Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 6 (1925-12).djvu/84

hour. If there are no questions, that is all."

As I left the cabin my heart was heavy with the responsibility that had been thrust upon me. Why I had been singled out to execute this gruesome task, when there were scores of officers available, will probably ever remain one of the mysteries of naval history. Orders were orders, and I had never before hesitated for a moment to put my best efforts into the execution of the wishes of my superiors, however unjust they may have appeared to be.

At the appointed time the gig splashed in the water and I, with my chosen seamen, the messboy and the coffin, pulled toward that dismal pall.

When we arrived within a half-mile of the island, the water was as smooth as a mill-pond, so damnably still and sullen, my friend, that I cursed it inwardly. It seemed to betoken the misery and destruction that lay ahead, the co-mate of death itself. The smoke cloud hung so near above our heads that I expected it to lower any moment and suffocate us. Our lungs felt a strange and appalling constriction and the sweat stood out in great beads on the stern faces of my comrades as they bent to the heavy oars. The messboy's face was a study in terror, his eyes weirdly wild and rolling. There was such an odor that we were sick unto death, and it drifted toward us as we came in; but like men, we went to meet it. Here and there on the motionless bosom of the bay was strewn the sad and floating wreckage of what had once been a gay and prosperous city; carts and housetops, chickencoops and cradles, cats and dogs and—God forbid, my friend!—swollen, drenched and staring human beings, dead these many days, and the sullen waters had cast them up. There they hung suspended, some with arms out stretched, others with their bloated stomachs puffed above the glassy surface.

Once, and only once, we stopped. The stroke oar became entangled in the long black hair of a floating corpse, young and white,—a woman, and she had to be dragged alongside before we could extricate the oar. When we loosed her, she sank slowly and silently back into her watery bed and we sped on.

Now we had come to what had one time been the docks, a mass of tangled wreckage and debris. They had collapsed and it was only after much difficulty that we effected a landing and secured the gig to the single post that yet remained standing. Leaving two men in the boat with strict orders to listen for the signal, I directed the others to shoulder the coffin and follow the terrified messboy, and we set out in search of the consulate.

Everything looked the same to me. To the front, to the right, to the left, all was ruin, and above all that terrible cloud. Stephen led us up a street, if such it could be called, but I was soon convinced that the city had been so completely changed by the holocaust that he did not know where he was going.

A thick white ash covered everything knee-deep. All around lay heaps of charred and blackened bodies just as they had been caught in little groups the morning of the disaster. They had been overtaken and died as they chatted, I thought. Some were in a sitting posture against the tottering and crumbling walls, their faces were burned off and the ghastly, white cheek-bones sent a chill of horror through my body. Their hands lay at their sides, buried in the terrible cinder. There was not to be seen a single living thing. Ruin. Silence. Terror. Death reigned supreme. Not even the vindictive volcano uttered from its molten