"H. Warner Munn - The Ship from Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Munn H Warner)

fish eggs was almost instantly digestible. It was not long before he felt
stronger. Placing the shortsword in the scabbard which still hung at his
belt, he opened a jar of water and drank deeply. Instinct told him he must
not drink the water in which the ship floated.

Afterward he slept again, the rest of that afternoon and all through the
night. While he slept, the wind continued to blow eastward and at dawn it
still pushed the ship on, though by intermittent light waftings, until
midday when it ceased entirely and the ship drifted in the doldrums.

It was very hot without the breezes. Pitch softened and ran in the deck
seams. The sail hung limply from the mast. Drifting, he noticed that little
patches of weed were coalescing into larger mats, upon which crabs and
insects crawled. The days went by with little change. He managed to clear
the deck of the skeletons, but he became infected with a fever which
exhausted him and he lay in his cabin for a long time, sick to the point of
dying.

It was a fight to crawl to the water jars and back again to his pallet. It
was only sullen determination to live that enabled him to choke down
food. Weeks passed. The Feathered Serpent worked its way out of the Gulf
Stream current and entered a calm expanse of sea. No rain fell. The weed
mats became islands. The islands joined and locked the becalmed ship
fast.

His strength became again as it had once been, but still his past was a
blank. And then one day as he sat on the afterdeck with a cup of water in
his hand, looking reflectively at the horizon across a sea of weed, he saw
that it lay everywhere that the eye could search. Close to the trapped ship,
lanes of clear water could be discerned, but father away, in the direction
whither ship and weed islands were slowly drifting, there seemed to be no
breaks in the thickly packed mass.

Nothing disturbed the surface, except a long even swell which came
irregularly as though some huge denizen of the undersea went privately
about its business far beneath. There were no waves. No rollers surged to
break upon the coast of that seaweed continent, neither had the winds any
power over it. This was the Sargasso, dread haven of dead ships, and only
the sun and silence here conspired to drive men mad, before famine was
to strike the mercy blow.

Far away the rays of the setting sun were reflected from some glistening
object of ruddy golden hue, deep in the weed pack, and at this he stared
while he sipped his water and wondered what it might be. Darkness hid
the mystery and he retired. On the next day it was a little nearer.

Other days came and passed, dragging out their monotonous round.
There was nothing to mark their passage but the sinking of the level in the
water jars and the closer matting of the weed masses as the constant
sluggish urging of the distant Gulf Stream forced them together. Then, as