During one such excursion, while the coachman waited for me in a nearby tavern, as I walked along the seastrand, I saw a shining object cast upon the beach by the high tide. I can be grateful to Providence and someone else that I descended the steep cliff, for I might well have broken my back or a leg. Far from it, that I feared for my life or my health; I was lethargic and fainthearted, and I would undertake such an effort for nothing – by earthly criteria – valuable. But the object sparkled mysteriously; that which greed could not do was done by curiosity, and I descended, wading knee-deep into the water, and I snatched it up. At first glance, it was just a common bottle of fine glass, carefully sealed with pitch. Immediately I called my driver and rode home. That evening, in the privacy of my study, I broke the bottle. Inside was a scroll of paper, the manuscript of Captain Adam Queensdale, dated 23 October 1761.
Although it had been well-protected, over the one hundred and twenty-five years the bottle had been carried by the ocean currents, the paper had suffered a degree of damage. I spent several exciting evenings copying the contents of the original which threatened to disintegrate into dust and ashes at any moment. The text contained a description of a shipwreck that only Captain Queensdale had survived; a description of the island, Ultima Thulae, north of Iceland, where the castaway was taken in by the inhabitants, members of the heretical sect of Two-Wheelers, exiled from Europe in the 14th century; a description of the life and rituals of the inhabitants, of their mythology and eschatology; and at the end, a copy of the holy text, The Purgatory of Sleep, the greater part of which, unfortunately, was so heavily damaged as to be unreadable.
Studying this tale, which had a healing effect on my soul, I decided to save it from oblivion, but also from the curiosity of the masses, from the quasi-scholars and sensationalists. The only way to do that was to act just as the bottle had acted toward me: I had to let the story find its readers by itself. Toward that end, I made six completely identical copies and inserted them into six expensive, but uninteresting, books. I sent the books to the addresses of reputable secondhand bookstores in London, Istanbul, Heidelberg, Reykjavik, Cairo and Bombay. They will, I am certain of it, know how to reach their readers. Everyone who comes to believe in their contents will do the same thing I did: he will make six copies of the text and find a way to release them into the world.
J. H. W.
4 July 1982
The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale
I do not know if these lines will ever be read. In their depths, the expanse of the oceans hides objects much larger than the bottle of Venetian glass to which I am entrusting these pages. The ancient books say that those depths swallowed up an entire continent that used to lie between Europe and America. But still, I am writing. If I write down my confession and entrust it to the currents of the seas (at times more conscientious than messengers), there is a hope that, even a hundred years from now, it will reach someone, somewhere. If I do not do this, it is certain that I will carry all I have discovered with me into my grave.
My great fortune came about in the form of a terrible accident. While returning from New England, the ship Invincible, under my command, was caught in an unprecedented storm. The crew threw our cargo overboard in vain, in vain we lowered the sails; the wind and waves snapped the rudder. On the second day (which I thought to be Judgment Day), an enormous wave broke the mainmast like a twig, under which nostromo Bradley met his death, and the next wave carried away three sailors who were rushing to help him. We had no other recourse than to pray to the Lord for the salvation of our souls. There was no more salvation for the ship.
The next day, water began to penetrate into the hold. Rudderless, with no sails, the Invincible was carried ever farther north. The sailors, believing that they had greater chances in the lifeboat, decided to abandon the ship. I could not blame them. They took the remaining stores of salt-cured meat, the last barrel of water, and they set off into the unknown. I doubt that they ever reached shore or that they came across another ship. For, when the sea finally calmed and the clouds scattered, I took the astrolabe and pinpointed the position of the swamped ship, and I realized that the winds had taken us far from any of the trade routes. But that was not all. Shocked, I saw a constellation in the sky that is not noted on any of the charts of the northern skies. I drew the configuration of stars onto the map, although I doubted that my discovery would ever be of service to anyone:
In my youth, I had read in a marine atlas, translated from Arabic, full of the fantastic deeds of Sinbad the Sailor and his company, about a constellation that appears every 365 years, when the year of years is fulfilled, and when the winter of centuries begins in which everything good dies out and the forces of evil grow strong. But, at the time, I could not remember how that constellation from the atlas looked, so that I could compare it with the one above my head. Nor did I have time. Already fairly exhausted, I reached for an ax, some rope and a hammer in order to make a raft. Wrapped in wax-cloth, on the raft I took the ship’s log, a Bible, writing materials, some gunpowder and lead, and at dawn on 12 October 1733, I sailed into the unknown.
One who has never been on the ocean’s expanse has also never experienced the sea of time with absolutely nothing to do. In spite of my desperation (or actually because of it), I measured time using instruments, and every twenty-four hours I carved a notch on the improvised mast, since day and night last for months at those latitudes. At the moment when, not believing my eyes, I spied land through the mist, there were seven notches on the mast. Setting foot on solid land, exhausted and hungry, I collapsed and fell sound asleep. I do not know how long I slept; perhaps an hour, maybe two, maybe two days, but I did not wake up on my own. Someone shook me gently, I opened my eyes and saw three people. One of them addressed me in some language, but I could not tell if it was broken Latin or Old French. To my surprise, when I spoke in English, the man picked up the conversation. I was expecting anything except the presence of a polyglot on such a distant island. But that would merely be the first of my surprises. To be honest, at first I thought that I was dreaming that I was awakened on a remote island by three blond men and that the eldest of them, who introduced himself as Joseph, was telling me that he had seen the sinking of the Invincible in a dream, and my suffering on the raft; that he had dreamt the place where I would land, and that he had come to meet me there. I thought to myself, “All of this is a nightmare; I have had similar dreams before; soon, I will wake up in my cabin on the Invincible, sailing smoothly for Southampton.” But I kept waking up in another place: in a warm hut, on bedclothes made of sheepskin, next to a man who was hovering over me. When the delirium caused by my exhaustion finally passed, it became clear to me that nothing in it had been a dream: I was in an unfamiliar hut, on an island isolated from the civilized world, surrounded by strangers.
Or, perhaps it