Gilliatt felt the pride of a Cyclops: he was the master of air, water,

and fire. Master of the air; for he had given a kind of lungs to the

wind, and changed the rude draught into a useful blower. Master of

water, for he had converted the little cascade into a "trompe." Master

of fire, for out of this moist rock he had struck a flame.

The cave being almost everywhere open to the sky, the smoke issued

freely, blackening the curved escarpment. The rocks which seemed

destined for ever to receive only the white foam, became now familiar

with the blackening smoke.

Gilliatt selected for an anvil a large smooth round stone, of about the

required shape and dimensions. It formed a base for the blows of his

hammer; but one that might fly and was very dangerous. One of the

extremities of this block, rounded and ending in a point, might, for

want of anything better, serve instead of a conoid bicorn; but the other

kind of bicorn of the pyramidal form was wanting. It was the ancient

stone anvil of the Troglodytes. The surface, polished by the waves, had

almost the firmness of steel.

He regretted not having brought his anvil. As he did not know that the

Durande had been broken in two by the tempest, he had hoped to find the

carpenter's chest and all his tools generally kept in the forehold. But

it was precisely the fore-part of the vessel which had been carried

away.

These two excavations which he had found in the rock were contiguous.

The warehouse and the forge communicated with each other.

Every evening, when his work was ended, he supped on a little biscuit,

moistened in water, a sea-urchin or a crab, or a few _châtaignes de

mer_, the only food to be found among those rocks; and shivering like

his knotted cord, mounted again to sleep in his cell upon the Great

Douvre.

The very materialism of his daily occupation increased the kind of

abstraction in which he lived. To be steeped too deeply in realities is

in itself a cause of visionary moods. His bodily labour, with its

infinite variety of details, detracted nothing from the sensation of

stupor which arose from the strangeness of his position and his work.

Ordinary bodily fatigue is a thread which binds man to the earth; but

the very peculiarity of the enterprise he was engaged in kept him in a

sort of ideal twilight region. There were times when he seemed to be

striking blows with his hammer in the clouds. At other moments his tools

appeared to him like arms. He had a singular feeling, as if he was

repressing or providing against some latent danger of attack. Untwisting

ropes, unravelling threads of yarn in a sail, or propping up a couple of

beams, appeared to him at such times like fashioning engines of war. The

thousand minute pains which he took about his salvage operations

produced at last in his mind the effect of precautions against

aggressions little concealed, and easy to anticipate. He did not know

the words which express the ideas, but he perceived them. His instincts

became less and less those of the worker; his habits more and more those

of the savage man.

His business there was to subdue and direct the powers of nature. He had

an indistinct perception of it. A strange enlargement of his ideas!

Around him, far as eye could reach, was the vast prospect of endless

labour wasted and lost. Nothing is more disturbing to the mind than the

contemplation of the diffusion of forces at work in the unfathomable and

illimitable space of the ocean. The mind tends naturally to seek the

object of these forces. The unceasing movement in space, the unwearying

sea, the clouds that seem ever hurrying somewhere, the vast mysterious

prodigality of effort, all this is a problem. Whither does this

perpetual movement tend? What do these winds construct? What do these

giant blows build up? These howlings, shocks, and sobbings of the storm,

what do they end in? and what is the business of this tumult? The ebb

and flow of these questionings is eternal, as the flux and reflux of

the sea itself. Gilliatt could answer for himself; his work he knew, but

the agitation which surrounded him far and wide at all times perplexed

him confusedly with its eternal questionings. Unknown to himself,

mechanically, by the mere pressure of external things, and without any

other effect than a strange, unconscious bewilderment, Gilliatt, in this

dreamy mood, blended his own toil somehow with the prodigious wasted

labour of the sea-waves. How, indeed, in that position, could he escape

the influence of that mystery of the dread, laborious ocean? how do

other than meditate, so far as meditation was possible, upon the

vacillation of the waves, the perseverance of the foam, the

imperceptible wearing down of rocks, the furious beatings of the four

winds? How terrible that perpetual recommencement, that ocean bed, those

Danaïdes-like clouds, all that travail and weariness for no end!

For no end? Not so! But for what? O Thou Infinite Unknown, Thou only

knowest!

XI

DISCOVERY

A rock near the coast is sometimes visited by men; a rock in mid-ocean

never. What object could any one have there? No supplies can be drawn

thence; no fruit-trees are there, no pasturage, no beasts, no springs of

water fitted for man's use. It stands aloft, a rock with its steep sides

and summits above water, and its sharp points below. Nothing is to be

found there but inevitable shipwreck.

This kind of rocks, which in the old sea dialect were called _Isolés_,

are, as we have said, strange places. The sea is alone there; she works

her own will. No token of terrestrial life disturbs her. Man is a terror

to the sea; she is shy of his approach, and hides from him her deeds.

But she is bolder among the lone sea rocks. The everlasting soliloquy of

the waves is not troubled there. She labours at the rock, repairs its

damage, sharpens its peaks, makes them rugged or renews them. She

pierces the granite, wears down the soft stone, and denudes the hard;

she rummages, dismembers, bores, perforates, and grooves; she fills the

rock with cells, and makes it sponge-like, hollows out the inside, or

sculptures it without. In that secret mountain which is hers, she makes

to herself caves, sanctuaries, palaces. She has her splendid and

monstrous vegetation, composed of floating plants which bite, and of

monsters which take root; and she hides away all this terrible

magnificence in the twilight of her deeps. Among the isolated rocks no

eye watches over her; no spy embarrasses her movements. It is there that

she develops at liberty her mysterious side, which is inaccessible to

man. Here she keeps all strange secretions of life. Here that the

unknown wonders of the sea are assembled.

Promontories, forelands, capes, headlands, breakers, and shoals are

veritable constructions. The geological changes of the earth are

trifling compared with the vast operations of the ocean. These breakers,

these habitations in the sea, these pyramids, and spouts of the foam are

the practicers of a mysterious art which the author of this book has

somewhere called "the Art of Nature." Their style is known by its

vastness. The effects of chance seem here design. Its works are

multiform. They abound in the mazy entanglement of the rock-coral

groves, the sublimity of the cathedral, the extravagance of the pagoda,

the amplitude of the mountain, the delicacy of the jeweller's work, the

horror of the sepulchre. They are filled with cells like the wasps'

nest, with dens like menageries, with subterranean passages like the

haunts of moles, with dungeons like Bastiles, with ambuscades like a

camp. They have their doors, but they are barricaded; their columns, but

they are shattered; their towers, but they are tottering; their bridges,

but they are broken. Their compartments are unaccommodating; these are

fitted for the birds only, those only for fish. They are impassable.

Their architectural style is variable and inconsistent; it regards or

disregards at will the laws of equilibrium, breaks off, stops short,

begins in the form of an archivolt, and ends in an architrave, block on

block. Enceladus is the mason. A wondrous science of dynamics exhibits

here its problems ready solved. Fearful overhanging blocks threaten, but

fall not: the human mind cannot guess what power supports their

bewildering masses. Blind entrances, gaps, and ponderous suspensions

multiply and vary infinitely. The laws which regulate this Babel baffle

human induction. The great unknown architect plans nothing, but succeeds

in all. Rocks massed together in confusion form a monstrous monument,

defy reason, yet maintain equilibrium. Here is something more than

strength; it is eternity. But order is wanting. The wild tumult of the

waves seems to have passed into the wilderness of stone. It is like a

tempest petrified and fixed for ever. Nothing is more impressive than

that wild architecture; always standing, yet always seeming to fall; in

which everything appears to give support, and yet to withdraw it. A

struggle between opposing lines has resulted in the construction of an

edifice, filled with traces of the efforts of those old antagonists, the

ocean and the storm.

This architecture has its terrible masterpieces, of which the Douvres

rock was one.

The sea had fashioned and perfected it with a sinister solicitude. The

snarling waters licked it into shape. It was hideous, treacherous, dark,

full of hollows.

It had a complete system of submarine caverns ramifying and losing

themselves in unfathomed depths. Some of the orifices of this labyrinth

of passages were left exposed by the low tides. A man might enter there,

but at his risk and peril.

Gilliatt determined to explore all these grottoes, for the purpose of

his salvage labour. There was not one which was not repulsive.

Everywhere about the caverns that strange aspect of an abattoir, those

singular traces of slaughter, appeared again in all the exaggeration of

the ocean. No one who has not seen in excavations of this kind, upon the

walls of everlasting granite, these hideous natural frescoes, can form a

notion of their singularity.

These pitiless caverns, too, were false and sly. Woe betide him who

would loiter there. The rising tide filled them to their roofs.

Rock limpets and edible mosses abounded among them.

They were obstructed by quantities of shingle, heaped together in their

recesses. Some of their huge smooth stones weighed more than a ton. They

were of every proportion, and of every hue; but the greater part were

blood coloured. Some, covered with a hairy and glutinous seaweed, seemed

like large green moles boring a way into the rock.

Several of the caverns terminated abruptly in the form of a demi-cupola.

Others, main arteries of a mysterious circulation, lengthened out in the

rock in dark and tortuous fissures. They were the alleys of the

submarine city; but they gradually contracted from their entrances, and

at length left no way for a man to pass. Peering in by the help of a

lighted torch, he could see nothing but dark hollows dripping with

moisture.

One day, Gilliatt, exploring, ventured into one of these fissures. The

state of the tide favoured the attempt. It was a beautiful day of calm

and sunshine. There was no fear of any accident from the sea to increase

the danger.

Two necessities, as we have said, compelled him to undertake these

explorations. He had to gather fragments of wreck and other things to

aid him in his labour, and to search for crabs and crayfish for his

food. Shell-fish had begun to fail him on the rocks.

The fissure was narrow, and the passage difficult. Gilliatt could see

daylight beyond. He made an effort, contorted himself as much as he

could, and penetrated into the cave as far as he was able.

He had reached, without suspecting it, the interior of the rock, upon

the point of which Clubin had steered the Durande. Though abrupt and

almost inaccessible without, it was hollowed within. It was full of

galleries, pits, and chambers, like the tomb of an Egyptian king. This

network of caverns was one of the most complicated of all that

labyrinth, a labour of the water, the undermining of the restless sea.

The branches of the subterranean maze probably communicated with the sea

without by more than one issue, some gaping at the level of the waves,

the others profound and invisible. It was near here, but Gilliatt knew

it not, that Clubin had dived into the sea.

In this crocodile cave--where crocodiles, it is true, were not among the

dangers--Gilliatt wound about, clambered, struck his head occasionally,

bent low and rose again, lost his footing and regained it many times,

advancing laboriously. By degrees the gallery widened; a glimmer of

daylight appeared, and he found himself suddenly at the entrance to a

cavern of a singular kind.

XII

THE INTERIOR OF AN EDIFICE UNDER THE SEA

The gleam of daylight was fortunate.

One step further, and Gilliatt must have fallen into a pool, perhaps

without bottom. The waters of these cavern pools are so cold and

paralysing as to prove fatal to the strongest swimmers.

There is, moreover, no means of remounting or of hanging on to any part

of their steep walls.

He stopped short. The crevice from which he had just issued ended in a

narrow and slippery projection, a species of corbel in the peaked wall.

He leaned against the side and surveyed it.

He was in a large cave. Over his head was a roofing not unlike the

inside of a vast skull, which might have been imagined to have been

recently dissected. The dripping ribs of the striated indentations of

the roof seemed to imitate the branching fibres and jagged sutures of

the bony cranium. A stony ceiling and a watery floor. The rippled waters

between the four walls of the cave were like wavy paving tiles. The

grotto was shut in on all sides. Not a window, not even an air-hole

visible. No breach in the wall, no crack in the roof. The light came

from below and through the water, a strange, sombre light.

Gilliatt, the pupils of whose eyes had contracted during his

explorations of the dusky corridor, could distinguish everything about

him in the pale glimmer.

He was familiar, from having often visited them, with the caves of

Plémont in Jersey, the Creux-Maillé at Guernsey, the Boutiques at Sark;

but none of these marvellous caverns could compare with the subterranean

and submarine chamber into which he had made his way.

Under the water at his feet he could see a sort of drowned arch. This

arch, a natural ogive, fashioned by the waves, was glittering between

its two dark and profound supports. It was by this submerged porch that

the daylight entered into the cavern from the open sea. A strange light

shooting upward from a gulf.

The glimmer spread out beneath the waters like a large fan, and was

reflected on the rocks. Its direct rays, divided into long, broad

shafts, appeared in strong relief against the darkness below, and

becoming brighter or more dull from one rock to another, looked as if

seen here and there through plates of glass. There was light in that

cave it is true; but it was the light that was unearthly. The beholder

might have dreamed that he had descended in some other planet. The

glimmer was an enigma, like the glaucous light from the eye-pupil of a

Sphinx. The whole cave represented the interior of a death's-head of

enormous proportions, and of a strange splendour. The vault was the

hollow of the brain, the arch the mouth; the sockets of the eyes were

wanting. The cavern, alternately swallowing and rendering up the flux

and reflux through its mouth wide opened to the full noonday without,

seemed to drink in the light and vomit forth bitterness; a type of some

beings intelligent and evil. The light, in traversing this inlet through

the vitreous medium of the sea-water, became green, like a ray of

starlight from Aldebaran. The water, filled with the moist light,

appeared like a liquid emerald. A tint of aqua-marina of marvellous

delicacy spread a soft hue throughout the cavern. The roof, with its

cerebral lobes, and its rampant ramifications, like the fibres of

nerves, gave out a tender reflection of chrysoprase. The ripples

reflected on the roof were falling in order and dissolving again

incessantly, and enlarging and contracting their glittering scales in a

mysterious and mazy dance. They gave the beholder an impression of

something weird and spectral: he wondered what prey secured, or what

expectation about to be realised, moved with a joyous thrill this

magnificent network of living fire. From the projections of the vault,

and the angles of the rock, hung lengths of delicate fibrous plants,

bathing their roots probably through the granite in some upper pool of

water, and distilling from their silky ends one after the other, a drop

of water like a pearl. These drops fell in the water now and then with a

gentle splash. The effect of the scene was singular. Nothing more

beautiful could be imagined; nothing more mournful could anywhere be

found.

It was a wondrous palace, in which death sat smiling and content.

XIII

WHAT WAS SEEN THERE; AND WHAT PERCEIVED DIMLY

A place of shade, which yet was dazzling to the eyes--such was this

surprising cavern.

The beating of the sea made itself felt throughout the cavern. The

oscillation without raised and depressed the level of the waters within,

with the regularity of respiration. A mysterious spirit seemed to fill

this great organism, as it swelled and subsided in silence.

The water had a magical transparency, and Gilliatt distinguished at

various depths submerged recesses, and surfaces of jutting rocks ever of

a deeper and a deeper green. Certain dark hollows, too, were there,

probably too deep for soundings.

On each side of the submarine porch, rude elliptical arches, filled with

shallows, indicated the position of small lateral caves, low alcoves of

the central cavern, accessible, perhaps, at certain tides. These

openings had roofs in the form of inclined planes, and at angles more or

less acute. Little sandy beaches of a few feet wide, laid bare by the

action of the water, stretched inward, and were lost in these recesses.

Here and there seaweeds of more than a fathom in length undulated

beneath the water, like the waving of long tresses in the wind; and

there were glimpses of a forest of sea plants.

Above and below the surface of the water, the wall of the cavern from

top to bottom--from the vault down to the depth at which it became

invisible--was tapestried with that prodigious efflorescence of the sea,

rarely perceived by human eyes, which the old Spanish navigators called

_praderias del mar_. A luxuriant moss, having all the tints of the

olive, enlarged and concealed the protuberances of granite. From all the

jutting points swung the thin fluted strips of varech, which sailors use

as their barometers. The light breath which stirred in the cavern waved

to and fro their glossy bands.

Under these vegetations there showed themselves from time to time some

of the rarest _bijoux_ of the casket of the ocean; ivory shells,

strombi, purple-fish, univalves, struthiolaires, turriculated cerites.

The bell-shaped limpet shells, like tiny huts, were everywhere adhering

to the rocks, distributed in settlements, in the alleys between which

prowled oscabrions, those beetles of the sea. A few large pebbles found

their way into the cavern; shell-fish took refuge there. The crustacea

are the grandees of the sea, who, in their lacework and embroidery,

avoid the rude contact of the pebbly crowd. The glittering heap of their

shells, in certain spots under the wave, gave out singular irradiations,

amidst which the eye caught glimpses of confused azure and gold, and

mother-of-pearl, of every tint of the water.

Upon the side of the cavern, a little above the water-line, a

magnificent and singular plant, attaching itself, like a fringe, to the

border of seaweed, continued and completed it. This plant, thick,

fibrous, inextricably intertwined, and almost black, exhibited to the

eye large confused and dusky festoons, everywhere dotted with

innumerable little flowers of the colour of lapis-lazuli. In the water

they seemed to glow like small blue flames. Out of the water they were

flowers; beneath it they were sapphires. The water rising and inundating

the basement of the grotto clothed with these plants, seemed to cover

the rock with gems.

At every swelling of the wave these flowers increased in splendour, and

at every subsidence grew dull again. So it is with the destiny of man;

aspiration is life, the outbreathing of the spirit is death.

One of the marvels of the cavern was the rock itself. Forming here a

wall, there an arch, and here again a pillar or pilaster, it was in

places rough and bare, and sometimes close beside, was wrought with the

most delicate natural carving. Strange evidences of mind mingled with

the massive stolidity of the granite. It was the wondrous art-work of

the ocean. Here a sort of panel, cut square, and covered with round

embossments in various positions, simulated a vague bas-relief. Before

this sculpture, with its obscure designs, a man might have dreamed of

Prometheus roughly sketching for Michael Angelo. It seemed as if that

great genius with a few blows of his mallet could have finished the

indistinct labours of the giant. In other places the rock was damasked

like a Saracen buckler, or engraved like a Florentine vase. There were

portions which appeared like Corinthian brass, then like arabesques, as

on the door of a mosque; then like Runic stones with obscure and mystic

prints of claws. Plants with twisted creepers and tendrils, crossing and

recrossing upon the groundwork of golden lichens, covered it with

filigree. The grotto resembled in some wise a Moorish palace. It was a

union of barbarism and of goldsmith's work, with the imposing and rugged

architecture of the elements.

The magnificent stains and moulderings of the sea covered, as with

velvet, the angles of granite. The escarpments were festooned with

large-flowered bindweed, sustaining itself with graceful ease, and

ornamenting the walls as by intelligent design. Wall-pellitories showed

their strange clusters in tasteful arrangement. The wondrous light which

came from beneath the water, at once a submarine twilight and an Elysian

radiance, softened down and blended all harsh lineaments. Every wave was

a prism. The outlines of things under these rainbow-tinted undulations

produced the chromatic effects of optical glasses made too convex. Solar

spectra shot through the waters. Fragments of rainbows seemed floating

in that transparent dawn. Elsewhere--in other corners--there was

discernible a kind of moonlight in the water. Every kind of splendour

seemed to mingle there, forming a strange sort of twilight. Nothing

could be more perplexing or enigmatical than the sumptuous beauties of

this cavern. Enchantment reigned over all. The fantastic vegetation,

the rude masonry of the place seemed to harmonise. It was a happy

marriage this, between these strange wild things. The branches seeming

but to touch one another clung closely each to each. The stern rock and

the pale flower met in a passionate embrace. Massive pillars had

capitals and entwining wreaths of delicate garlands, that quivered

through every fibre, suggestive of fairy fingers tickling the feet of a

Behemoth, and the rock upheld the plant, and the plant clasped the rock

with unnatural joy of attraction.

The effect produced by the mysterious reconciliation of these strange

forms was of a supreme and inexpressible beauty.

The works of nature, not less than the works of genius, contain the

absolute, and produce an impression of awe. Something unexpected about

them imperiously insists on our mental submission; we are conscious of a

premeditation beyond our human scope, and at no time are they more

startling than when we suddenly become aware of the beauty that is

mingled with their terror.

This hidden grotto was, if we may use the expression, siderealised.

There was everything in it to surprise and overwhelm. An apocalyptic

light illuminated this crypt. One could not tell if that which the eyes

looked upon was a reality, for reality bore the impress of the

impossible. One could see, and touch, and know that one was standing

there, and yet it was difficult to believe in it all.

Was it daylight which entered by this casement beneath the sea? Was it

indeed water which trembled in this dusky pool? Were not these arched

roofs and porches fashioned out of sunset clouds to imitate a cavern to

men's eyes? What stone was that beneath the feet? Was not this solid

shaft about to melt and pass into thin air? What was that cunning

jewellery of glittering shells, half seen beneath the wave? How far away

were life, and the green earth, and human faces? What strange

enchantment haunted that mystic twilight? What blind emotion, mingling

its sympathies with the uneasy restlessness of plants beneath the wave?

At the extremity of the cavern, which was oblong, rose a Cyclopean

archivolte, singularly exact in form. It was a species of cave within a

cave, of tabernacle within a sanctuary. Here, behind a sheet of bright

verdure, interposed like the veil of a temple, arose a stone out of the

waves, having square sides, and bearing some resemblance to an altar.

The water surrounded it in all parts. It seemed as if a goddess had

just descended from it. One might have dreamed there that some

celestial form beneath that crypt or upon that altar dwelt for ever

pensive in naked beauty, but grew invisible at the approach of mortals.

It was hard to conceive that majestic chamber without a vision within.

The day-dream of the intruder might evoke again the marvellous

apparition. A flood of chaste light falling upon white shoulders

scarcely seen; a forehead bathed with the light of dawn; an Olympian

visage oval-shaped; a bust full of mysterious grace; arms modestly

drooping; tresses unloosened in the aurora; a body delicately modelled

of pure whiteness, half-wrapped in a sacred cloud, with the glance of a

virgin; a Venus rising from the sea, or Eve issuing from chaos; such was

the dream which filled the mind.

It seemed improbable that no phantom figure haunted this abode. Some

woman's form, the embodiment of a star, had no doubt but shortly left

the altar. Enveloped in this atmosphere of mute adoration the mind

pictured an Amphitryon, a Tethys, some Diana capable of passion, some

idealistic figure formed of light, looking softly down in the

surrounding dusk. It was she who had left behind in the cave this

perfumed luminosity, an emanation from her star-body. The dazzling

phantom was no longer visible, she was only revealed by the invisible,

and the sense of her presence lingered, setting the whole being

voluptuously a-quiver. The goddess had departed, but divinity remained.

The beauty of the recess seemed made for this celestial presence. It was

for the sake of this deity, this fairy of the pearl caverns, this queen

of the Zephyrs, this Grace born of the waves, it was for her--as the

mind, at least, imagined--that this subterranean dwelling had been thus

religiously walled in, so that nothing might ever trouble the reverent

shadows and the majestic silence round about that divine spirit.

Gilliatt, who was a kind of seer amid the secrets of nature, stood there

musing, and sensible of confused emotions.

Suddenly, at a few feet below him, in the delightful transparence of

that water like liquid jewels, he became sensible of the approach of

something of mystic shape. A species of long ragged band was moving

amidst the oscillation of the waves. It did not float, but darted about

of its own will. It had an object; was advancing somewhere rapidly. The

object had something of the form of a jester's bauble with points, which

hung flabby and undulating. It seemed covered with a dust incapable of

being washed away by the water. It was more than horrible; it was foul.

The beholder felt that it was something monstrous. It was a living

thing; unless, indeed, it were but an illusion. It seemed to be seeking

the darker portion of the cavern, where at last it vanished. The heavy

shadows grew darker as its sinister form glided into them, and

disappeared.

BOOK II

THE LABOUR

I

THE RESOURCES OF ONE WHO HAS NOTHING

The cavern did not easily part with its explorers. The entry had been

difficult; going back was more difficult still. Gilliatt, however,

succeeded in extricating himself; but he did not return there. He had

found nothing of what he was in quest of, and he had not the time to

indulge curiosity.

He put the forge in operation at once. Tools were wanting; he set to

work and made them.

For fuel he had the wreck; for motive force the water; for his bellows

the wind; for his anvil a stone; for art his instinct; for power his

will.

He entered with ardour upon his sombre labours.

The weather seemed to smile upon his work. It continued to be dry and

free from equinoctial gales. The month of March had come, but it was

tranquil. The days grew longer. The blue of the sky, the gentleness of

all the movements of the scene, the serenity of the noontide, seemed to

exclude the idea of mischief. The waves danced merrily in the sunlight.

A Judas kiss is the first step to treachery; of such caresses the ocean

is prodigal. Her smile, like that of woman's sometimes, cannot be

trusted.

There was little wind. The hydraulic bellows worked all the better for

that reason. Much wind would have embarrassed rather than aided it.

Gilliatt had a saw; he manufactured for himself a file. With the saw he

attacked the wood; with the file the metal. Then he availed himself of

the two iron hands of the smith--the pincers and the pliers. The pincers

gripe, the pliers handle; the one is like the closed hand, the other

like the fingers. By degrees he made for himself a number of

auxiliaries, and constructed his armour. With a piece of hoop-wood he

made a screen for his forge-fire.

One of his principal labours was the sorting and repair of pulleys. He

mended both the blocks and the sheaves of tackle. He cut down the

irregularities of all broken joists, and reshaped the extremities. He

had, as we have said, for the necessities of his carpentry, a quantity

of pieces of wood, stored away, and arranged according to the forms, the

dimensions, and the nature of their grain; the oak on one side, the pine

on the other; the short pieces like riders, separated from the straight

pieces like binding strakes. This formed his reserve of supports and

levers, of which he might stand in great need at any moment.

Any one who intends to construct hoisting tackle ought to provide

himself with beams and small cables. But that is not sufficient. He must

have cordage. Gilliatt restored the cables, large and small. He frayed

out the tattered sails, and succeeded in converting them into an

excellent yarn, of which he made twine. With this he joined the ropes.

The joins, however, were liable to rot. It was necessary, therefore, to

hasten to make use of these cables. He had only been able to make white

tow, for he was without tar.

The ropes mended, he proceeded to repair the chains.

Thanks to the lateral point of the stone anvil, which served the part of

the conoid bicorn, he was able to forge rings rude in shape but strong.

With these he fastened together the severed lengths of chains, and made

long pieces.

To work at a forge without assistance is something more than

troublesome. He succeeded nevertheless. It is true that he had only to

forge and shape articles of comparatively small size, which he was able

to handle with the pliers in one hand, while he hammered with the other.

He cut into lengths the iron bars of the captain's bridge on which

Clubin used to pass to and fro from paddle-box to paddle-box giving his

orders; forged at one extremity of each piece a point, and at the other

a flat head. By this means he manufactured large nails of about a foot

in length. These nails, much used in pontoon making, are useful in

fixing anything in rocks.

What was his object in all these labours? We shall see.

He was several times compelled to renew the blade of his hatchet and the

teeth of his saw. For renotching the saw he had manufactured a

three-sided file.

Occasionally he made use of the capstan of the Durande. The hook of the

chain broke: he made another.

By the aid of his pliers and pincers, and by using his chisel as a

screwdriver, he set to work to remove the two paddle-wheels of the

vessel; an object which he accomplished. This was rendered practicable

by reason of a peculiarity in their construction. The paddle-boxes which

covered them served him to stow them away. With the planks of these

paddle-boxes, he made two cases in which he deposited the two paddles,

piece by piece, each part being carefully numbered.

His lump of chalk became precious for this purpose.

He kept the two cases upon the strongest part of the wreck.

When these preliminaries were completed, he found himself face to face

with the great difficulty. The problem of the engine of the Durande was

now clearly before him.

Taking the paddle-wheels to pieces had proved practicable. It was very

different with the machinery.

In the first place, he was almost entirely ignorant of the details of

the mechanism. Working thus blindly he might do some irreparable damage.

Then, even in attempting to dismember it, if he had ventured on that

course, far other tools would be necessary than such as he could

fabricate with a cavern for a forge, a wind-draught for bellows, and a

stone for an anvil. In attempting, therefore, to take to pieces the

machinery, there was the risk of destroying it.

The attempt seemed at first sight wholly impracticable.

The apparent impossibility of the project rose before him like a stone

wall, blocking further progress.

What was to be done?

II

WHEREIN SHAKESPEARE AND ÆSCHYLUS MEET

Gilliatt had a notion.

Since the time of the carpenter-mason of Salbris, who, in the sixteenth

century, in the dark ages of science--long before Amontons had

discovered the first law of electricity, or Lahire the second, or

Coulomb the third--without other helper than a child, his son, with

ill-fashioned tools, in the chamber of the great clock of La

Charité-sur-Loire, resolved at one stroke five or six problems in

statics and dynamics inextricably intervolved like the wheels in a block

of carts and waggons--since the time of that grand and marvellous

achievement of the poor workman, who found means, without breaking a

single piece of wire, without throwing one of the teeth of the wheels

out of gear, to lower in one piece, by a marvellous simplification, from

the second story of the clock-tower to the first, that massive monitor

of the hours, made all of iron and brass, "large as the room in which

the man watches at night from the tower," with its motion, its

cylinders, its barrels, its drum, its hooks, and its weights, the barrel

of its spring steel-yard, its horizontal pendulum, the holdfasts of its

escapement, its reels of large and small chains, its stone weights, one

of which weighed five hundred pounds, its bells, its peals, its jacks

that strike the hours--since the days, I say, of the man who

accomplished this miracle, and of whom posterity knows not even the

name--nothing that could be compared with the project which Gilliatt was

meditating had ever been attempted.

The ponderousness, the delicacy, the involvement of the difficulties

were not less in the machinery of the Durande than in the clock of La

Charité-sur-Loire.

The untaught mechanic had his helpmate--his son; Gilliatt was alone.

A crowd gathered together from Meung-sur-Loire, from Nevers, and even

from Orleans, able at time of need to assist the mason of Salbris, and

to encourage him with their friendly voices. Gilliatt had around him no

voices but those of the wind; no crowd but the assemblage of waves.

There is nothing more remarkable than the timidity of ignorance, unless

it be its temerity. When ignorance becomes daring, she has sometimes a

sort of compass within herself--the intuition of the truth, clearer

oftentimes in a simple mind than in a learned brain.

Ignorance invites to an attempt. It is a state of wonderment, which,

with its concomitant curiosity, forms a power. Knowledge often enough

disconcerts and makes over-cautious. Gama, had he known what lay before

him, would have recoiled before the Cape of Storms. If Columbus had been

a great geographer, he might have failed to discover America.

The second successful climber of Mont Blanc was the savant, Saussure;

the first the goatherd, Balmat.

These instances I admit are exceptions, which detract nothing from

science, which remains the rule. The ignorant man may discover; it is

the learned who invent.

The sloop was still at anchor in the creek of "The Man Rock," where the

sea left it in peace. Gilliatt, as will be remembered, had arranged

everything for maintaining constant communication with it. He visited

the sloop and measured her beam carefully in several parts, but

particularly her midship frame. Then he returned to the Durande and

measured the diameter of the floor of the engine-room. This diameter,

of course, without the paddles, was two feet less than the broadest part

of the deck of his bark. The machinery, therefore, might be put aboard

the sloop.

But how could it be got there?

III

GILLIATT'S MASTERPIECE COMES TO THE RESCUE OF THAT OF LETHIERRY

Any fisherman who had been mad enough to loiter in that season in the

neighbourhood of Gilliatt's labours about this time would have been

repaid for his hardihood, by a singular sight between the two Douvres.

Before his eyes would have appeared four stout beams, at equal

distances, stretching from one Douvre to the other, and apparently

forced into the rock, which is the firmest of all holds. On the Little

Douvre, their extremities were laid and buttressed upon the projections

of rock. On the Great Douvre, they had been driven in by blows of a

hammer, by the powerful hand of a workman standing upright upon the beam

itself. These supports were a little longer than the distance between

the rocks. Hence the firmness of their hold; and hence, also, their

slanting position. They touched the Great Douvre at an acute, and the

Little Douvre at an obtuse angle. Their inclination was only slight; but

it was unequal, which was a defect. But for this defect, they might have

been supposed to be prepared to receive the planking of a deck. To these

four beams were attached four sets of hoisting apparatus, each having

its pendent and its tackle-fall, with the bold peculiarity of having the

tackle-blocks with two sheaves at one extremity of the beam, and the

simple pulleys at the opposite end. This distance, which was too great

not to be perilous, was necessitated by the operations to be effected.

The blocks were firm, and the pulleys strong. To this tackle-gear cables

were attached, which from a distance looked like threads; while beneath

this apparatus of tackle and carpentry, in the air, the massive hull of

the Durande seemed suspended by threads.

She was not yet suspended, however. Under the cross beams, eight

perpendicular holes had been made in the deck, four on the port, and

four on the starboard side of the engine; eight other holes had been

made beneath them through the keel. The cables, descending vertically

from the four tackle-blocks, through the deck, passed out at the keel,

and under the machinery, re-entered the ship by the holes on the other

side, and passing again upward through the deck, returned, and were

wound round the beams. Here a sort of jigger-tackle held them in a bunch

bound fast to a single cable, capable of being directed by one arm. The

single cable passed over a hook, and through a dead-eye, which completed

the apparatus, and kept it in check. This combination compelled the four

tacklings to work together, and acting as a complete restraint upon the

suspending powers, became a sort of dynamical rudder in the hand of the

pilot of the operation, maintaining the movements in equilibrium. The

ingenious adjustment of this system of tackling had some of the

simplifying qualities of the Weston pulley of these times, with a

mixture of the antique polyspaston of Vitruvius. Gilliatt had discovered

this, although he knew nothing of the dead Vitruvius or of the still

unborn Weston. The length of the cables varied, according to the unequal

declivity of the cross-beams. The ropes were dangerous, for the untarred

hemp was liable to give way. Chains would have been better in this

respect, but chains would not have passed well through the

tackle-blocks.

The apparatus was full of defects; but as the work of one man, it was

surprising. For the rest, it will be understood that many details are

omitted which would render the construction perhaps intelligible to

practical mechanics, but obscure to others.

The top of the funnel passed between the two beams in the middle.

Gilliatt, without suspecting it, had reconstructed, three centuries

later, the mechanism of the Salbris carpenter--a mechanism rude and

incorrect, and hazardous for him who would dare to use it.

Here let us remark, that the rudest defects do not prevent a mechanism

from working well or ill. It may limp, but it moves. The obelisk in the

square of St. Peter's at Rome is erected in a way which offends against

all the principles of statics. The carriage of the Czar Peter was so

constructed that it appeared about to overturn at every step; but it

travelled onward for all that. What deformities are there in the

machinery of Marly! Everything that is heterodox in hydraulics. Yet it

did not supply Louis XIV. any the less with water.

Come what might, Gilliatt had faith. He had even anticipated success so

confidently as to fix in the bulwarks of the sloop, on the day when he

measured its proportions, two pairs of corresponding iron rings on each

side, exactly at the same distances as the four rings on board the

Durande, to which were attached the four chains of the funnel.

He had in his mind a very complete and settled plan. All the chances

being against him, he had evidently determined that all the precautions

at least should be on his side.

He did some things which seemed useless; a sign of attentive

premeditation.

His manner of proceeding would, as we have said, have puzzled an

observer, even though familiar with mechanical operations.

A witness of his labour who had seen him, for example, with enormous

efforts, and at the risk of breaking his neck, driving with blows of his

hammer eight or ten great nails which he had forged into the base of the

two Douvres at the entrance of the defile between them, would have had

some difficulty in understanding the object of these nails, and would

probably have wondered what could be the use of all that trouble.

If he had then seen him measuring the portion of the fore bulwark which

had remained, as we have described it, hanging on by the wreck, then

attaching a strong cable to the upper edge of that portion, cutting away

with strokes of his hatchet the dislocated fastenings which held it,

then dragging it out of the defile, pushing the lower part by the aid of

the receding tide, while he dragged the upper part; finally, by great

labour, fastening with the cable this heavy mass of planks and piles

wider than the entrance of the defile itself, with the nails driven into

the base of the Little Douvre, the observer would perhaps have found it

still more difficult to comprehend, and might have wondered why

Gilliatt, if he wanted for the purpose of his operations to disencumber

the space between the two rocks of this mass, had not allowed it to fall

into the sea, where the tide would have carried it away.

Gilliatt had probably his reasons.

In fixing the nails in the basement of the rocks, he had taken advantage

of all the cracks in the granite, enlarged them where needful, and

driven in first of all wedges of wood, in which he fixed the nails. He

made a rough commencement of similar preparations in the two rocks which

rose at the other extremity of the narrow passage on the eastern side.

He furnished with plugs of wood all the crevices, as if he desired to

keep these also ready to hold nails or clamps; but this appeared to be

a simple precaution, for he did not use them further. He was compelled

to economise, and only to use his materials as he had need, and at the

moment when the necessity for them came. This was another addition to

his numerous difficulties.

As fast as one labour was accomplished another became necessary.

Gilliatt passed without hesitation from task to task, and resolutely

accomplished his giant strides.

IV

SUB RE

The aspect of the man who accomplished all these labours became

terrible.

Gilliatt in his multifarious tasks expended all his strength at once,

and regained it with difficulty.

Privations on the one hand, lassitude on the other, had much reduced

him. His hair and beard had grown long. He had but one shirt which was

not in rags. He went about bare-footed, the wind having carried away one

of his shoes and the sea the other. Fractures of the rude and dangerous

stone anvil which he used had left small wounds upon his hands and arms,

the marks of labour. These wounds, or rather scratches, were

superficial; but the keen air and the salt sea irritated them

continually.

He was generally hungry, thirsty, and cold.

His store of fresh water was gone; his rye-meal was used or eaten. He

had nothing left but a little biscuit.

This he broke with his teeth, having no water in which to steep it.

By little and little, and day by day, his powers decreased.

The terrible rocks were consuming his existence.

How to obtain food was a problem; how to get drink was a problem; how to

find rest was a problem.

He ate when he was fortunate enough to find a crayfish or a crab; he

drank when he chanced to see a sea-bird descend upon a point of rock;

for on climbing up to the spot he generally found there a hollow with a

little fresh water. He drank from it after the bird; sometimes with the

bird; for the gulls and seamews had become accustomed to him, and no

longer flew away at his approach. Even in his greatest need of food he

did not attempt to molest them. He had, as will be remembered, a

superstition about birds. The birds on their part--now that his hair was

rough and wild and his beard long--had no fear of him. The change in his

face gave them confidence; he had lost resemblance to men, and taken the

form of the wild beast.

The birds and Gilliatt, in fact, had become good friends. Companions in

poverty, they helped each other. As long as he had had any meal, he had

crumbled for them some little bits of the cakes he made. In his deeper

distress they showed him in their turn the places where he might find

the little pools of water.

He ate the shell-fish raw. Shell-fish help in a certain degree to quench

the thirst. The crabs he cooked. Having no kettle, he roasted them

between two stones made red-hot in his fire, after the manner of the

savages of the Feroe islands.

Meanwhile signs of the equinoctial season had begun to appear. There

came rain--an angry rain. No showers or steady torrents, but fine,

sharp, icy, penetrating points which pierced to his skin through his

clothing, and to his bones through his skin. It was a rain which yielded

little water for drinking, but which drenched him none the less.

Chary of assistance, prodigal of misery--such was the character of these

rains. During one week Gilliatt suffered from them all day and all

night.

At night, in his rocky recess, nothing but the overpowering fatigue of

his daily work enabled him to get sleep. The great sea-gnats stung him,

and he awakened covered with blisters.

He had a kind of low fever, which sustained him; this fever is a succour

which destroys. By instinct he chewed the mosses, or sucked the leaves

of wild cochlearia, scanty tufts of which grew in the dry crevices of

the rocks. Of his suffering, however, he took little heed. He had no

time to spare from his work to the consideration of his own privations.

The rescue of the machinery of the Durande was progressing well. That

sufficed for him.

Every now and then, for the necessities of his work, he jumped into the

water, swam to some point, and gained a footing again. He simply plunged

into the sea and left it, as a man passes from one room in his dwelling

to another.

His clothing was never dry. It was saturated with rain water, which had

no time to evaporate, and with sea water, which never dries. He lived

perpetually wet.

Living in wet clothing is a habit which may be acquired. The poor

groups of Irish people--old men, mothers, girls almost naked, and

infants--who pass the winter in the open air, under the snow and rain,

huddled together, sometimes at the corners of houses in the streets of

London, live and die in this condition.

To be soaked with wet, and yet to be thirsty: Gilliatt grew familiar

with this strange torture. There were times when he was glad to suck the

sleeve of his loose coat.

The fire which he made scarcely warmed him. A fire in open air yields

little comfort. It burns on one side, and freezes on the other.

Gilliatt often shivered even while sweating over his forge.

Everywhere about him rose resistance amidst a terrible silence. He felt

himself the enemy of an unseen combination. There is a dismal _non

possumus_ in nature. The inertia of matter is like a sullen threat. A

mysterious persecution environed him. He suffered from heats and

shiverings. The fire ate into his flesh; the water froze him; feverish

thirst tormented him; the wind tore his clothing; hunger undermined the

organs of the body. The oppression of all these things was constantly

exhausting him. Obstacles silent, immense, seemed to converge from all

points, with the blind irresponsibility of fate, yet full of a savage

unanimity. He felt them pressing inexorably upon him. No means were

there of escaping from them. His sufferings produced the impression of

some living persecutor. He had a constant sense of something working

against him, of a hostile form ever present, ever labouring to

circumvent and to subdue him. He could have fled from the struggle; but

since he remained, he had no choice but to war with this impenetrable

hostility. He asked himself what it was. It took hold of him, grasped

him tightly, overpowered him, deprived him of breath. The invisible

persecutor was destroying him by slow degrees. Every day the oppression

became greater, as if a mysterious screw had received another turn.

His situation in this dreadful spot resembled a duel, in which a

suspicion of some treachery haunts the mind of one of the combatants.

Now it seemed a coalition of obscure forces which surrounded him. He

felt that there was somewhere a determination to be rid of his presence.

It is thus that the glacier chases the loitering ice-block.

Almost without seeming to touch him this latent coalition had reduced

him to rags; had left him bleeding, distressed, and, as it were, _hors

de combat_, even before the battle. He laboured, indeed, not the

less--without pause or rest; but as the work advanced, the workman

himself lost ground. It might have been fancied that Nature, dreading

his bold spirit, adopted the plan of slowly undermining his bodily

power. Gilliatt kept his ground, and left the rest to the future. The

sea had begun by consuming him; what would come next?

The double Douvres--that dragon made of granite, and lying in ambush in

mid-ocean--had sheltered him. It had allowed him to enter, and to do his

will; but its hospitality resembled the welcome of devouring jaws.

The desert, the boundless surface, the unfathomable space around him and

above, so full of negatives to man's will; the mute, inexorable

determination of phenomena following their appointed course; the grand

general law of things, implacable and passive; the ebbs and flows; the

rocks themselves, dark Pleiades whose points were each a star amid

vortices, a centre of an irradiation of currents; the strange,

indefinable conspiracy to stifle with indifference the temerity of a

living being; the wintry winds, the clouds, and the beleaguering waves

enveloped him, closed round him slowly, and in a measure shut him in,

and separated him from companionship, like a dungeon built up by degrees

round a living man. All against him; nothing for him; he felt himself

isolated, abandoned, enfeebled, sapped, forgotten. His storehouse empty,

his tools broken or defective; he was tormented with hunger and thirst

by day, with cold by night. His sufferings had left him with wounds and

tatters, rags covering sores, torn hands, bleeding feet, wasted limbs,

pallid cheeks, and eyes bright with a strange light; but this was the

steady flame of his determination.

The virtue of a man is betrayed by his eyes. How much of the man there

is in us may be read in their depths. We make ourselves known by the

light that gleams beneath our brows. The petty natures wink at us, the

larger send forth flashes. If there is no brilliancy under the lids,

there is no thought in the brain, no love in the heart. Those who love

desire, and those who desire sparkle and flash. Determination gives a

fire to the glance, a magnificent fire that consumes all timid thoughts.

It is the self-willed ones who are sublime. He who is only brave, has

but a passing fit, he who is only valiant has temperament and nothing

more, he who is courageous has but one virtue. He who persists in the

truth is the grand character. The secret of great hearts may be summed

up in the word: Perseverando. Perseverance is to courage what the wheel

is to the lever; it is the continual renewing of the centre of support.

Let the desired goal be on earth or in heaven, only make for the goal.

Everything is in that; in the first case one is a Columbus, in the

second a god. Not to allow conscience to argue or the will to fail--this

is the way to suffering and glory. In the world of ethics to fall does

not exclude the possibility of soaring, rather does it give impetus to

flight. The mediocrities allow themselves to be dissuaded by the

specious obstacles--the great ones never. To perish is their perhaps, to

conquer their conviction. You may propose many good reasons to the

martyr why he should not allow himself to be stoned to death. Disdain of

every reasonable objection begets that sublime victory of the vanquished

which we call martyrdom.

All his efforts seemed to tend to the impossible. His success was

trifling and slow. He was compelled to expend much labour for very

little results. This it was that gave to his struggle its noble and

pathetic character.

That it should have required so many preparations, so much toil, so many

cautious experiments, such nights of hardship, and such days of danger,

merely to set up four beams over a shipwrecked vessel, to divide and

isolate the portion that could be saved, and to adjust to that wreck

within a wreck four tackle-blocks with their cables was only the result

of his solitary labour. Fate had decreed him the work, and necessity

obliged him to carry it out.

That solitary position Gilliatt had more than accepted; he had

deliberately chosen it. Dreading a competitor, because a competitor

might have proved a rival, he had sought for no assistance. The

overwhelming enterprise, the risk, the danger, the toil multiplied by

itself, the possible destruction of the salvor in his work, famine,

fever, nakedness, distress--he had chosen all these for himself! Such

was his selfishness. He was like a man placed in some terrible chamber

which is being slowly exhausted of air. His vitality was leaving him by

little and little. He scarcely perceived it.

Exhaustion of the bodily strength does not necessarily exhaust the will.

Faith is only a secondary power; the will is the first. The mountains,

which faith is proverbially said to move, are nothing beside that which

the will can accomplish. All that Gilliatt lost in vigour, he gained in

tenacity. The destruction of the physical man under the oppressive

influence of that wild surrounding sea, and rock, and sky, seemed only

to reinvigorate his moral nature.

Gilliatt felt no fatigue; or, rather, would not yield to any. The

refusal of the mind to recognise the failings of the body is in itself

an immense power.

He saw nothing, except the steps in the progress of his labours.

His object--now seeming so near attainment--wrapped him in perpetual

illusions.

He endured all this suffering without any other thought than is

comprised in the word "Forward." His work flew to his head; the strength

of the will is intoxicating. Its intoxication is called heroism.

He had become a kind of Job, having the ocean for the scene of his

sufferings. But he was a Job wrestling with difficulty, a Job combating

and making head against afflictions; a Job conquering! a combination of

Job and Prometheus, if such names are not too great to be applied to a

poor sailor and fisher of crabs and crayfish.

V

SUB UMBRA

Sometimes in the night-time Gilliatt woke and peered into the darkness.

He felt a strange emotion.

His eyes were opened upon the black night; the situation was dismal;

full of disquietude.

There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness.

A strange roof of shadow; a deep obscurity, which no diver can explore;

a light mingled with that obscurity, of a strange, subdued, and sombre

kind; floating atoms of rays, like a dust of seeds or of ashes; millions

of lamps, but no illumining; a vast sprinkling of fire, of which no man

knows the secret; a diffusion of shining points, like a drift of sparks

arrested in their course; the disorder of the whirlwind, with the

fixedness of death; a mysterious and abyssmal depth; an enigma, at once

showing and concealing its face; the Infinite in its mask of

darkness--these are the synonyms of night. Its weight lies heavily on

the soul of man.

This union of all mysteries--the mystery of the Cosmos and the mystery

of Fate--oppresses human reason.

The pressure of darkness acts in inverse proportion upon different kinds

of natures. In the presence of night man feels his own incompleteness.

He perceives the dark void and is sensible of infirmity. It is like the

vacancy of blindness. Face to face with night, man bends, kneels,

prostrates himself, crouches on the earth, crawls towards a cave, or

seeks for wings. Almost always he shrinks from that vague presence of

the Infinite Unknown. He asks himself what it is; he trembles and bows

the head. Sometimes he desires to go to it.

To go whither?

He can only answer, "Yonder."

But what is that? and what is there?

This curiosity is evidently forbidden to the spirit of man; for all

around him the roads which bridge that gulf are broken up or gone. No

arch exists for him to span the Infinite. But there is attraction in

forbidden knowledge, as in the edge of the abyss. Where the footstep

cannot tread, the eye may reach; where the eye can penetrate no further,

the mind may soar. There is no man, however feeble or insufficient his

resources, who does not essay. According to his nature he questions or

recoils before that mystery. With some it has the effect of repressing;

with others it enlarges the soul. The spectacle is sombre, indefinite.

Is the night calm and cloudless? It is then a depth of shadow. Is it

stormy? It is then a sea of cloud. Its limitless deeps reveal themselves

to us, and yet baffle our gaze: close themselves against research, but

open to conjecture. Its innumerable dots of light only make deeper the

obscurity beyond. Jewels, scintillations, stars; existences revealed in

the unknown universes; dread defiances to man's approach; landmarks of

the infinite creation; boundaries there, where there are no bounds;

sea-marks impossible, and yet real, numbering the fathoms of those

infinite deeps. One microscopic glittering point; then another; then

another; imperceptible, yet enormous. Yonder light is a focus; that

focus is a star; that star is a sun; that sun is a universe; that

universe is nothing. For all numbers are as zero in the presence of the

Infinite.

These worlds, which yet are nothing, exist. Through this fact we feel

the difference which separates the _being nothing_ from the _not to be_.

The inaccessible joined to the inexplicable, such is the universe. From

the contemplation of the universe is evolved a sublime phenomenon: the

soul growing vast through its sense of wonder. A reverent fear is

peculiar to man; the beasts know no such fear.

His intelligence becomes conscious in this august terror of its own

power and its own weakness.

Darkness has unity, hence arises horror; at the same time it is complex,

and hence terror. Its unity weighs on the spirit and destroys all desire

of resistance. Its complexity causes us to look around on all sides;

apparently we have reason to fear sudden happenings. We yield and yet

are on guard. We are in presence of the whole, hence submission; and of

the many, hence defiance.

The unity of darkness contains a multiple, a mysterious

plurality--visible in matter, realised in thought. Silence rules all;

another reason for watchfulness.

Night--and he who writes this has said it elsewhere--is the right and

normal condition of that special part of creation to which we belong.

Light, brief of duration here as throughout space, is but the nearness

of a star. This universal, prodigious night does not fulfil itself,

without friction, and all such friction in such a mechanism means what

we call evil. We feel this darkness to be evil, a latent denial of

divine order, the implicit blasphemy of the real rebelling against the

ideal. Evil complicates, by one knows not what hydra-headed monstrosity,

the vast, cosmic whole.

Everywhere it arises and resists.

It is the tempest, and hinders the hastening ship; it is chaos, and

trammels the birth of a world. Good is one; evil is ubiquitous. Evil

dislocates the logic of Life. It causes the bird to devour the fly and

the comet to destroy the planet. Evil is a blot on the page of creation.

The darkness of night is full of vertiginous uncertainty.

Whoso would sound its depths is submerged, and struggles therein.

What fatigue to be compared to this contemplation of shadows. It is the

study of annihilation.

There is no sure hold on which the soul may rest. There are ports of

departure, and no havens for arrival. The interlacing of contradictory

solutions; all the branches of doubt seen at a glance; the ramifications

of phenomena budding limitlessly from some undefined impulse; laws

intersecting each other; an incomprehensible promiscuity causing the

mineral to become vegetable; the vegetable to rise to higher life;

thought to gather weight; love to shine and gravitation to attract; the

immense range presented to view by all questions, extending itself into

the limitless obscurity; the half seen, suggesting the unknown; the

cosmic correlation appearing clearly, not to sight but to intelligence,

in the vast, dim space; the invisible become visible--these are the

great overshadowing! Man lives beneath it. He is ignorant of detail, but

he carries, in such proportion as he is able to bear, the weight of the

monstrous whole. This obsession prompted the astronomy of the Chaldean

shepherds. Involuntary revelations flow from creation; hints of science

fall from it unconsciously and are absorbed by the ignorant. Every

solitary, impregnated in this mysterious way, becomes, without being

aware of it, a natural philosopher.

The darkness is indivisible. It is inhabited. Inhabited by the

changeless absolute; inhabited also by change. Action exists there,

disquieting thought! An awful creative will works out its phases.

Premeditations, Powers, fore-ordained Destinies, elaborate there

together an incommensurable work. A life of horror and terror is hidden

therein. There are vast evolutions of suns; the stellar family, the

planetary family; zodiacal pollen; the _Quid Divinum_ of currents;

effluvia, polarisations, and attractions; there are embraces and

antagonisms; a magnificent flux and reflux of universal antithesis; the

imponderable, free-floating around fixed centres; there is the sap of

globes and light beyond globes; the wandering atom, the scattered germ,

the processes of fecundity, meetings for union and for combat;

unimagined profusion, distances which are as a dream, vertiginous

orbits, the rush of worlds into the incalculable; marvels following each

other in the obscurity. One mechanism works throughout in the breath of

fleeing spheres, and the wheels that we know are turning. The sage

conjectures; the ignorant man believes and trembles. These things exist

and yet are hidden; they are inexpugnable, beyond reach, beyond

approach.

We are convinced and oppressed--we feel, we know not what dark evidence

within us; we realise nothing, but are crushed by the impalpable.

All is incomprehensible, but nothing is unintelligible.

And add to all that, the tremendous question: Is this immanent universe

a Being?

We exist beneath the shadow. We look; we listen. And meanwhile the dark

earth rolls onward. The flowers are conscious of this tremendous motion;

the one opens at eleven in the evening and the other at five in the

morning. Astounding sense of law! And in other depths of wonder, the

drop of water is a world; the infusoria breed; animalculæ display

gigantic fecundity, the imperceptible reveals its grandeur, immensity

manifests itself, in an inverse sense; there are algæ that produce in an

hour thirteen hundred millions of their kind. Every enigma is propounded

in one. The irreducible is before us. Hence we are constrained to some

kind of faith. An involuntary belief is the result. But belief does not

ensure peace of mind. Faith has an extraordinary desire to take shape.

Hence religions. Nothing is so overwhelming as a formless faith.

And despite of thought or desire or inward resistance, to look at the

darkness is to fall into profound and wondering meditation. What can we

make of these phenomena! How should we act beneath their united forces?

To divide such weight of oppression is impossible. What reverie can

follow all these mystic vistas? What abstruse revelations arise,

stammering, and are obscure from their very mass, as a hesitating

speech. Darkness is silence, but such a silence suggests everything. One

majestic thought is the result: God--God is the irrepressible idea that

springs within man's soul. Syllogisms, feuds, negations, systems,

religions cannot destroy it. This idea is affirmed by the whole dark

universe. Yet unrest is everywhere in fearful immanence. The wondrous

correlation of forces is manifested in the upholding of the balanced

darkness. The universe is suspended and nothing falls. Incessant and

immeasurable changes operate without accident or destruction. Man

participates in the constant changes, and in experiencing such he names

them Destiny. But where does destiny begin? And where does nature end?

What difference is there between an event and a season? between a sorrow

and a rainfall? between a virtue and a star? An hour, is it not a

rolling wave? The wheels of creation revolve mechanically regardless of

man. The starry sky is a vision of wheels, pendulums, and counterpoise.

He who contemplates it cannot but ponder upon it.

It is the whole reality and yet the whole abstraction. And nothing more.

We are in prison and at the mercy of the darkness, and no evasion is

possible.

We are an integral part of the working of this unknown whole; and we

feel the mystery within us fraternising with the mystery beyond us.

Hence the sublimity of Death. What anguish! And yet what bliss to

belong to the Infinite, and through the sense of the Infinite to

recognise our inevitable immortality, the possibility of an eternity; to

grasp amid this prodigious deluge of universal life, the persistent,

imperishable _Me_; to look at the stars and say, The living soul within

me is akin to you; to gaze into darkness and cry, I am as unfathomable

as thou! Such immensity is of night, and, added to solitude, weighed

heavily on Gilliatt's mind.

Did he understand it? No.

Did he feel it? Yes.

All these vague imaginings, increased and intensified by solitude,

weighed upon Gilliatt.

He understood them little, but he felt them. His was a powerful

intellect clouded; a great spirit wild and untaught.

VI

GILLIATT PLACES THE SLOOP IN READINESS

This rescue of the machinery of the wreck as meditated by Gilliatt was,

as we have already said, like the escape of a criminal from a

prison--necessitating all the patience and industry recorded of such

achievements; industry carried to the point of a miracle, patience only

to be compared with a long agony. A certain prisoner named Thomas, at

the Mont Saint Michel, found means of secreting the greater part of a

wall in his paillasse. Another at Tulle, in 1820, cut away a quantity of

lead from the terrace where the prisoners walked for exercise. With what

kind of knife? No one would guess. And melted this lead with what fire?

None have ever discovered; but it is known that he cast it in a mould

made of the crumbs of bread. With this lead and this mould he made a

key, and with this key succeeded in opening a lock of which he had never

seen anything but the keyhole. Some of this marvellous ingenuity

Gilliatt possessed. He had once climbed and descended from the cliff at

Boisrosé. He was the Baron Trenck of the wreck, and the Latude of her

machinery.

The sea, like a jailor, kept watch over him.

For the rest, mischievous and inclement as the rain had been, he had

contrived to derive some benefit from it. He had in part replenished his

stock of fresh water; but his thirst was inextinguishable, and he

emptied his can as fast as he filled it.

One day--it was on the last day of April or the first of May--all was at

length ready for his purpose.

The engine-room was, as it were, enclosed between the eight cables

hanging from the tackle-blocks, four on one side, four on the other. The

sixteen holes upon the deck and under the keel, through which the cables

passed, had been hooped round by sawing. The planking had been sawed,

the timber cut with the hatchet, the ironwork with a file, the sheathing

with the chisel. The part of the keel immediately under the machinery

was cut squarewise, and ready to descend with it while still supporting

it. All this frightful swinging mass was held only by one chain, which

was itself only kept in position by a filed notch. At this stage, in

such a labour and so near its completion, haste is prudence.

The water was low; the moment favourable.

Gilliatt had succeeded in removing the axle of the paddles, the

extremities of which might have proved an obstacle and checked the

descent. He had contrived to make this heavy portion fast in a vertical

position within the engine-room itself.

It was time to bring his work to an end. The workman, as we have said,

was not weary, for his will was strong; but his tools were. The forge

was by degrees becoming impracticable. The blower had begun to work

badly. The little hydraulic fall being of sea-water, saline deposits had

encrusted the joints of the apparatus, and prevented its free action.

Gilliatt visited the creek of "The Man Rock," examined the sloop, and

assured himself that all was in good condition, particularly the four

rings fixed to starboard and to larboard; then he weighed anchor, and

worked the heavy barge-shaped craft with the oars till he brought it

alongside the two Douvres. The defile between the rocks was wide enough

to admit it. There was also depth enough. On the day of his arrival he

had satisfied himself that it was possible to push the sloop under the

Durande.

The feat, however, was difficult; it required the minute precision of a

watchmaker. The operation was all the more delicate from the fact that,

for his objects, he was compelled to force it in by the stern, rudder

first. It was necessary that the mast and the ringing of the sloop

should project beyond the wreck in the direction of the sea.

These embarrassments rendered all Gilliatt's operations awkward. It was

not like entering the creek of "The Man," where it was a mere affair of

the tiller. It was necessary here to push, drag, row, and take

soundings all together. Gilliatt consumed but a quarter of an hour in

these manoeuvres; but he was successful.

In fifteen or twenty minutes the sloop was adjusted under the wreck. It

was almost wedged in there. By means of his two anchors he moored the

boat by head and stern. The strongest of the two was placed so as to be

efficient against the strongest wind that blows, which was that from the

south-west. Then by the aid of a lever and the capstan, he lowered into

the sloop the two cases containing the pieces of the paddle-wheel, the

slings of which were all ready. The two cases served as ballast.

Relieved of these encumbrances, he fastened to the hook of the chain of

the capstan the sling of the regulating tackle-gear, intending to check

the pulleys.

Owing to the peculiar objects of this labour, the defects of the old

sloop became useful qualities. It had no deck; her burden therefore

would have greater depth, and could rest upon the hold. Her mast was

very forward--too far forward indeed for general purposes; her contents

therefore would have more room, and the mast standing thus beyond the

mass of the wreck, there would be nothing to hinder its disembarkation.

It was a mere shell, or case for receiving it; but nothing is more

stable than this on the sea.

While engaged in these operations, Gilliatt suddenly perceived that the

sea was rising. He looked around to see from what quarter the wind was

coming.

VII

SUDDEN DANGER

The breeze was scarcely perceptible; but what there was came from the

west. A disagreeable habit of the winds during the equinoxes.

The rising sea varies much in its effects upon the Douvres rocks,

depending upon the quarter of the wind.

According to the gale which drives them before it, the waves enter the

rocky corridor either from the east or from the west. Entering from the

east, the sea is comparatively gentle; coming from the west, it is

always furious. The reason of this is, that the wind from the east

blowing from the land has not had time to gather force; while the

westerly winds, coming from the Atlantic, blow unchecked from a vast

ocean. Even a very slight breeze, if it comes from the west, is serious.

It rolls the huge billows from the illimitable space and dashes the

waves against the narrow defile in greater bulk than can find entrance

there.

A sea which rolls into a gulf is always terrible. It is the same with a

crowd of people: a multitude is a sort of fluid body. When the quantity

which can enter is less than the quantity endeavouring to force a way,

there is a fatal crush among the crowd, a fierce convulsion on the

water. As long as the west wind blows, however slight the breeze, the

Douvres are twice a day subjected to that rude assault. The sea rises,

the tide breasts up, the narrow gullet gives little entrance, the waves,

driven against it violently, rebound and roar, and a tremendous surf

beats the two sides of the gorge. Thus the Douvres, during the slightest

wind from the west, present the singular spectacle of a sea

comparatively calm without, while within the rocks a storm is raging.

This tumult of waters, altogether confined and circumscribed, has

nothing of the character of a tempest. It is a mere local outbreak among

the waves, but a terrible one. As regards the winds from the north and

south, they strike the rocks crosswise, and cause little surf in the

passage. The entrance by the east, a fact which must be borne in mind,

was close to "The Man Rock." The dangerous opening to the west was at

the opposite extremity, exactly between the two Douvres.

It was at this western entrance that Gilliatt found himself with the

wrecked Durande, and the sloop made fast beneath it.

A catastrophe seemed inevitable. There was not much wind, but it was

sufficient for the impending mischief.

Before many hours, the swell which was rising would be rushing with full

force into the gorge of the Douvres. The first waves were already

breaking. This swell, and eddy of the entire Atlantic, would have behind

it the immense sea. There would be no squall; no violence, but a simple

overwhelming wave, which commencing on the coasts of America, rolls

towards the shores of Europe with an impetus gathered over two thousand

leagues. This wave, a gigantic ocean barrier, meeting the gap of the

rocks, must be caught between the two Douvres, standing like

watch-towers at the entrance, or like pillars of the defile. Thus

swelled by the tide, augmented by resistance, driven back by the shoals,

and urged on by the wind, it would strike the rock with violence, and

with all the contortions from the obstacles it had encountered, and all

the frenzy of a sea confined in limits, would rush between the rocky

walls, where it would reach the sloop and the Durande, and, in all

probability, destroy them.

A shield against this danger was wanting. Gilliatt had one.

The problem was to prevent the sea reaching it at one bound; to obstruct

it from striking, while allowing it to rise; to bar the passage without

refusing it admission; to prevent the compression of the water in the

gorge, which was the whole danger; to turn an eruption into a simple

flood; to extract as it were from the waves all their violence, and

constrain the furies to be gentle; it was, in fact, to substitute an

obstacle which will appease, for an obstacle which irritates.

Gilliatt, with all that dexterity which he possessed, and which is so

much more efficient than mere force, sprang upon the rocks like a

chamois among the mountains or a monkey in the forest; using for his

tottering and dizzy strides the smallest projecting stone; leaping into

the water, and issuing from it again; swimming among the shoals and

clambering the rocks, with a rope between his teeth and a mallet in his

hand. Thus he detached the cable which kept suspended and also fast to

the basement of the Little Douvre the end of the forward side of the

Durande; fashioned out of some ends of hawsers a sort of hinges, holding

this bulwark to the huge nails fixed in the granite; swung this

apparatus of planks upon them, like the gates of a great dock, and

turned their sides, as he would turn a rudder, outward to the waves,

which pushed the extremities upon the Great Douvre, while the rope

hinges detained the other extremities upon the Little Douvre; next he

contrived, by means of the huge nails placed beforehand for the purpose,

to fix the same kind of fastenings upon the Great Douvre as on the

little one; made completely fast the vast mass of woodwork against the

two pillars of the gorge, slung a chain across this barrier like a

baldric upon a cuirass; and in less than an hour, this barricade against

the sea was complete and the gullet of the rocks closed as by a

folding-door.

This powerful apparatus, a heavy mass of beams and planks, which laid

flat would have made a raft, and upright formed a wall, had by the aid

of the water been handled by Gilliatt with the adroitness of a juggler.

It might almost have been said that the obstruction was complete before

the rising sea had the time to perceive it.

It was one of those occasions on which Jean Bart would have employed the

famous expression which he applied to the sea every time he narrowly

escaped shipwreck. "We have cheated the Englishman;" for it is well

known that when that famous admiral meant to speak contemptuously of the

ocean he called it "the Englishman."

The entrance to the defile being thus protected, Gilliatt thought of the

sloop. He loosened sufficient cable for the two anchors to allow her to

rise with the tide; an operation similar to what the mariners of old

called "_mouiller avec des embossures_." In all this, Gilliatt was not

taken the least by surprise; the necessity had been foreseen. A seaman

would have perceived it by the two pulleys of the top ropes cut in the

form of snatch-blocks, and fixed behind the sloop, through which passed

two ropes, the ends of which were slung through the rings of the

anchors.

Meanwhile the tide was rising fast; the half flood had arrived, a moment

when the shock of the waves, even in comparatively moderate weather, may

become considerable. Exactly what Gilliatt expected came to pass. The

waves rolled violently against the barrier, struck it, broke heavily and

passed beneath. Outside was the heavy swell; within, the waters ran

quietly. He had devised a sort of marine _Furculæ caudinæ_. The sea was

conquered.

VIII

MOVEMENT RATHER THAN PROGRESS

The moment so long dreaded had come.

The problem now was to place the machinery in the bark.

Gilliatt remained thoughtful for some moments, holding the elbow of his

left arm in his right hand, and applying his left hand to his forehead.

Then he climbed upon the wreck, one part of which, containing the

engine, was to be parted from it, while the other remained.

He severed the four slings which fixed the four chains from the funnel

on the larboard and the starboard sides. The slings being only of cord,

his knife served him well enough for this purpose.

The four chains set free, hung down along the sides of the funnel.

From the wreck he climbed up to the apparatus which he had constructed,

stamped with his feet upon the beams, inspected the tackle-blocks,

looked to the pulleys, handled the cables, examined the eking-pieces,

assured himself that the untarred hemp was not saturated through, found

that nothing was wanting and nothing giving way; then springing from the

height of the suspending props on to the deck, he took up his position

near the capstan, in the part of the Durande which he intended to leave

jammed in between the two Douvres. This was to be his post during his

labours.

Earnest, but troubled with no impulses but what were useful to his work,

he took a final glance at the hoisting-tackle, then seized a file and

began to saw with it through the chain which held the whole suspended.

The rasping of the file was audible amidst the roaring of the sea.

The chain from the capstan, attached to the regulating gear, was within

his reach, quite near his hand.

Suddenly there was a crash. The link which he was filing snapped when

only half cut through: the whole apparatus swung violently. He had only

just time sufficient to seize the regulating gear.

The severed chain beat against the rock; the eight cables strained; the

huge mass, sawed and cut through, detached itself from the wreck; the

belly of the hull opened, and the iron flooring of the engine-room was

visible below the keel.

If he had not seized the regulating tackle at that instant it would have

fallen. But his powerful hand was there, and it descended steadily.

When the brother of Jean Bart, Peter Bart, that powerful and sagacious

toper, that poor Dunkirk fisherman, who used to talk familiarly with the

Grand Admiral of France, went to the rescue of the galley _Langeron_, in

distress in the Bay of Ambleteuse, endeavouring to save the heavy

floating mass in the midst of the breakers of that furious bay, he

rolled up the mainsail, tied it with sea-reeds, and trusted to the ties

to break away of themselves, and give the sail to the wind at the right

moment. Just so Gilliatt trusted to the breaking of the chain; and the

same eccentric feat of daring was crowned with the same success.

The tackle, taken in hand by Gilliatt, held out and worked well. Its

function, as will be remembered, was to moderate the powers of the

apparatus, thus reduced from many to one, by bringing them into united

action. The gear had some similarity to a bridle of a bowline, except

that instead of trimming a sail it served to balance a complicated

mechanism.

Erect, and with his hand upon the capstan, Gilliatt, so to speak, was

enabled to feel the pulse of the apparatus.

It was here that his inventive genius manifested itself.

A remarkable coincidence of forces was the result.

While the machinery of the Durande, detached in a mass, was lowering to

the sloop, the sloop rose slowly to receive it. The wreck and the

salvage vessel assisting each other in opposite ways, saved half the

labour of the operation.

The tide swelling quietly between the two Douvres raised the sloop and

brought it nearer to the Durande. The sea was more than conquered; it

was tamed and broken in. It became, in fact, part and parcel of the

organisation of power.

The rising waters lifted the vessel without any sort of shock, gently,

and almost with precaution, as one would handle porcelain.

Gilliatt combined and proportioned the two labours, that of the water

and that of the apparatus; and standing steadfast at the capstan, like

some terrible statue obeyed by all the movement around it at the same

moment, regulated the slowness of the descent by the slow rise of the

sea.

There was no jerk given by the waters, no slip among the tackle. It was

a strange collaboration of all the natural forces subdued. On one side,

gravitation lowering the huge bulk, on the other the sea raising the

bark. The attraction of heavenly bodies which causes the tide, and the

attractive force of the earth, which men call weight, seemed to conspire

together to aid his plans. There was no hesitation, no stoppage in their

service; under the dominance of mind these passive forces became active

auxiliaries. From minute to minute the work advanced; the interval

between the wreck and the sloop diminished insensibly. The approach

continued in silence, and as in a sort of terror of the man who stood

there. The elements received his orders and fulfilled them.

Nearly at the moment when the tide ceased to raise it, the cable ceased

to slide. Suddenly, but without commotion, the pulleys stopped. The vast

machine had taken its place in the bark, as if placed there by a

powerful hand. It stood straight, upright, motionless, firm. The iron

floor of the engine-room rested with its four corners evenly upon the

hold.

The work was accomplished.

Gilliatt contemplated it, lost in thought.

He was not the spoiled child of success. He bent under the weight of his

great joy. He felt his limbs, as it were, sinking; and contemplating

his triumph, he, who had never been shaken by danger, began to tremble.

He gazed upon the sloop under the wreck and at the machinery in the

sloop. He seemed to feel it hard to believe it true. It might have been

supposed that he had never looked forward to that which he had

accomplished. A miracle had been wrought by his hands, and he

contemplated it in bewilderment.

His reverie lasted but a short time.

Starting like one awakening from a deep sleep, he seized his saw, cut

the eight cables, separated now from the sloop, thanks to the rising of

the tide, by only about ten feet; sprang aboard, took a bunch of cord,

made four slings, passed them through the rings prepared beforehand, and

fixed on both sides aboard the sloop the four chains of the funnel which

only an hour before had been still fastened to their places aboard the

Durande.

The funnel being secured, he disengaged the upper part of the machinery.

A square portion of the planking of the Durande was adhering to it; he

struck off the nails and relieved the sloop of this encumbrance of

planks and beams; which fell over on to the rocks--a great assistance in

lightening it.

For the rest, the sloop, as has been foreseen, behaved well under the

burden of the machinery. It had sunk in the water, but only to a good

water-line. Although massive, the engine of the Durande was less heavy

than the pile of stones and the cannon which he had once brought back

from Herm in the sloop.

All then was ended; he had only to depart.

IX

A SLIP BETWEEN CUP AND LIP

All was not ended.

To re-open the gorge thus closed by the portion of the Durande's

bulwarks, and at once to push out with the sloop beyond the rocks,

nothing could appear more clear and simple. On the ocean every minute is

urgent. There was little wind; scarcely a wrinkle on the open sea. The

afternoon was beautiful, and promised a fine night. The sea, indeed, was

calm, but the ebb had begun. The moment was favourable for starting.

There would be the ebb-tide for leaving the Douvres; and the flood

would carry him into Guernsey. It would be possible to be at St.

Sampson's at daybreak.

But an unexpected obstacle presented itself. There was a flaw in his

arrangements which had baffled all his foresight.

The machinery was freed; but the chimney was not.

The tide, by raising the sloop to the wreck suspended in the air, had

diminished the dangers of the descent, and abridged the labour. But this

diminution of the interval had left the top of the funnel entangled in

the kind of gaping frame formed by the open hull of the Durande. The

funnel was held fast there as between four walls.

The services rendered by the sea had been accompanied by that

unfortunate drawback. It seemed as if the waves, constrained to obey,

had avenged themselves by a malicious trick.

It is true that what the flood-tide had done, the ebb would undo.

The funnel, which was rather more than three fathoms in height, was

buried more than eight feet in the wreck. The water-level would fall

about twelve feet. Thus the funnel descending with the falling tide

would have four feet of room to spare, and would clear itself easily.

But how much time would elapse before that release would be completed?

Six hours.

In six hours it would be near midnight. What means would there be of

attempting to start at such an hour? What channel could he find among

all those breakers, so full of dangers even by day? How was he to risk

his vessel in the depth of black night in that inextricable labyrinth,

that ambuscade of shoals?

There was not help for it. He must wait for the morrow. These six hours

lost, entailed a loss of twelve hours at least.

He could not even advance the labour by opening the mouth of the gorge.

His breakwater was necessary against the next tide.

He was compelled to rest. Folding his arms was almost the only thing

which he had not yet done since his arrival on the rocks.

This forced inaction irritated, almost vexed him with himself, as if it

had been his fault. He thought "what would Déruchette say of me if she

saw me thus doing nothing?"

And yet this interval for regaining his strength was not unnecessary.

The sloop was now at his command; he determined to pass the night in

it.

He mounted once more to fetch his sheepskin upon the Great Douvre;

descended again, supped off a few limpets and _châtaignes de mer_,

drank, being very thirsty, a few draughts of water from his can, which

was nearly empty, enveloped himself in the skin, the wool of which felt

comforting, lay down like a watch-dog beside the engine, drew his red

cap over his eyes and slept.

His sleep was profound. It was such sleep as men enjoy who have

completed a great labour.

X

SEA-WARNINGS

In the middle of the night he awoke suddenly and with a jerk like the

recoil of a spring.

He opened his eyes.

The Douvres, rising high over his head, were lighted up as by the white

glow of burning embers. Over all the dark escarpment of the rock there

was a light like the reflection of a fire.

Where could this fire come from?

It was from the water.

The aspect of the sea was extraordinary.

The water seemed a-fire. As far as the eye could reach, among the reefs

and beyond them, the sea ran with flame. The flame was not red; it had

nothing in common with the grand living fires of volcanic craters or of

great furnaces. There was no sparkling, no glare, no purple edges, no

noise. Long trails of a pale tint simulated upon the water the folds of

a winding-sheet. A trembling glow was spread over the waves. It was the

spectre of a great fire, rather than the fire itself. It was in some

degree like the glow of unearthly flames lighting the inside of a

sepulchre. A burning darkness.

The night itself, dim, vast, and wide-diffused, was the fuel of that

cold flame. It was a strange illumination issuing out of blindness. The

shadows even formed part of that phantom-fire.

The sailors of the Channel are familiar with those indescribable

phosphorescences, full of warning for the navigator. They are nowhere

more surprising than in the "Great V," near Isigny.

By this light, surrounding objects lose their reality. A spectral

glimmer renders them, as it were, transparent. Rocks become no more

than outlines. Cables of anchors look like iron bars heated to a white

heat. The nets of the fishermen beneath the water seem webs of fire. The

half of the oar above the waves is dark as ebony, the rest in the sea

like silver. The drops from the blades uplifted from the water fall in

starry showers upon the sea. Every boat leaves a furrow behind it like a

comet's tail. The sailors, wet and luminous, seem like men in flames. If

you plunge a hand into the water, you withdraw it clothed in flame. The

flame is dead, and is not felt. Your arm becomes a firebrand. You see

the forms of things in the sea roll beneath the waves as in liquid fire.

The foam twinkles. The fish are tongues of fire, or fragments of the

forked lightning, moving in the depths.

The reflection of this brightness had passed over the closed eyelids of

Gilliatt in the sloop. It was this that had awakened him.

His awakening was opportune.

The ebb tide had run out, and the waters were beginning to rise again.

The funnel, which had become disengaged during his sleep, was about to

enter again into the yawning hollow above it.

It was rising slowly.

A rise of another foot would have entangled it in the wreck again. A

rise of one foot is equivalent to half-an-hour's tide. If he intended,

therefore, to take advantage of that temporary deliverance once more

within his reach, he had just half-an-hour before him.

He leaped to his feet.

Urgent as the situation was, he stood for a few moments meditative,

contemplating the phosphorescence of the waves.

Gilliatt knew the sea in all its phases. Notwithstanding all her tricks,

and often as he had suffered from her terrors, he had long been her

companion. That mysterious entity which we call the ocean had nothing in

its secret thoughts which he could not divine. Observation, meditation,

and solitude, had given him a quick perception of coming changes, of

wind, or cloud, or wave.

Gilliatt hastened to the top ropes and payed out some cable; then being

no longer held fast by the anchors, he seized the boat-hook of the

sloop, and pushed her towards the entrance to the gorge some fathoms

from the Durande, and quite near to the breakwater. Here, as the

Guernsey sailors say, it had _du rang_. In less than ten minutes the

sloop was withdrawn from beneath the carcase of the wreck. There was no

further danger of the funnel being caught in a trap. The tide might rise

now.

And yet Gilliatt's manner was not that of one about to take his

departure.

He stood considering the light upon the sea once more; but his thoughts

were not of starting. He was thinking of how to fix the sloop again, and

how to fix it more firmly than ever, though near to the exit from the

defile.

Up to this time he had only used the two anchors of the sloop and had

not yet employed the little anchor of the Durande, which he had found,

as will be remembered, among the breakers. This anchor had been

deposited by him in readiness for any emergency, in a corner of the

sloop, with a quantity of hawsers, and blocks of top-ropes, and his

cable, all furnished beforehand with large knots, which prevented its

dragging. He now let go this third anchor, taking care to fasten the

cable to a rope, one end of which was slung through the anchor ring,

while the other was attached to the windlass of the sloop. In this

manner he made a kind of triangular, triple anchorage, much stronger

than the moorings with two anchors. All this indicated keen anxiety, and

a redoubling of precautions. A sailor would have seen in this operation

something similar to an anchorage in bad weather, when there is fear of

a current which might carry the vessel under the wind.

The phosphorescence which he had been observing, and upon which his eye

was now fixed once more, was threatening, but serviceable at the same

time. But for it he would have been held fast locked in sleep, and

deceived by the night. The strange appearance upon the sea had awakened

him, and made things about him visible.

The light which it shed among the rocks was, indeed, ominous; but

disquieting as it appeared to be to Gilliatt, it had served to show him

the dangers of his position, and had rendered possible his operations in

extricating the sloop. Henceforth, whenever he should be able to set

sail, the vessel, with its freight of machinery, would be free.

And yet the idea of departing was further than ever from his mind. The

sloop being fixed in its new position, he went in quest of the strongest

chain which he had in his store-cavern, and attaching it to the nails

driven into the two Douvres, he fortified from within with this chain

the rampart of planks and beams, already protected from without by the

cross chain. Far from opening the entrance to the defile, he made the

barrier more complete.

The phosphorescence lighted him still, but it was diminishing. The day,

however, was beginning to break.

Suddenly he paused to listen.

XI

A WORD TO THE WISE IS ENOUGH

A feeble, indistinct sound seemed to reach his ear from somewhere in the

far distance.

At certain hours the great deeps give forth a murmuring noise.

He listened a second time. The distant noise recommenced. Gilliatt shook

his head like one who recognises at last something familiar to him.

A few minutes later he was at the other extremity of the alley between

the rocks, at the entrance facing the east, which had remained open

until then, and by heavy blows of his hammer was driving large nails

into the sides of the gullet near "The Man Rock," as he had done at the

gullet of the Douvres.

The crevices of these rocks were prepared and well furnished with

timber, almost all of which was heart of oak. The rock on this side

being much broken up, there were abundant cracks, and he was able to fix

even more nails there than in the base of the two Douvres.

Suddenly, and as if some great breath had passed over it, the luminous

appearance on the waters vanished. The twilight becoming paler every

moment, assumed its functions.

The nails being driven, Gilliatt dragged beams and cords, and then

chains to the spot; and without taking his eyes off his work, or

permitting his mind to be diverted for a moment, he began to construct

across the gorge of "The Man" with beams fixed horizontally, and made

fast by cables, one of those open barriers which science has now adopted

under the name of breakwaters.

Those who have witnessed, for example, at La Rocquaine in Guernsey, or

at Bourg-d'Eau in France, the effect produced by a few posts fixed in

the rock, will understand the power of these simple preparations. This

sort of breakwater is a combination of what is called in France _épi_

with what is known in England as "a dam." The breakwater is the

chevaux-de-frise of fortifications against tempests. Man can only

struggle against the sea by taking advantage of this principle of

dividing its forces.

Meanwhile, the sun had risen, and was shining brightly. The sky was

clear, the sea calm.

Gilliatt pressed on his work. He, too, was calm; but there was anxiety

in his haste. He passed with long strides from rock to rock, and

returned dragging wildly sometimes a rider, sometimes a binding strake.

The utility of all this preparation of timbers now became manifest. It

was evident that he was about to confront a danger which he had

foreseen.

A strong iron bar served him as a lever for moving the beams.

The work was executed so fast that it was rather a rapid growth than a

construction. He who has never seen a military pontooner at his work can

scarcely form an idea of this rapidity.

The eastern gullet was still narrower than the western. There were but

five or six feet of interval between the rocks. The smallness of this

opening was an assistance. The space to be fortified and closed up being

very little, the apparatus would be stronger, and might be more simple.

Horizontal beams, therefore, sufficed, the upright ones being useless.

The first cross pieces of the breakwater being fixed, Gilliatt mounted

upon them and listened once more.

The murmurs had become significant.

He continued his construction. He supported it with the two cat-heads of

the Durande, bound to the frame of beams by cords passed through the

three pulley-sheaves. He made the whole fast by chains.

The construction was little more than a colossal hurdle, having beams

for rods and chains in the place of wattles.

It seemed woven together, quite as much as built.

He multiplied the fastenings, and added nails where they were necessary.

Having obtained a great quantity of bar iron from the wreck, he had been

able to make a large number of these heavy nails.

While still at work, he broke some biscuit with his teeth. He was

thirsty, but he could not drink, having no more fresh water. He had

emptied the can at his meal of the evening before.

He added afterwards four or five more pieces of timber; then climbed

again upon the barrier and listened.

The noises from the horizon had ceased; all was still.

The sea was smooth and quiet; deserving all those complimentary phrases

which worthy citizens bestow upon it when satisfied with a trip. "A

mirror," "a pond," "like oil," and so forth. The deep blue of the sky

responded to the deep green tint of the ocean. The sapphire and the

emerald hues vied with each other. Each were perfect. Not a cloud on

high, not a line of foam below. In the midst of all this splendour, the

April sun rose magnificently. It was impossible to imagine a lovelier

day.

On the verge of the horizon a flight of birds of passage formed a long

dark line against the sky. They were flying fast as if alarmed.

Gilliatt set to work again to raise the breakwater.

He raised it as high as he could; as high, indeed, as the curving of the

rocks would permit.

Towards noon the sun appeared to him to give more than its usual warmth.

Noon is the critical time of the day. Standing upon the powerful frame

which he had built up, he paused again to survey the wide expanse.

The sea was more than tranquil. It was a dull dead calm. No sail was

visible. The sky was everywhere clear; but from blue it had become

white. The whiteness was singular. To the west, and upon the horizon,

was a little spot of a sickly hue. The spot remained in the same place,

but by degrees grew larger. Near the breakers the waves shuddered; but

very gently.

Gilliatt had done well to build his breakwater.

A tempest was approaching.

The elements had determined to give battle.

BOOK III

THE STRUGGLE

I

EXTREMES MEET

Nothing is more threatening than a late equinox.

The appearance of the sea presents a strange phenomenon, resulting from

what may be called the arrival of the ocean winds.

In all seasons, but particularly at the epoch of the Syzygies, at the

moment when least expected, the sea sometimes becomes singularly

tranquil. That vast perpetual movement ceases; a sort of drowsiness and

languor overspreads it; and it seems weary and about to rest. Every rag

of bunting, from the tiny streamer of the fishing-boat to the great flag

of ships of war, droops against the mast. The admiral's flag, the Royal

and Imperial ensigns sleep alike.

Suddenly all these streamers begin to flutter gently.

If there happen to be clouds, the moment has then come for marking the

formation of the _cirri_; if the sun is setting, for observing the red

tints of the horizon; or if it be night and there is a moon, for looking

attentively for the halo.

It is then that the captain or commander of a squadron, if he happen to

possess one of those storm indicators, the inventor of which is unknown,

notes his instrument carefully and takes his precautions against the

south wind, if the clouds have an appearance like dissolved sugar; or

against the north, if they exfoliate in crystallisations like brakes of

brambles, or like fir woods. Then, too, the poor Irish or Breton

fisherman, after having consulted some mysterious gnomon engraved by the

Romans or by demons upon one of those straight enigmatical stones, which

are called in Brittany _Menhir_, and in Ireland _Cruach_, hauls his boat

up on the shore.

Meanwhile the serenity of sky and ocean continues. The day dawns

radiant, and Aurora smiles. It was this which filled the old poets and

seers with religious horror; for men dared to suspect the falsity of

the sun. _Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?_

The sombre vision of nature's secret laws is interdicted to man by the

fatal opacity of surrounding things. The most terrible and perfidious of

her aspects is that which masks the convulsions of the deep.

Some hours, and even days sometimes, pass thus. Pilots raise their

telescopes here and there. The faces of old seamen have always an

expression of severity left upon them by the vexation of perpetually

looking out for changes.

Suddenly a great confused murmur is heard. A sort of mysterious dialogue

takes place in the air.

Nothing unusual is seen.

The wide expanse is tranquil.

Yet the noises increase. The dialogue becomes more audible.

There is something beyond the horizon.

Something terrible. It is the wind.

The wind; or rather that populace of Titans which we call the gale. The

unseen multitude.

India knew them as the Maroubs, Judea as the Keroubim, Greece as the

Aquilones. They are the invisible winged creatures of the Infinite.

Their blasts sweep over the earth.

II

THE OCEAN WINDS

They come from the immeasurable deep. Their wide wings need the breadth

of the ocean gulf; the spaciousness of desert solitudes. The Atlantic,

the Pacific--those vast blue plains--are their delight. They hasten

thither in flocks. Commander Page witnessed, far out at sea, seven

waterspouts at once. They wander there, wild and terrible! The

ever-ending yet eternal flux and reflux is their work. The extent of

their power, the limits of their will, none know. They are the Sphinxes

of the abyss: Gama was their Œdipus. In that dark, ever-moving expanse,

they appear with faces of cloud. He who perceives their pale lineaments

in that wide dispersion, the horizon of the sea, feels himself in

presence of an unsubduable power. It might be imagined that the

proximity of human intelligence disquieted them, and that they revolted

against it. The mind of man is invincible, but the elements baffle him.

He can do nothing against the power which is everywhere, and which none

can bind. The gentle breath becomes a gale, smites with the force of a

war-club, and then becomes gentle again. The winds attack with a

terrible crash, and defend themselves by fading into nothingness. He who

would encounter them must use artifice. Their varying tactics, their

swift redoubled blows, confuse. They fly as often as they attack. They

are tenacious and impalpable. Who can circumvent them? The prow of the

_Argo_, cut from an oak of Dodona's grove, that mysterious pilot of the

bark, spoke to them, and they insulted that pilot-goddess. Columbus,

beholding their approach at _La Pinta_, mounted upon the poop, and

addressed them with the first verses of St. John's Gospel. Surcouf

defied them: "Here come the gang," he used to say. Napier greeted them

with cannon-balls. They assume the dictatorship of chaos.

Chaos is theirs, in which to wreak their mysterious vengeance: the den

of the winds is more monstrous than that of lions. How many corpses lie

in its deep recesses, where the howling gusts sweep without pity over

that obscure and ghastly mass! The winds are heard wheresoever they go,

but they give ear to none. Their acts resemble crimes. None know on whom

they cast their hoary surf; with what ferocity they hover over

shipwrecks, looking at times as if they flung their impious foam-flakes

in the face of heaven. They are the tyrants of unknown regions. "_Luoghi

spaventosi_," murmured the Venetian mariners.

The trembling fields of space are subjected to their fierce assaults.

Things unspeakable come to pass in those deserted regions. Some horseman

rides in the gloom; the air is full of a forest sound; nothing is

visible; but the tramp of cavalcades is heard. The noonday is overcast

with sudden night; a tornado passes. Or it is midnight, which suddenly

becomes bright as day; the polar lights are in the heavens. Whirlwinds

pass in opposite ways, and in a sort of hideous dance, a stamping of the

storms upon the waters. A cloud overburdened opens and falls to earth.

Other clouds, filled with red light, flash and roar; then frown again

ominously. Emptied of their lightnings, they are but as spent brands.

Pent-up rains dissolve in mists. Yonder sea appears a fiery furnace in

which the rains are falling: flames seem to issue from the waves. The

white gleam of the ocean under the shower is reflected to marvellous

distances. The different masses transform themselves into uncouth

shapes. Monstrous whirlpools make strange hollows in the sky. The

vapours revolve, the waves spin, the giddy Naiads roll; sea and sky are

livid; noises as of cries of despair are in the air.

Great sheaves of shadow and darkness are gathered up, trembling in the

far depths of the sky. Now and then there is a convulsion. The rumour

becomes tumult as the wave becomes surge. The horizon, a confused mass

of strata, oscillating ceaselessly, murmurs in a continual undertone.

Strange and sudden outbursts break through the monotony. Cold airs rush

forth, succeeded by warm blasts. The trepidation of the sea betokens

anxious expectation, agony, terror profound. Suddenly the hurricane

comes down, like a wild beast, to drink of the ocean: a monstrous

draught! The sea rises to the invisible mouth; a mound of water is

formed; the swell increases, and the waterspout appears; the Prester of

the ancients, stalactite above, stalagmite below, a whirling

double-inverted cone, a point in equilibrium upon another, the embrace

of two mountains--a mountain of foam ascending, a mountain of vapour

descending--terrible coition of the cloud and the wave. Like the column

in Holy Writ, the waterspout is dark by day and luminous by night. In

its presence the thunder itself is silent and seems cowed.

The vast commotion of those solitudes has its gamut, a terrible

crescendo. There are the gust, the squall, the storm, the gale, the

tempest, the whirlwind, the waterspout--the seven chords of the lyre of

the winds, the seven notes of the firmament. The heavens are a clear

space, the sea a vast round; but a breath passes, they have vanished,

and all is fury and wild confusion.

Such are these inhospitable realms.

The winds rush, fly, swoop down, dwindle away, commence again; hover

above, whistle, roar, and smile; they are frenzied, wanton, unbridled,

or sinking at ease upon the raging waves. Their howlings have a harmony

of their own. They make all the heavens sonorous. They blow in the cloud

as in a trumpet; they sing through the infinite space with the mingled

tones of clarions, horns, bugles, and trumpets--a sort of Promethean

fanfare.

Such was the music of ancient Pan. Their harmonies are terrible. They

have a colossal joy in the darkness. They drive and disperse great

ships. Night and day, in all seasons, from the tropics to the pole,

there is no truce; sounding their fatal trumpet through the tangled

thickets of the clouds and waves, they pursue the grim chase of vessels

in distress. They have their packs of bloodhounds, and take their

pleasure, setting them to bark among the rocks and billows. They huddle

the clouds together, and drive them diverse. They mould and knead the

supple waters as with a million hands.

The water is supple because it is incompressible. It slips away without

effort. Borne down on one side, it escapes on the other. It is thus that

waters become waves, and that the billows are a token of their liberty.

III

THE NOISES EXPLAINED

The grand descent of winds upon the world takes place at the equinoxes.

At this period the balance of tropic and pole librates, and the vast

atmospheric tides pour their flood upon one hemisphere and their ebb

upon another. The signs of Libra and Aquarius have reference to these

phenomena.

It is the time of tempests.

The sea awaits their coming, keeping silence.

Sometimes the sky looks sickly. Its face is wan. A thick dark veil

obscures it. The mariners observe with uneasiness the angry aspect of

the clouds.

But it is its air of calm contentment which they dread the most. A

smiling sky in the equinoxes is the tempest in gay disguise. It was

under skies like these that "The Tower of Weeping Women," in Amsterdam,

was filled with wives and mothers scanning the far horizon.

When the vernal or autumnal storms delay to break, they are gathering

strength; hoarding up their fury for more sure destruction. Beware of

the gale that has been long delayed. It was Angot who said that "the sea

pays well old debts."

When the delay is unusually long, the sea betokens her impatience only

by a deeper calm, but the magnetic intensity manifests itself by what

might be called a fiery humour in the sea. Fire issues from the waves;

electric air, phosphoric water. The sailors feel a strange lassitude.

This time is particularly perilous for iron vessels; their hulls are

then liable to produce variations of the compass, leading them to

destruction. The transatlantic steam-vessel _Iowa_ perished from this

cause.

To those who are familiar with the sea, its aspect at these moments is

singular. It may be imagined to be both desiring and fearing the

approach of the cyclone. Certain unions, though strongly urged by

nature, are attended by this strange conjunction of terror and desire.

The lioness in her tenderest moods flies from the lion. Thus the sea, in

the fire of her passion, trembles at the near approach of her union with

the tempest. The nuptials are prepared. Like the marriages of the

ancient emperors, they are celebrated with immolations. The fête is

heralded with disasters.

Meanwhile, from yonder deeps, from the great open sea, from the

unapproachable latitudes, from the lurid horizon of the watery waste,

from the utmost bounds of the free ocean, the winds pour down.

Listen; for this is the famous equinox.

The storm prepares mischief. In the old mythology these entities were

recognised, indistinctly moving, in the grand scene of nature. Eolus

plotted with Boreas. The alliance of element with element is necessary;

they divide their task. One has to give impetus to the wave, the cloud,

the stream: night is an auxiliary, and must be employed. There are

compasses to be falsified, beacons to be extinguished, lanterns of

lighthouses to be masked, stars to be hidden. The sea must lend her aid.

Every storm is preceded by a murmur. Behind the horizon line there is a

premonitory whispering among the hurricanes.

This is the noise which is heard afar off in the darkness amidst the

terrible silence of the sea.

It was this significant whispering which Gilliatt had noted. The

phosphorescence on the water had been the first warning: this murmur the

second.

If the demon Legion exists, he is assuredly no other than the wind.

The wind is complex, but the air is one.

Hence it follows that all storms are mixed--a principle which results

from the unity of the air.

The entire abyss of heaven takes part in a tempest: the entire ocean

also. The totality of its forces is marshalled for the strife. A wave is

the ocean gulf; a gust is a gulf of the atmosphere. A contest with a

storm is a contest with all the powers of sea and sky.

It was Messier, that great authority among naval men, the pensive

astronomer of the little lodge at Cluny, who said, "The wind comes from

everywhere and is everywhere." He had no faith in the idea of winds

imprisoned even in inland seas. With him there were no Mediterranean

winds; he declared that he recognised them as they wandered about the

earth. He affirmed that on a certain day, at a certain hour, the Föhn of

the Lake of Constance, the ancient Favonius of Lucretius, had traversed

the horizon of Paris; on another day, the Bora of the Adriatic; on

another day, the whirling Notus, which is supposed to be confined in the

round of the Cyclades. He indicated their currents. He did not believe

it impossible that the "Autan," which circulates between Corsica and the

Balearic Isles, could escape from its bounds. He did not admit the

theory of winds imprisoned like bears in their dens. It was he, too, who

said that "every rain comes from the tropics, and every flash of

lightning from the pole." The wind, in fact, becomes saturated with

electricity at the intersection of the colures which marks the extremity

of the axis, and with water at the equator; bringing moisture from the

equatorial line and the electric fluid from the poles.

The wind is ubiquitous.

It is certainly not meant by this that the winds never move in zones.

Nothing is better established than the existence of those continuous air

currents; and aerial navigation by means of the wind boats, to which the

passion for Greek terminology has given the name of "aeroscaphes," may

one day succeed in utilising the chief of these streams of wind. The

regular course of air streams is an incontestable fact. There are both

rivers of wind and rivulets of wind, although their branches are exactly

the reverse of water currents: for in the air it is the rivulets which

flow out of the rivers, and the smaller rivers which flow out of the

great streams instead of falling into them. Hence instead of

concentration we have dispersion.

The united action of the winds and the unity of the atmosphere result

from this dispersion. The displacement of one molecule produces the

displacement of another. The vast body of air becomes subject to one

agitation. To these profound causes of coalition we must add the

irregular surface of the earth, whose mountains furrow the atmosphere,

contorting and diverting the winds from their course, and determining

the directions of counter currents in infinite radiations.

The phenomenon of the wind is the oscillation of two oceans one against

the other; the ocean of air, superimposed upon the ocean of water, rests

upon these currents, and is convulsed with this vast agitation.

The indivisible cannot produce separate action. No partition divides

wave from wave. The islands of the Channel feel the influence of the

Cape of Good Hope. Navigation everywhere contends with the same monster;

the sea is one hydra. The waves cover it as with a coat of scales. The

ocean is Ceto.

Upon that unity reposes an infinite variety.

IV

TURBA TURMA

According to the compass there are thirty-two winds, that is to say,

thirty-two points. But these directions may be subdivided indefinitely.

Classed by its directions, the wind is incalculable; classed by its

kinds, it is infinite. Homer himself would have shrunk from the task of

enumerating them.