Quotation from: Lord Jim

Written by: Joseph Conrad


'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get
from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation
of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had
meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves
the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside
themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in
complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance
of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams,
with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of
annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the
state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of
accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason
to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have
given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep
above water to the end of each successive second. And still she
floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their
whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the
Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony
on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign,
"Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a
prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can
be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then,
worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least
wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two
helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over
from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under
intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow,
cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly
Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at
the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the
court with an important air--

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