Hyperion to Bellarmin
I was in a lovely dream when I copied out for you the letters that I once exchanged. Now I write to you again, my Bellarmin! and take you further down, down to the deepest depths of my sorrows, and then, last of my loved ones! come forth with me to the place where a new day shines upon us.
The battle I’d written about to Diotima began. The ships of the Turks had taken refuge in the channel between the island of Chios and the Asian coast, and stood along the mainland off Chesma. My admiral left the line with his ship, the one I was on, and began the prelude with the first ship of the Turks. At the very first attack the raging pair were heated to a frenzy, it was a terrible revenge-sodden turmoil. The ships were soon bound fast together with their cordage; the furious fighting grew ever tighter and tighter.
A deep feeling of life coursed through me once more. I felt warm and well in every limb. Like one tenderly departing, my spirit felt itself for the last time in all its senses. And now, full of hot resentment that I knew no better way than to let myself be slaughtered among a throng of barbarians, and with tears of rage in my eyes, I stormed to where my death was certain.
I found the foe close enough to hand and, of the Russians who fought at my side, in a matter of moments not even one remained. I stood there alone, full of pride, and cast my life like a beggar’s penny before the barbarians, but they didn’t want me. They looked on me as someone whom one fears to sin against, and fate seemed to reverence me in my despair.
In sheer self-defence one of them at last laid into me and struck me so that I fell. From then on I was aware of nothing more until I came to again on Paros, whither I’d been shipped.
From the servant who carried me out of the battle I afterwards heard that the two ships that began the combat had blown up only moments after he’d taken me off in a skiff with the surgeon. The Russians had hurled fire into the Turkish ship, and because their own was entangled with it, both went up together.
How this terrible battle ended you will know. ‘So does one poison purge the other,’ I cried, when I heard that the Russians had burned the entire Turkish fleet — ‘so do tyrants wipe each other out.’