Where a reader might enter without having read anything before, without knowing anything… and yet feel that they have arrived in the midst of something that began elsewhere.
“At first, however, the immense liner aboard which Lucian had embarked had been unable to make its way into open water by itself. Several tugboats had been needed to take hold of its mass, to pull it, restrain it, slowly swing it around between the quays before turning its bow towards the opening of the sea… then, one after another, they had cast off their hawsers and drawn away, growing smaller as the giant’s engines took over the movement that had just been imparted to it, until the land itself, still close at first with its buildings, its breakwaters and familiar lines, began to recede, and soon there remained before it nothing but that vast expanse where nothing seemed capable of checking its course.
That movement came from far below the decks, from a depth that nothing in the lounges, the passageways or the broad spaces open to the sea air made it truly possible to imagine. It rose through the steel like a muffled rumour, a vibration regular enough that one soon ceased to hear it, and yet it remained present everywhere, in the partitions against which a hand might have rested, in the panes of glass trembling imperceptibly, even in the flooring through which there passed without pause something of the force buried several metres below. There, behind walls the eye could not penetrate, the ship seemed to possess its own entrails, heated, lubricated, coursed by vapours, thrusts and rotations whose consequences alone could be perceived outside, as though all the violence required for such speed had been driven down into its depths so that nothing on the surface might disturb its apparent ease.
Only now and then would some difference in the rumbling, an almost imperceptible resurgence, an inflection within that immense mechanical continuity, make one feel that something below had changed, and one might then be tempted to listen more closely, as one listens in a sentence repeated over and over for the syllable that suddenly no longer falls in quite the same place. But nothing came to explain the variation… no order rose from the depths, no figure crossed the passageways to give the power driving the liner onward any visible origin, so that, as the land receded, it became possible to experience the peculiar impression that the vessel itself was accomplishing everything required for its progress, that it tended its own fires, watched over its pressures, greased its joints and corrected, even in the darkness of its machinery, the slightest irregularities in its own breathing.
And yet one needed only to look around to discover everywhere the traces of a life organised down to its smallest details… an armchair slightly displaced before a broad window, a book left open, a blanket folded over the back of a seat, a cup whose bottom still bore a dark ring, a door not quite closed swaying gently with the roll… but instead of making those presences more certain, such signs seemed only to draw them farther away, as though those who had left them there had stepped out only moments before and were expected to return at once, while those few moments, for no reason that could be understood, continued to lengthen.
On deck, the air had that clean freshness the wind acquires after running for a long while over water, and the liner, freed from the slowness of its departure, gradually gathered speed. A few triangular sails had been set upon the masts, less perhaps because such a mass truly required their assistance than because no thrust, however slight, seemed worth losing in a race whose destination remained invisible… they filled, slackened, caught the wind again according to a rhythm unlike that of the engines, while beneath them the hull rose upon the swell and sank again with that deceptive slowness which made the movement of a mass travelling at great speed seem almost motionless.
And then there began, for the body, a kind of navigation no chart could ever have accounted for. One had to learn, without even noticing that one was learning, to yield slightly to the movement of the deck, to shorten a step as the ship rose, to hold back a shoulder when the roll carried the body sideways, and soon the legs performed by themselves those minute corrections that thought would have been too slow to command. One believed oneself to be walking as one had always walked while already walking differently… one believed oneself to be keeping one’s balance while losing and recovering it at every instant, and perhaps this was, long before the sea demanded anything more, the first lesson it gave through that enormous hull built precisely so that no one aboard should ever have to receive it.
For however many layers the liner might interpose between the water and whatever travelled aboard it—the thickness of its decks, its lounges, its machinery—something of the sea nevertheless managed to pass through, not in the spectacular form of a wave breaking over the rail, but in that almost imperceptible oscillation altering the body’s uprightness, in the way a door opened by itself a few inches before swinging back again, in some suspended object whose swaying betrayed the reality of a movement the immensity of the ship had almost succeeded in concealing.
Meanwhile the land had lost its details, then its height, then even that slender unevenness by which the eye could still distinguish it from the sky… and when at last it disappeared, nothing seemed truly to have been left behind, so completely did the ocean at once take its place. Before the bow stretched a surface every point of which seemed at first like every other, and which nevertheless nowhere ceased to change, now dark and heavy, now crossed by a cold light, now covered in long ripples that the wind brought into being and erased again like a script written too quickly to be retained.
It was possible to remain before it for a long time without knowing exactly what one was looking at, until a wave ceased to be merely a wave and became a slope of light, a rising, a mass lifting itself and then disappearing beneath another, and the gaze, believing it could encompass the ocean, discovered that in truth it could follow only one movement after another, unable to decide precisely where what appeared before it began, or at what instant it had ceased to exist.
Then certain details of the ship acquired an unexpected importance in their turn… the curve of a cable, the angle of a mast against the sky, a tarpaulin stretched over a lifeboat, the mark left by water on a steel plate, the reflection in a pane that turned black as a cloud passed before it… all things without a history, it seemed, yet which, detached for a moment from everything surrounding them, appeared to be waiting for something, as though the voyage were already producing its images before any event had come to give them meaning, and as though some gaze, somewhere, had begun gathering them without yet knowing what it would make of them.
The liner continued on its course, and the vibration rising from its depths was now so closely mingled with the movement of the sea that it became difficult to know what, in that continuous trembling, belonged to the engines and what the swell imposed upon the hull. The wind passed through the rigging, the sails added their slight tension, the water ran along the ship’s sides with a deeper sound whenever the bow fell back into the hollow of a wave, and all those movements, which one might have thought separate, gradually entered into one another, until they gave the impression that the ship, the sea, the wind and that faceless gaze were already no longer entirely foreign to the same movement.
Thus perhaps the voyage had begun even before anything whatsoever had taken place, in that imperceptible way the world already had of displacing the one who still believed himself merely to be moving within it.”
Very freely inspired by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898
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