Shortly before I had opened a box containing some old football clothes
which I had not seen for twenty years. I was wearing this costume at
the time; and though my cap, coat, and gloves were gone, as I stood
there in a pair of my old Oxford University running shorts, and red,
yellow, and black Richmond football stockings, and a flannel shirt, I
remembered involuntarily the little dying girl who asked to be dressed
in her Sunday frock so that she might arrive in heaven properly
attired.
Forcing my biggest dog to lie down, I cuddled up close to him, drew
the improvised dogskin rug over me, and proceeded to go to sleep. One
hand being against the dog was warm, but the other was frozen, and
about midnight I woke up shivering enough, so I thought, to shatter my
frail pan to atoms. The moon was just rising, and the wind was
steadily driving me toward the open sea. Suddenly what seemed a
miracle happened, for the wind veered, then dropped away entirely
leaving it flat calm. I turned over and fell asleep again. I was next
awakened by the sudden and persistent thought that I must have a flag,
and accordingly set to work to disarticulate the frozen legs of my
dead dogs. Cold as it was I determined to sacrifice my shirt to top
this rude flagpole as soon as the daylight came. When the legs were at
last tied together with bits of old harness rope, they made the
crookedest flagstaff that it has ever been my lot to see. Though with
the rising of the sun the frost came out of the dogs' legs to some
extent, and the friction of waving it made the odd pole almost tie
itself in knots, I could raise it three or four feet above my head,
which was very important.
Once or twice I thought that I could distinguish men against the
distant cliffs--for I had drifted out of the bay into the sea--but the
objects turned out to be trees. Once also I thought that I saw a boat
appearing and disappearing on the surface of the water, but it proved
to be only a small piece of ice bobbing up and down. The rocking of my
cradle on the waves had helped me to sleep, and I felt as well as I
ever did in my life. I was confident that I could last another
twenty-four hours if my boat would only hold out and not rot under the
sun's rays. I could not help laughing at my position, standing hour
after hour waving my shirt at those barren and lonely cliffs; but I
can honestly say that from first to last not a single sensation of
fear crossed my mind.
My own faith in the mystery of immortality is so untroubled that it
now seemed almost natural to be passing to the portal of death from an
ice-pan. Quite unbidden, the words of the old hymn kept running
through my head:
"My God, my Father, while I stray
Far from my home on life's rough way,
Oh, help me from my heart to say,
Thy will be done."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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