Built entirely of steel, immense and yet shaped for speed, she carried within her flanks nothing but passengers and their dreams. No inflammable cargo lay heaped in her depths, no dark freight for fire to seize upon. Freed from that burden, her engineers had been able to give her hull, instead of the heavy, almost flat belly of a cargo ship, the clean, keen lines of a steam yacht: from the keel her sides rose at a decided angle that seemed designed less to endure the sea than to enter with it into a common movement.
She was nearly two hundred and forty-four metres long. Seventy thousand tons moved with her. Seventy-five thousand horsepower slept within her engines, ready to awaken at the first command. And when she had been sent out to prove herself, she had run at twenty-five knots over the bottom, through winds, tides and currents, as though all those ancient powers which from time immemorial had driven, checked or turned ships from their course were now no more than secondary circumstances in her progress.
For she was almost no longer a ship.
She was a city that had left the land.
A city of steel, light and movement, carrying with her, into the midst of the ocean, everything mankind had patiently invented in order to forget that they were at sea. Within her metal walls, they had sought to keep at bay fire, fatigue, discomfort, perhaps even fear; they had amassed power against the currents, form against the waves, ingenuity against chance, and even the pleasures of existence against that ancient austerity of sea crossings, when man still knew, with every roll of the ship, that between himself and the depths there was never more than the thickness of a hull.
Here, that hull was made of steel.
And everything seemed to have been foreseen.
The dangers diminished, the discomforts held at bay, the sea itself kept far enough away that one might live above it almost without feeling its presence. One could walk, sleep, converse, dine, laugh, while beneath the passengers’ feet seventy thousand tons pursued their course through the night and the ocean, immense and indifferent, continued its movement around them.
Thus went that floating city, carrying with her everything that might make life safer, gentler, more pleasant—as though man, after so long learning how to cross the sea, had finally come to believe that he could carry it with him without any longer having to belong to it.
For she was almost no longer a ship.
She was a city that had left the land.
A city of steel, light and movement, carrying with her, into the midst of the ocean, everything mankind had patiently invented in order to forget that they were at sea. Within her metal walls, they had sought to keep at bay fire, fatigue, discomfort, perhaps even fear; they had amassed power against the currents, form against the waves, ingenuity against chance, and even the pleasures of existence against that ancient austerity of sea crossings, when man still knew, with every roll of the ship, that between himself and the depths there was never more than the thickness of a hull.
Here, that hull was made of steel.
And everything seemed to have been foreseen.
The dangers diminished, the discomforts held at bay, the sea itself kept far enough away that one might live above it almost without feeling its presence. One could walk, sleep, converse, dine, laugh, while beneath the passengers’ feet seventy thousand tons pursued their course through the night and the ocean, immense and indifferent, continued its movement around them.
Thus went that floating city, carrying with her everything that might make life safer, gentler, more pleasant—as though man, after so long learning how to cross the sea, had finally come to believe that he could carry it with him without any longer having to belong to it.
From Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
(Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898).
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…as though Lucian, after so long learning how to cross the sea, had finally come to believe that it was now the sea that was crossing through him.
It was then that the vibration began, at first so deep beneath my feet that I took it for some new transformation of the swell, then continuous enough for me to understand that it belonged to the ship itself, a long metallic moan that sounded less like a cry than the endless grinding of two masses, one of which wished to continue while the other had encountered something that held it back; the sea was still driving us forward, while the seabed or the rock—I did not know—now resisted it, and between these two powers the liner began to pivot with a terrifying slowness, not because the movement was violent, but because its very immensity made palpable the force required to move in such a way what I had believed immovable.
The deck became a slope beneath my feet while the water, taking advantage of an inclination that now seemed as though it would never cease, came over the side and spread around me, first as an almost smooth sheet that carried a few objects with it before receding, then as a thicker mass that returned with the following wave; and what until then had been the sea around the ship suddenly entered the place where I stood, blurring that boundary which the hull had maintained with such assurance between the element and myself. I seized a railing, moved forward, perhaps backward, for I no longer knew whether climbing the deck meant drawing nearer to some possibility of salvation or merely rising along a part of the ship that was sinking more deeply, and when some of the lights went out, their very extinction seemed to move with us, as though an entire city were beginning to tilt into the night.
I cannot say today how I left the liner, for the memory of that instant remains less a sequence of actions than a rupture in the relations to which my body had been accustomed; I was holding something, or believed I was holding it, then my grip was suddenly elsewhere, my arm stretched in a direction that was no longer the one it had chosen, the water passed beneath me or over me, and suddenly the weight I had never imagined might be a relation with the world rather than a simple property of my body lost its accustomed support, so that I fell without being able to decide towards what I was falling.
The water received me with a cold violence that stripped all meaning from the words still at my disposal, entered my mouth, my ears, beneath my clothes, and as I sank I saw the ship’s lights breaking apart above me into long shifting shapes that seemed now to rise, now to descend, according to whether it was my own body or the surface that was moving; I kicked my legs, rose, breathed too soon, swallowed water, went under again, and when at last I found the air once more I turned about in search, with that almost childlike obstinacy which danger restores to our gestures, of something that might tell me which way to go.
Behind me and ahead of me, though I no longer truly knew which was which, the light remained like a beacon that made me turn my head more than it gave me any direction, for the immense vessel, still illuminated here and there, appeared and disappeared behind the waves, its reflections running across the water in contradictory directions, so that to have guided myself by that brightness might just as easily have led me back towards what was sinking as away from it; and meanwhile my feet searched for the bottom with a persistence of which I became conscious only after several attempts, reaching down beneath me as they had always done, expecting to encounter that resistance against which the body straightens itself, pushes, rises, until the repeated absence of any stone, any sand, any matter capable of answering their appeal made me experience, long before I could think it, what it truly means to lose one’s footing.
I had often used that expression without granting it any more reality than so many other metaphors in which language preserves a physical origin long after we have almost forgotten the body from which they came; but now it returned to me whole, stripped of its figurative use, and I discovered that to lose one’s footing was not merely to become disoriented, to doubt or stagger, but to lose a trust so ancient that it probably precedes all thought: the certainty that something will eventually answer beneath us to our weight. Yet there was nothing there, and my legs, in their useless effort to find a bottom, were teaching me what my intelligence could certainly have put into words without those words ever having taught me anything.
The deck became a slope beneath my feet while the water, taking advantage of an inclination that now seemed as though it would never cease, came over the side and spread around me, first as an almost smooth sheet that carried a few objects with it before receding, then as a thicker mass that returned with the following wave; and what until then had been the sea around the ship suddenly entered the place where I stood, blurring that boundary which the hull had maintained with such assurance between the element and myself. I seized a railing, moved forward, perhaps backward, for I no longer knew whether climbing the deck meant drawing nearer to some possibility of salvation or merely rising along a part of the ship that was sinking more deeply, and when some of the lights went out, their very extinction seemed to move with us, as though an entire city were beginning to tilt into the night.
I cannot say today how I left the liner, for the memory of that instant remains less a sequence of actions than a rupture in the relations to which my body had been accustomed; I was holding something, or believed I was holding it, then my grip was suddenly elsewhere, my arm stretched in a direction that was no longer the one it had chosen, the water passed beneath me or over me, and suddenly the weight I had never imagined might be a relation with the world rather than a simple property of my body lost its accustomed support, so that I fell without being able to decide towards what I was falling.
The water received me with a cold violence that stripped all meaning from the words still at my disposal, entered my mouth, my ears, beneath my clothes, and as I sank I saw the ship’s lights breaking apart above me into long shifting shapes that seemed now to rise, now to descend, according to whether it was my own body or the surface that was moving; I kicked my legs, rose, breathed too soon, swallowed water, went under again, and when at last I found the air once more I turned about in search, with that almost childlike obstinacy which danger restores to our gestures, of something that might tell me which way to go.
Behind me and ahead of me, though I no longer truly knew which was which, the light remained like a beacon that made me turn my head more than it gave me any direction, for the immense vessel, still illuminated here and there, appeared and disappeared behind the waves, its reflections running across the water in contradictory directions, so that to have guided myself by that brightness might just as easily have led me back towards what was sinking as away from it; and meanwhile my feet searched for the bottom with a persistence of which I became conscious only after several attempts, reaching down beneath me as they had always done, expecting to encounter that resistance against which the body straightens itself, pushes, rises, until the repeated absence of any stone, any sand, any matter capable of answering their appeal made me experience, long before I could think it, what it truly means to lose one’s footing.
I had often used that expression without granting it any more reality than so many other metaphors in which language preserves a physical origin long after we have almost forgotten the body from which they came; but now it returned to me whole, stripped of its figurative use, and I discovered that to lose one’s footing was not merely to become disoriented, to doubt or stagger, but to lose a trust so ancient that it probably precedes all thought: the certainty that something will eventually answer beneath us to our weight. Yet there was nothing there, and my legs, in their useless effort to find a bottom, were teaching me what my intelligence could certainly have put into words without those words ever having taught me anything.
