The Heathen Page #2

"The Heathen" by Jack London is a short story that explores themes of love, morality, and the clash between civilization and primal instincts. The narrative follows the complex relationship between a white man, a Native American woman named Kaviak, and the expectations of their respective cultures. Set against the backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, the story delves into the challenges they face as they confront societal norms and personal desires. London's vivid descriptions and compelling characters highlight the tension between raw human emotion and the constraints imposed by society, ultimately questioning what it means to be civilized.

								

off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a clean
breach. The life-lines were only for the strong and well, and little
good were they even for them when the women and children, the bananas
and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade boxes, the sick and the dying, were
swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.

The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne's decks flush with the rails;
and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the
miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human
torrent. They came head-first, feet-first, sidewise, rolling over and
over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again one
caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope; but the weight of the bodies
behind tore such grips loose.

One man I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the
starboard-bitt. His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming,
sprang on top of the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah
Choon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump
ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a
piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in
behind it. But a strapping Raratonga vahine (woman)--she must have
weighed two hundred and fifty--brought up against him, and got an arm
around his neck. He clutched the kanaka steersman with his other hand;
and just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard.

The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway between
the cabin and the rail turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away
they went--vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman: and I swear I saw Ah Choon
grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went
under.

The third sea--the biggest of the three--did not do so much damage. By
the time it arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps
a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were rolling
about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as did
the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl-buyers and
myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children
into the cabin, and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures
in the end.

Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for
the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one
describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the
clothes off our bodies. I say tore them off, and I mean it. I am not
asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and
felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through
it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was a
monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it
increased and continued to increase.

Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this
sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any
other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be
invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand.
Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like.

Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible,
impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every
molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the
multitudinous impact of mud-banks. No; it is beyond me. Language may be
adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot
possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.
It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not
attempting a description.

I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down
by that wind. More: it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up
in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on through that portion of
space which previously had been occupied by the air.

Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on
the Petite Jeanne something I had never before seen on a South Sea
schooner--a sea-anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which
was kept open by a huge hoop of iron. The sea-anchor was bridled
something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites
into the air, but with a difference. The sea-anchor remained just under
the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular position. A long line, in
turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite Jeanne
rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was.

The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the
path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the
gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running-gear,
but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square in
front of the advancing storm-centre. That was what fixed us. I was in a
state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact
of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when
the centre smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There
was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening.

Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension,
withstanding the awful pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the
pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I was about to
expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom
composing my body was repelling every other atom and was on the verge of
rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment.
Destruction was upon us.

In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it
leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point
of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the centre
of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the
compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks
released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to
them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty
feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea
a man had ever seen.

They were splashes, monstrous splashes--that is all. Splashes that were
eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our
mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell
anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided. They rushed
together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand
waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of,
that hurricane centre. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was
anarchy. It was a hell-pit of sea-water gone mad.

The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The heathen told me afterward that he
did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten
into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to I
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