loud before. Everybody in that book asks him at some point why he is there. Starbuck tries to save his soul. Ahab notices him. The reader is told constantly that he is the strangest thing aboard.
And the one question nobody asks him is the one he asked himself, and it was whether he was going to be allowed to die properly.
A man whose whole world is not here. Who has no country he is inside of, no family he is inside of, nothing he can be buried inside of. And at the end of his life, in a hold, in the Pacific, on a ship run by men who were not his people, the single thing he asks for is that somebody build him the right box.
And they do. It is the one thing on that ship that was given to him, and it cost a night's work with a saw, and Starbuck built it himself.
And he does not need it in the end. And that is the cruelest and the best thing in the whole book, and I have never known what to do with it, and I have stopped trying.
If I had to say what a whale is, I would say it is that. That it is the size of the world and it has no particular interest in you, and that it can be very beautiful and it can kill everybody you love for no reason, and that it is not the point of the book.
The point of the book is a man in a box, asking for it.
Now the last part, and I will do it as briefly as I can.
We went out three years and we never saw the white whale at all until the last month, and when we saw it, it came up out of the Pacific in the last of the light on a day that was, and I will not exaggerate this, one of the most beautiful things a person can see. That is in the story. Everybody remembers that the whale is beautiful, and everybody treats it as an omen or a symbol or a piece of atmospherics, and it is neither, and it is the whole of the reason I am able to write this down.
It was beautiful the way an enormous thing is beautiful when it is not doing anything to you. It came up out of that water the way a mountain would come up out of cloud, and it was white, and it was much too big to be real, and it was the most alive thing any of us had ever seen.
And I remember, and I have never told this to anybody, that I was not afraid, and that I was not even much impressed, and that what I felt was something much worse than either, which was that the sight of it made everything else on that ship suddenly look extremely small and temporary, including the oil in the hold and the agreement we had all made.
That is what a whale is. It is a thing that makes the rest of your life look like an arrangement, because it is, and you knew it all along.
And it did not attack us. I want to say that, because people who have not read it and hear the story assume the whale came for them, and everybody in that boat went for it, every man, on the orders of one man, and the whale went about its own business the whole time.
What happened was arithmetic, and I have already given you the arithmetic. They had agreed to go out for one whale. They killed everything else along the way, and made a great deal of oil, and by the end there was a ship full of oil that could not be sold, because selling it would have meant going home.
That is the whole of it. Thirty men had signed on to kill one whale, and had killed a great many others to get at him, and the whaling had been the price of the hunt, and the price had been paid, and the hunt was not over, and the oil was worthless to them, and one of them said so out loud.
And the man who said it was right, and I was there, and I have thought about it for thirty years, and here it is.
The oil was the alibi. That was what the whaling was for. Nobody got on a whaler because they wanted to kill one whale. They got on it because they wanted a job that paid, and there was no job that paid, and this one did. And the man in the cabin wanted one whale. And so the two reasons lived together on that ship for three years, each one pretending to be the other, and neither of them could be dropped.
The whale was not the reason anybody was there. The oil was the reason the whale was allowed to be the reason.
And when the whale finally came up out of the water and was there, in the open, at last, in the one hour of the voyage in which the entire reason for the voyage could be finished, it turned out that the two reasons could not both be satisfied, and the oil lost.
Not the whale. The oil.
I have never been able to explain to anybody how shocking that is. Three years, and a great many dead whales, and a ship full of treasure, and the treasure was the thing that had to be thrown away.
And that is the apocalypse. Not a monster. An argument that turns out to have been a lie about its own reasons, and a man who finds that out, and chooses.
Now. Here is what happened, and I am going to tell it plainly, because I have been told it and I have read it, and it is not difficult, and I am not going to be one of those people who acts as though it were too terrible to be said out loud.
Ahab was in a boat. The whale came. It was struck. And in the middle of it, the line went round and caught the old man's neck and pulled him under, and he went down alive, and that was the end of him, in the way that everything on that ship ended, which was not with any ceremony at all.
That is what happens. There is no scene. A man is doing the last thing he ever does, and the thing he is doing is the thing that is killing him, and it does not take longer than a rope takes.
And the rest of it was the sea doing what it had been doing for three years, which was waiting.
The ship sank in the Pacific Ocean, with thirty men in it, on a night when the weather was fine.
I have no more to say about that than that.
But here is the part I want to leave you with, and it is why I have written all this.
When it went, the thing on the bottom was a ship with thirty men in it, and there was one man alive, floating in a circle in the black water on the wreckage, in the dark, in the middle of the Pacific, with an old man's hat on his head.
He was the one who had got into the water. Not by anything. He was standing on something at the time.
And he lay on a piece of the boat and looked at a whale, which was going away from him, at a distance, into a sea that had no light in it.
And the whale went.
I have thought about that a great deal, and it is the only part of the story I am able to make any use of, and I want to be careful with it, because a sentimental reading is available and it is false.
The whale did not save him. There is no reading in which the sea has mercy, and I will not offer one. The whale was going away because it had other business, and it would have done the same to any man, and the reason he was not in the water with the rest of them has nothing to do with the whale at all.
It is that the catastrophe was not one thing. It was an agreement, made by thirty men in a cheap inn, in eleven hours, over three years, and every one of them went into the water with a piece of it still in his pocket. And the ship was not an object. It was the thirty men, and it was the agreement, and it went down in three pieces at three different times, and I was on the second piece.
And that is the whole of the theology of it, and I have never been able to improve on it.
The thing survives that was not on the ship.
Not the doctrine, which was never ours. Not the voyage, which was somebody else's arrangement. Not the whale, which was there before all of us and will be there after. Not the captain, who was a good captain, and had been good at it for forty years, and who would have taught any of us if we had let him.
What survived was the part of the world that was not made of anything, and never had been, and had no reason to be destroyed: the water, and the cold, and a wind that came from somewhere, and a sail that somebody else had built, on a ship that came to where I was drifting because it was looking for a ship.
That is what the story is. It is a story about a thing that a man made of agreements, and how it went into the water, and about the fact that he was not in it.
And I have had thirty years to make that into something I could say at a dinner table, and I have never once managed it, because it does not improve. The more I have thought about it the less it will hold up.
So this is what I have instead.
I got out. That is the fact. I got out of the water, and I am old, and I have never been able to work out what it was for, and I have never once said a sentence about it at a dinner table that was any good, and I have had a great many dinner tables.
And this is my advice and I am aware that it is not advice anybody can use.
Do not go looking for the thing in the dark. Every man who went out on that ship was looking for something in the dark, and the dark did not care, and they found out that the not-caring is all that a catastrophe is.
But be in the boat when it happens. That is all. Be in the boat. It is a stupid piece of advice and it is the only one I have that is true, and I have given it to nobody, because I have never been able to work out how to say it without sounding as though I am congratulating myself, and I did not congratulate myself at the time, and I have spent thirty years trying to go back and find a version of myself who did deserve it, and there is not one.
I was asleep. Somebody was asleep. And the sea made absolutely no difference between him and the thirty men, and it was asleep all night, and it went on doing exactly what it was doing while he was under it.
And if you want to know what a whale is, I will tell you the last thing I know about it, and then I am finished.
A whale is not a thing that is out there. A whale is the size of the world, and it does not know you are in it, and that is the whole of the difference between you and it, and it took thirty men and a ship three years to establish that difference, and they did not survive establishing it.
And there were some of us on the water who got to find out what it was like to be a very small thing in an enormous place, and to find out that we did not have to be brave, or good, or special, or anything at all, except present.
That is the book. That is all of it. Everything else is a whale.
I have not seen the white whale since. It is out there. It is still out there, and it is still too big, and it is still going about a business that has nothing to do with us, and if you were to go out and look for it you would find it, and that is the trouble, and you should not.
Look at the water instead. Look at the water.
I have done it for thirty years. That is what I have instead of an answer. There is a great deal out there and most of it is not coming for you, and the whole of your work in this world is to be in a boat when it does.
If you want to know what survives, it survives anyway, and it is not on the ship, and it was there before the ship, and it will be there after. And you are in it. That is the good news, and it is the only part of this that anybody needs, and it has nothing to do with me.
That is all. I have said it as well as I know how, and I have not said it well, and I would not know where to begin to.
It was the water. I will leave it at that. It was the water, and it was not on the ship.