The Complete Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Illustrated Collectors Edition) (SF Classic)

By Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Rackham

Assembled for the first time is a complete collection of Edgar Allan Poe's science fiction stories. These sixteen tales include Poe's only novel 'Arthur Gordon Pym', which is filled with fantastical thoughts on life at the south polar region. 'The Unparalleled Adventures of Hans Pfall' involves space travel and aliens, 'Some Words with a Mummy' explores the realm of alternate history and suspended animation, while 'Eureka' introduces the big bang theory eighty years before its time. Known for his tales of horror, Edgar Allan Poe shaped the building blocks of science fiction. His scientific speculation was based on mid-nineteenth century theories and understandings, but he took them to levels that no one had ever dreamed possible. Poe's stories inspired Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to dream beyond the limits of science and technology, and they are essential to an understanding of the roots of science fiction. This 352 page collectors edition includes 34 illustrations, a biography, historical reviews, articles, and an introduction by Mark Rich.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Engage Books
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781926606552

Edgar Allan Poe

Dan Ariely is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and Sunday Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. Ariely's TED talks have over 10 million views; he has 90,000 Twitter followers; and probably the second most famous Behavioural Economist in the World after Daniel Kahneman.

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Historical Reviews

He is, perhaps, the most original writer that ever existed in America. Delighting in the wild and visionary, his mind penetrates the inmost recesses of the human soul, creating vast and magnificent dreams, eloquent fancies and terrible mysteries.

– George Lippard, 1843

Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power.

– James Russell Lowell, 1845

The writings of Mr Poe are a refreshment. . . . His narrative proceeds with vigor, his colours are applied with discrimination, and where the effects are fantastic they are not unmeaningly so.

– Margaret Fuller, 1845

You might call him ‘The Leader of the Cult of the Unusual’.

– Jules Verne, 1864

An enormously talented writer.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1873

"Through many a year his fame has grown,—

Like midnight, vast, like starlight sweet,—

Till now his genius fills a throne,

And nations marvel at his feet."

– William Winter, dedication of the Poe Memorial in Baltimore, 1875

Hunger was ever at his door, and he had too imperious a desire for what we call nowadays the sensational in literature.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, 1875

Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demonic undertone behind every page — and, by final judgement, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.

– Walt Whitman, 1882

This marvelous lord of rhythmic expression.

– Oscar Wilde, 1886

The human mind became, in his estimation, a treasure-house of undreamed-of possibilities, which was but the poet’s version of the value of the individual.

– The Atlantic Monthly, 1896

Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?

– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1909

Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries produced only beauty.

– George Bernard Shaw, 1909

Was ever any story-teller so versatile as Poe within his chosen field, so generally perfect in execution? Was any other nineteenth century writer so prepotent, so fertile in suggestion, so dominant over those who came after him?

– The New York Times, W. H. Babcock, 1909

The directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in either America or England.

– T. S. Eliot, 1919

Poe is hardly an artist. He is rather a supreme scientist.

– D. H. Lawrence, 1919

By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story.

– Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories, 1926

Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beaconlights in the province of the short story. . . . Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.

– H. P. Lovecraft, 1927

It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.

– Alfred Hitchcock, 1960

His portraits of abnormal or self-destructive states contributed much to Dostoyevsky, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his tales of the future lead to H. G. Wells, his adventure stories to Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson.

– W. H. Auden, 1966

Biography

Edgar Allan Poe

Painting by Oscar Halling

Edgar Poe

was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, to Elizabeth and David Poe. After the mother’s death, different families cared for the Poe children. Edgar was taken in by Frances and John Allan of Richmond, Virginia, and was renamed Edgar Allan. The tobacco merchant never legally adopted the boy.

Edgar attended school in Richmond and, in years 1815-20, in Scotland and England. Afterwards, Edgar resumed studies in Richmond, and entered University of Virginia in 1826, excelling in ancient and modern languages.

Although now wealthy, Allan refused to provide Poe with full funds for the university. To meet expenses, Poe gambled, adding to his difficulties. Unable to continue at Virginia, he enlisted, in 1827, in the U.S. Army, and was posted at Fort Independence, Boston Harbor. During this time his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, appeared, without winning attention. A second, in 1829, won a favorable review. By the time Poe published his third, in 1830, he had withdrawn from the military, and John Allan, already unsupportive, had severed relations.

Poe began residing in Baltimore with paternal aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, whom he would marry. After having stories published by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, Poe found significant affirmation of his talent when, in October, 1833, his story MS. Found in a Bottle won the $50 first prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter.

Poe soon began his association with The Southern Literary Messenger, in which Hans Phaall appeared. He served as editor and chief book-reviewer, resigning in 1837 over salary. After moving to New York, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published by Harper’s. In 1839, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two volumes.

In 1841 Poe became an editor of Graham’s Magazine, which published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, his first tale of ratiocination. Poe oversaw the magazine’s rapid rise in readership, before his resignation in 1842. In that year Virginia burst a blood vessel, from which she would never fully recover; and Poe met Charles Dickens. The following years saw alternations between artistic success and personal decline. In 1843, The Gold-Bug won for Poe a $100 prize from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. His 1844 hoax in the New York Sun about the first balloon-crossing of the Atlantic added to his fame.

He joined the New York Evening Mirror staff, and in its pages, in 1845, published The Raven, to great acclaim. He assumed editorship of the Broadway Journal that year, then ownership. Illness and hardship forced him to cease publication by 1846. The Poe household suffered greatly that year and the next, when Virginia died. Despite suffering from grave illness himself, Poe began work on cosmological theories, resulting in 1848’s Eureka.

Financial and resulting mental instability plagued Poe to the last. He was found delirious outside a polling booth in Baltimore, on October 3, 1849, possibly a victim of political hazing. He died October 7. His reputation nearly died as well, blackened by Rufus Griswold’s slanderous obituary.

Mark Rich

September 2009

Contents

Historical Reviews

Biography

To Science (A Poem)

Introduction

The Complete Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe

Shorter Works

1 MS. Found in a Bottle

2 The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion

3 The Island of the Fay

4 The Colloquy of Monos and Una

5 Astounding News! (The Balloon-Hoax)

6 A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

7 Mesmeric Revelation

8 The Power of Words

9 The Facts of M. Valdemar’s Case

10 Some Words with a Mummy

11 A Prediction

12 Mellonta Tauta

13 Von Kempelen and His Discovery

Longer Works

14 The Unparalleled Adventures of Hans Phaall

15 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

16 Eureka: A Prose Poem (Excerpts)

Appendix

Report on Poe’s Lecture on The Universe

Obituary

A Poem To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or deem thee wise?

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Has thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

– Edgar Allan Poe, 1829

Introduction

Poe’s Speculative Futures

Two centuries

after his birth, Edgar Allan Poe enjoys widespread and well-deserved fame for his tales of satire and black humor, his tales of mystery and detection, and his tales of terror.

Without Poe’s tales of ratiocination, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could never have created the character of Sherlock Holmes in the way he did. Without Poe’s poetry and fiction, Surrealism in France might have starved and withered for lack of adequate nourishment. Without Poe’s criticism, T.S. Eliot’s critical authority might never have achieved its crusty maturity.

And without Poe’s stories of the speculative future, Jules Verne would never have become the Jules Verne whose name still sells books – he of Around the World in Eighty Days and A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Many of Verne’s best-loved novels – his most imaginative and forward-looking – were directly inspired by Poe’s ideas; and most if not all were influenced by his example.

Given that the first American science fiction magazine’s masthead featured an image of Jules Verne reaching skyward from the grave, it seems doubtful Amazing Stories would have turned out to be the same, had Verne not produced his substantial body of imaginative work. And if Amazing Stories would have been different – if it, indeed, would have come into existence at all in the absence of Verne – what might have become of American science fiction as a whole? Would it have taken root with the vitality that it did?

Verne was an inspiration to American writers to work out the logical implications of their own most far-reaching dreams – thanks to Poe.

★ ★ ★

As would later writers of the imagination, Poe looked both to the near future and the far.

As a careful observer of scientific and technical progress, he imagined practical inventions nearly within reach – as in his story for the New York Sun, in 1844, describing a powered balloon flight across the Atlantic.

"If (as some assert) the ‘Victoria’ did not absolutely accomplish the voyage recorded, Poe would write later of the hoax, it will be difficult to assign a reason why she should not have accomplished it."

His near-future imaginings addressed geography and travel, as did his early story MS. Found in a Bottle. This particular story offers more than geographical adventure, however – for its narrator encounters an immense sea-going vessel unknown to Poe’s world, embodying a strange conception: an ocean-going ship that may have been literally alive. Poe’s considerably longer story of exploration, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, exerted special influence upon Verne, with its hauntingly strange ending at the Pole.

Poe was aware his efforts were new, in imaginative story-telling. Others before him had written imaginative journeys – even to the moon, which Poe tackled in Hans Pfaall. In moon journeys before his, Poe wrote, "the aim is always satirical; the theme being a description of Lunarian customs as compared with ours. In none, is there any effort at plausibility in the details of the voyage itself. ... In ‘Hans Pfaall’ the design is original, inasmuch as regards an attempt at verisimilitude, in the application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit,) to the actual passage between the earth and the moon."

Poe tackled many themes that would become commonplace in later imaginative fiction. Of the several stories describing global cataclysm in astronomical terms, the earliest was The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion – notable not only for its realistic depiction of cosmic catastrophe, but also for the notions that inspired Verne’s more comic Doctor Ox’s Experiment.

Some of Poe’s speculations may greatly surprise the reader, because of their Modern flavor. In one essay, The Island of the Fay, written to provide text beneath an illustrative plate, Poe describes our planet as one vast and sentient whole, anticipating the 20th-century Gaean theory. Just as startling is Poe’s statement and elaboration on the Butterfly Effect – no act is without infinite result – in The Power of Words. Poe imagined a future in which mathematicians would have full computational command of this effect – not anticipating, at least within this story, the wrench Chaos theory would throw into such works. This same story concludes, as hinted by its title, at the understanding that provided the underpinning for 20th-century Teilhardian notions, the literal power of words.

Even more astonishing are some of his astronomical speculations – which, for instance, come circling near the concept of the black hole in Mesmeric Revelation. In the amazing Eureka, Poe goes further and arrives, purely by means of logic, at the idea that such a compressed unity would be beyond the realm of matter. The notion of the Universe arising from such a unity – and then of there existing an oscillating relationship, between Universe and Unity – will further surprise those who regard such ideas as purely of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Poe was naturally interested in marvelous inventions, as well. Magnetically-powered ocean liners, high-speed trains, skyscrapers, and trans-oceanic cables were among them. Most impressively, however, is Poe’s realization that for a journey to be undertaken, in a practical way, beyond Earth’s atmosphere, some means of hermetically sealing the traveler in against airless space was necessary, along with some means of propagating atmosphere within the enclosed vehicle. Poe’s was a concept – a purely rational one – that anticipated the practical reality of the space capsule, and the philosophic notion of the ecosphere.

Poe held no spiritual beliefs, and looked down upon the mystical practices enjoying popularity in his time. Even so, he applied the same approach of verisimilitude, and of the hoax, in speculating about mesmerism as if factual. His use of religious notions, such as God or Angel, are also, as the reader will discover, rational and materialist.

★ ★ ★

The text-versions in this volume have been restored to close to their original published form, insofar as was possible. While there may be some youthful excesses – as in the comparative measure of a million times in one story, which Poe later and more cautiously revised to a hundred times – they reflect a youthful exuberance of expression worth preserving. Some original spellings (and all original word choices) are retained for their evocation of Poe’s times, as well.

Mark Rich

September 2009

MS. Found in a Bottle

1935 illustration by Arthur Rackham

One (1833)

MS. Found in a Bottle

A wet sheet and a flowing sea. – Cunningham

Of my country

and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodise the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. Beyond all things, the works of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age – I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the ravings of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.

After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18––, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I went as passenger – having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me like a fiend.

Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank.

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound.

One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N.W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below – not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed, every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears; but he paid no attention to what I said, and went below without deigning to give me a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

A wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends.

Artist unknown

The extreme fury of the blast proved, in a great measure, the salvation of the ship. Although completely water-logged, yet, as her masts had gone by the board, she rose, after a minute, heavily from the sea, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense pressure of the tempest, finally righted.

By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say. Stunned by the shock of the water, I found myself, upon recovery, jammed in between the stern-post and rudder. With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was at first struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were ingulfed. After a while, I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had shipped with us at the moment of our leaving port. I hallooed to him with all my strength, and presently he came reeling aft. We soon discovered that we were the sole survivors of the accident. All on deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept overboard; and the captain and mates must have perished as they slept, for the cabins were deluged with water. Without assistance, we could expect to do little for the security of the ship, and our exertions were at first paralyzed by the momentary expectation of going down. Our cable had, of course, parted like pack-thread, at the first breath of the hurricane, or we should have been instantaneously overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful velocity before the sea, and the water made clear breaches over us. The frame-work of our stern was shattered excessively, and, in almost every respect, we had received considerable injury; but to our extreme joy we found the pumps unchoked, and that we had no great difficulty in keeping free. The main fury of the Simoom had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the violence of the wind; but we looked forward to its total cessation with dismay; well believing that, in our shattered condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell which would ensue. But this very just apprehension seemed by no means likely to be soon verified.

For five entire days and nights – during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle – the hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equalling the first violence of the Simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest I had before encountered. Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S.E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. On the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon – emitting no decisive light. There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow unaccompanied by any ray. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, sliver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean.

We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day – that day to me has not yet arrived – to him, never did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in pitchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phosphoric sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed in the tropics. We observed too, that, although the tempest continued to rage with unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual appearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All around was horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. Superstition’s terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless, and securing ourselves, as well as possible, to the stump of the mizen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of ocean. We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation. We were, however, well aware of having made farther to the southward than any previous navigators, and felt extreme amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In the meantime every moment threatened to be our last – every mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm us. The swell surpassed anything I had imagined possible, and that we were not instantly buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the lightness of our cargo, and reminded me of the excellent qualities of our ship; but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot of way the ship made, the swelling of the black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross – at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.

Almighty God! see! see!

Artist unknown

We were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when a quick scream from my companion broke fearfully upon the night. See! see! cried he, shrieking in my ears, Almighty God! see! see! As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which rolled, as it were, down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship, of nearly four thousand tons. Although upreared upon the summit of a wave more than a million times her own altitude, her apparent size still exceeded that of any ship of the line or East Indiaman in existence. Her huge hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the customary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass cannon protruded from her open ports, and dashed from their polished surfaces the fires of innumerable battle-lanterns, which swung to and fro about her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane. When we first discovered her, her stupendous bows were alone to be seen, as she rose up, like a demon of the deep, slowly from the everlasting gulf beyond her. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled and tottered, and – came down.

At this instant, I know not what sudden self-possession came over my spirit. Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea. The shock of the descending mass struck her, consequently, in that portion of her frame which was already under water, and the inevitable result was to hurl me, with irresistible violence, upon the rigging of the stranger.

As I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about; and to the confusion ensuing I attributed my escape from the notice of the crew. With little difficulty I made my way, unperceived, to the main hatchway, which was partially open, and soon found an opportunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so I can hardly tell. A nameless and indefinite sense of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the ship had taken hold of my mind, was perhaps the principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to trust myself with a race of people who had offered, to the cursory glance I had taken, so many points of vague novelty, doubt, and apprehension. I therefore thought proper to contrive a hiding-place in the hold. This I did by removing a small portion of the shifting-boards, in such a manner as to afford me a convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the ship.

I had scarcely completed my work, when a footstep in the hold forced me to make use of it. A man passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait. I could not see his face, but had an opportunity of observing his general appearance. There was about it an evidence of great age and infirmity. His knees tottered beneath a load of years, and his entire frame quivered under the burthen. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of navigation. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more.

★ ★ ★

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul – a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never – I know that I shall never – be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense – a new entity is added to my soul.

★ ★ ★

It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus. Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate; it was no long while ago that I ventured into the captain’s own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall from time to time continue this Journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endeavour. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.

★ ★ ★

An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned Chance? I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me in a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word discovery.

Incomprehensible men!

1923 illustration by Harry Clarke

★ ★ ★

I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive – what she is, I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such shadows, as it were, of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago.

★ ★ ★

I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood has every characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended or swelled by any unnatural means.

In reading the above sentence, a curious apothegm of an old weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. It is as sure, he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of his veracity, as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.

★ ★ ★

About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction.

★ ★ ★

I mentioned, some time ago, the bending of a studding-sail. From that period, the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has held her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvas packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail booms, and rolling every moment her top-gallant yard-arms into the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind of a man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats, and forbidden to destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes from imminent and deadly peril to the only natural cause which can account for such effect. I must suppose the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or impetuous under-tow.

★ ★ ★

I have seen the captain face to face in his own cabin – but, as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or less than man, still, a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In stature, he is nearly my own height; that is, I mean, about five feet eight inches. He is of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkably otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon the face – it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which strikes upon my soul with the shock of a Galvanic battery. His forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the stamp of a myriad of years. His gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself – as did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold – some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue; and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile.

★ ★ ★

The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their figures fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.

His gray hairs are records of the past.

1856 illustration by Johann Friedrich Vogel

★ ★ ★

When I look around me I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any idea of which the words tornado and simoom are trivial and ineffective? All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.

★ ★ ★

As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current – if that appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong lashing of a cataract.

★ ★ ★

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge – some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor.

★ ★ ★

The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of hope than of the apathy of despair.

In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a crowd of canvas, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out of the sea! Oh, horror upon horror! – the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small – we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool – and amid a roaring and bellowing, and shrieking of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering – oh God! and –– going down!

Two (1839)

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion

Πυρ σοι προσοισω

I will bring fire to thee. – Euripides - Androm.

Eiros

. Why do you call me Eiros?

Charmion. So henceforward will you always be called. You must forget too, my earthly name, and speak to me as Charmion.

Eiros. This is indeed no dream!

Charmion. Dreams are with us no more; – but of these mysteries anon. I rejoice to see you looking life-like and rational. The film of the shadow has already passed from off your eyes. Be of heart, and fear nothing. Your allotted days of stupor have expired; and, to-morrow, I will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence.

Eiros. True – I feel no stupor – none at all. The wild sickness and the terrible darkness have left me, and I hear no longer that mad, rushing, horrible sound, like the voice of many waters. Yet my senses are bewildered, Charmion, with the keenness of their perception of the new.

Charmion. A few days will remove all this; – but I fully understand you, and feel for you. It is now ten earthly years since I underwent what you have undergone – yet the remembrance of it hangs by me still. You have not suffered all of pain, however, which you will suffer in Aidenn.

Eiros. In Aidenn?

Charmion. In Aidenn.

Eiros. Oh God! – pity me, Charmion! – I am overburthened with the majesty of all things – of the unknown now known – of the speculative Future merged in the august and certain Present.

Charmion. Grapple not now with such thoughts. To-morrow we will speak of this. Your mind wavers, and its agitation will find relief in the exercise of simple memories. Look not around, nor forward – but back. I am burning with anxiety to hear the details of that stupendous event which threw you among us. Tell me of it. Let us converse of familiar things, in the old familiar language of the world which has so fearfully perished.

Eiros. Most fearfully, fearfully! – this is indeed no dream.

Charmion. Dreams are no more. Was I much mourned, my Eiros?

Eiros. Mourned, Charmion? – oh deeply. To that last hour of all, there hung a cloud of intense gloom and devout sorrow over your household.

Charmion. And that last hour – speak of it. Remember that, beyond the naked fact of the catastrophe itself, I know nothing. When, coming out from among mankind, I passed into Night through the Grave – at that period, if I remember aright, the calamity which overwhelmed you was utterly unanticipated. But, indeed, I knew little of the speculative philosophy of the day.

Eiros. The individual calamity was as you say entirely unanticipated; but analogous misfortunes had been long a subject of discussion with astronomers. I need scarce tell you, my friend, that, even when you left us, men had agreed to understand those passages in the most holy writings which speak of the final destruction of all things by fire, as having reference to the orb of the earth alone. But in regard to the immediate agency of the ruin, speculation had been at fault from that epoch in astronomical knowledge in which the comets were divested of the terrors of flame. The very moderate density of these bodies had been well established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites of Jupiter, without bringing about any sensible alteration either in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets. We had long regarded the wanderers as vapory creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as