thus combined; the equilibrium is distributed by a shock, the wave of
wind issues forth and is distended, scattered and broken up in every
direction in fierce streams. The dispersion of the gusts shakes the
streaming locks of the wind upon the four corners of the horizon.
All the winds which blow are there. The wind of the Gulf Stream, which
disgorges the great fogs of Newfoundland; the wind of Peru, in the
region of silent heavens, where no man ever heard the thunder roar; the
wind of Nova Scotia, where flies the great auk (_Alca impennis_) with
his furrowed beak; the iron whirlwinds of the Chinese seas; the wind of
Mozambique, which destroys the canoes and junks; the electric wind,
which the people of Japan denounce by the beating of a gong; the African
wind, which blows between Table Mountain and the Devil's Peak, where it
gains its liberty; the currents of the equator, which pass over the
trade winds, describing a parabola, the summit of which is always to the
west; the Plutonian wind, which issues from craters, the terrible breath
of flames; the singular wind peculiar to the volcano Awa, which
occasions a perpetual olive tint in the north; the Java monsoon, against
which the people construct those casemates known as hurricane houses;
the branching north winds called by the English "Bush winds;" the curved
squalls of the Straits of Malacca, observed by Horsburgh; the powerful
south-west wind, called Pampero in Chili, and Rebojo at Buenos Ayres,
which carries the great condor out to sea, and saves him from the pit
where the Indian, concealed under a bullock-hide newly stripped,
watches for him, lying on his back and bending his great bow with his
feet; the chemical wind, which, according to Lemery, produces
thunder-bolts from the clouds; the Harmattan of the Caffres; the Polar
snow-driver, which harnesses itself to the everlasting icebergs; the
wind of the Gulf of Bengal, which sweeps over a continent to pillage the
triangular town of wooden booths at Nijni-Novogorod, in which is held
the great fair of Asia; the wind of the Cordilleras, agitator of great
waves and forests; the wind of the Australian Archipelago, where the
bee-hunters take the wild hives hidden under the forks of the branches
of the giant eucalyptus; the Sirocco, the Mistral, the Hurricane, the
dry winds, the inundating and diluvian winds, the torrid winds, which
scatter dust from the plains of Brazil upon the streets of Genoa, which
both obey and revolt against diurnal rotation, and of which Herrara
said, "_Malo viento torna contra el sol_;" those winds which hunt in
couples, conspiring mischief, the one undoing the work of the other; and
those old winds which assailed Columbus on the coast of Veragua, and
which during forty days, from the 21st of October to the 28th of
November 1520, delayed and nearly frustrated Magellan's approach to the
Pacific; and those which dismasted the Armada and confounded Philip II.
Others, too, there are, of the names of which there is no end. The
winds, for instance, which carry showers of frogs and locusts, and drive
before them clouds of living things across the ocean; those which blow
in what are called "Wind-leaps," and whose function is to destroy ships
at sea; those which at a single blast throw the cargo out of trim, and
compel the vessel to continue her course half broadside over; the winds
which construct the circum-cumuli; the winds which mass together the
circum-strati; the dark heavy winds swelled with rains; the winds of the
hailstorms; the fever winds, whose approach sets the salt springs and
sulphur springs of Calabria boiling; those which give a glittering
appearance to the fur of African panthers, prowling among the bushes of
Cape Ferro; those which come shaking from the cloud, like the tongue of
a trigonocephal, the terrible forked lightning; and those which bring
whirlwinds of black snow. Such is the legion of winds.
The Douvres rock heard their distant tramp at the moment when Gilliatt
was constructing his breakwater.
As we have said, the wind means the combination of all the winds of the
earth.
V
GILLIATT'S ALTERNATIVES
The mysterious forces had chosen their time well.
Chance, if chance exists, is sometimes far-seeing.
While the sloop had been anchored in the little creek of "The Man Rock,"
and as long as the machinery had been prisoned in the wreck, Gilliatt's
position had been impregnable. The sloop was in safety; the machinery
sheltered. The Douvres, which held the hull of the Durande fast,
condemned it to slow destruction, but protected it against unexpected
accidents. In any event, one resource had remained to him. If the engine
had been destroyed, Gilliatt would have been uninjured. He had still the
sloop by which to escape.
But to wait till the sloop was removed from the anchorage where she was
inaccessible; to allow it to be fixed in the defile of the Douvres; to
watch until the sloop, too, was, as it were, entangled in the rocks; to
permit him to complete the salvage, the moving, and the final
embarkation of the machinery; to do no damage to that wonderful
construction by which one man was enabled to put the whole aboard his
bark; to acquiesce, in fact, in the success of his exploits so far; this
was but the trap which the elements had laid for him. Now for the first
time he began to perceive in all its sinister characteristics the trick
which the sea had been meditating so long.
The machinery, the sloop, and their master were all now within the gorge
of the rocks. They formed but a single point. One blow, and the sloop
might be dashed to pieces on the rock, the machinery destroyed, and
Gilliatt drowned.
The situation could not have been more critical.
The sphinx, which men have imagined concealing herself in the cloud,
seemed to mock him with a dilemma.
"Go or stay."
To go would have been madness; to remain was terrible.
VI
THE COMBAT
Gilliatt ascended to the summit of the Great Douvre.
From hence he could see around the horizon.
The western side was appalling. A wall of cloud spread across it,
barring the wide expanse from side to side, and ascending slowly from
the horizon towards the zenith. This wall, straight lined, vertical,
without a crevice in its height, without a rent in its structure, seemed
built by the square and measured by the plumb-line. It was cloud in the
likeness of granite. Its escarpment, completely perpendicular at the
southern extremity, curved a little towards the north, like a bent sheet
of iron, presenting the steep slippery face of an inclined plane. The
dark wall enlarged and grew; but its entablature never ceased for a
moment to be parallel with the horizon line, which was almost
indistinguishable in the gathering darkness. Silently, and altogether,
the airy battlements ascended. No undulation, no wrinkle, no projection
changed its shape or moved its place. The aspect of this immobility in
movement was impressive. The sun, pale in the midst of a strange sickly
transparence, lighted up this outline of the Apocalypse. Already the
cloudy bank had blotted out one half the space of the sky: shelving like
the fearful talus of the abyss. It was the uprising of a dark mountain
between earth and heaven.
It was night falling suddenly upon midday.
There was a heat in the air as from an oven door, coming from that
mysterious mass on mass. The sky, which from blue had become white, was
now turning from white to a slatey grey. The sea beneath was leaden-hued
and dull. There was no breath, no wave, no noise. Far as eye could
reach, the desert ocean. No sail was visible on any side. The birds had
disappeared. Some monstrous treason seemed abroad.
The wall of cloud grew visibly larger.
This moving mountain of vapours, which was approaching the Douvres, was
one of those clouds which might be called the clouds of battle. Sinister
appearances; some strange, furtive glance seemed cast upon the beholder
through that obscure mass up-piled.
The approach was terrible.
Gilliatt observed it closely, and muttered to himself, "I am thirsty
enough, but you will give me plenty to drink."
He stood there motionless a few moments, his eye fixed upon the cloud
bank, as if mentally taking a sounding of the tempest.
His _galérienne_ was in the pocket of his jacket; he took it out and
placed it on his head. Then he fetched from the cave, which had so long
served him for a sleeping-place, a few things which he had kept there in
reserve; he put on his overalls, and attired himself in his waterproof
overcoat, like a knight who puts on his armour at the moment of battle.
He had no shoes; but his naked feet had become hardened to the rocks.
This preparation for the storm being completed, he looked down upon his
breakwater, grasped the knotted cord hurriedly, descended from the
plateau of the Douvre, stepped on to the rocks below, and hastened to
his store cavern. A few moments later he was at work. The vast silent
cloud might have heard the strokes of his hammer. With the nails, ropes,
and beams which still remained, he constructed for the eastern gullet a
second frame, which he succeeded in fixing at ten or twelve feet from
the other.
The silence was still profound. The blades of grass between the cracks
of the rocks were not stirred.
The sun disappeared suddenly. Gilliatt looked up.
The rising cloud had just reached it. It was like the blotting out of
day, succeeded by a mingled pale reflection.
The immense wall of cloud had changed its appearance. It no longer
retained its unity. It had curved on reaching the zenith, whence it
spread horizontally over the rest of the heavens. It had now its various
stages. The tempest formation was visible, like the strata in the side
of a trench. It was possible to distinguish the layers of the rain from
the beds of hail. There was no lightning, but a horrible, diffused
glare; for the idea of horror may be attached to light. The vague
breathing of the storm was audible; the silence was broken by an obscure
palpitation. Gilliatt, silent also, watched the giant blocks of vapour
grouping themselves overhead forming the shapeless mass of clouds. Upon
the horizon brooded and lengthened out a band of mist of ashen hue; in
the zenith, another band of lead colour. Pale, ragged fragments of cloud
hung from the great mass above upon the mist below. The pile of cloud
which formed the background was wan, dull, gloomy. A thin, whitish
transverse cloud, coming no one could tell whither, cut the high dark
wall obliquely from north to south. One of the extremities of this
cloud trailed along the surface of the sea. At the point where it
touched the waters, a dense red vapour was visible in the midst of the
darkness. Below it, smaller clouds, quite black and very low, were
flying as if bewildered or moved by opposite currents of air. The
immense cloud beyond increased from all points at once, darkened the
eclipse, and continued to spread its sombre pall. In the east, behind
Gilliatt, there was only one clear porch in the heavens, which was
rapidly being closed. Without any feeling of wind abroad, a strange
flight of grey downy particles seemed to pass; they were fine and
scattered as if some gigantic bird had been plucked of its plumage
behind the bank of cloud. A dark compact roof had gradually formed
itself, which on the verge of the horizon touched the sea, and mingled
in darkness with it. The beholder had a vague sense of something
advancing steadily towards him. It was vast, heavy, ominous. Suddenly an
immense peal of thunder burst upon the air.
Gilliatt himself felt the shock. The rude reality in the midst of that
visionary region has something in it terrific. The listener might fancy
that he hears something falling in the chamber of giants. No electric
flash accompanied the report. It was a blind peal. The silence was
profound again. There was an interval, as when combatants take up their
position. Then appeared slowly, one after the other, great shapeless
flashes; these flashes were silent. The wall of cloud was now a vast
cavern, with roofs and arches. Outlines of forms were traceable among
them; monstrous heads were vaguely shadowed forth; rocks seemed to
stretch out; elephants bearing turrets, seen for a moment, vanished. A
column of vapour, straight, round, and dark, and surmounted by a white
mist, simulated the form of a colossal steam-vessel engulfed, hissing,
and smoking beneath the waves. Sheets of cloud undulated like folds of
giant flags. In the centre, under a thick purple pall, a nucleus of
dense fog sunk motionless, inert, impenetrable by the electric fires; a
sort of hideous foetus in the bosom of the tempest.
Suddenly Gilliatt felt a breath moving his hair. Two or three large
spots of rain fell heavily around him on the rock. Then there was a
second thunder-clap. The wind was rising.
The terror of darkness was at its highest point. The first peal of
thunder had shaken the sea; the second rent the wall of cloud from top
to base; breach was visible; the pent-up deluge rushed towards it; the
rent became like a gulf filled with rain. The outpouring of the tempest
had begun.
The moment was terrible.
Rain, wind, lightnings, thunder, waves swirling upwards to the clouds,
foam, hoarse noises, whistlings, mingled together like monsters suddenly
unloosened.
For a solitary man, imprisoned with an overloaded vessel, between two
dangerous rocks in mid-ocean, no crisis could have been more menacing.
The danger of the tide, over which he had triumphed, was nothing
compared with the danger of the tempest.
Surrounded on all sides by dangers, Gilliatt, at the last moment, and
before the crowning peril, had developed an ingenious strategy. He had
secured his basis of operations in the enemies' territory; had pressed
the rock into his service. The Douvres, originally his enemy, had become
his second in that immense duel. Out of that sepulchre he had
constructed a fortress. He was built up among those formidable sea
ruins. He was blockaded, but well defended. He had, so to speak, set his
back against the wall, and stood face to face with the hurricane. He had
barricaded the narrow strait, that highway of the waves. This, indeed,
was the only possible course. It seemed as if the ocean, like other
despots, might be brought to reason by the aid of barricades. The sloop
might be considered secure on three sides. Closely wedged between the
two interior walls of the rock, made fast by three anchorings, she was
sheltered from the north by the Little Douvre, on the south by the Great
one; terrible escarpments, more accustomed to wreck vessels than to save
them. On the western side she was protected by the frame of timbers made
fast and nailed to the rocks--a tried barrier which had withstood the
rude flood-tide of the sea; a veritable citadel-gate, having for its
sides the columns of the rock--the two Douvres themselves. Nothing was
to be feared from that side. It was on the eastern side only that there
was danger.
On that side there was no protection but the breakwater. A breakwater is
an apparatus for dividing and distributing. It requires at least two
frames. Gilliatt had only had time to construct one. He was compelled to
build the second in the very presence of the tempest.
Fortunately the wind came from the north-west. The wind is not always
adroit in its attacks. The north-west wind, which is the ancient
"galerno," had little effect upon the Douvres. It assailed the rocks in
flank, and drove the waves neither against the one nor the other of the
two gullets; so that instead of rushing into a defile, they dashed
themselves against a wall.
But the currents of the wind are curved, and it was probable that there
would be some sudden change. If it should veer to the east before the
second frame could be constructed the peril would be great. The
irruption of the sea into the gorge would be complete, and all would
probably be lost.
The wildness of the storm went on increasing. The essence of a tempest
is the rapid succession of its blows. That is its strength; but it is
also its weakness. Its fury gives the opportunity to human intelligence,
and man spies its weak points for his defence; but under what
overwhelming assaults! No respite, no interruption, no truce, no pause
for taking breath. There seems an unspeakable cowardice in that
prodigality of inexhaustible resources.
All the tumult of the wide expanse rushed towards the Douvres. Voices
were heard in the darkness. What could they be? The ancient terror of
the sea was there. At times they seemed to speak as if some one was
uttering words of command. There were clamours, strange trepidations,
and then that majestic roar which the mariners call the "Ocean cry." The
indefinite and flying eddies of the wind whistled, while curling the
waves and flinging them like giant quoits, cast by invisible athletes,
against the breakers. The enormous surf streamed over all the rocks;
torrents above; foam below. Then the roaring was redoubled. No uproar of
men or beasts could yield an idea of that din which mingled with the
incessant breaking of the sea. The clouds cannonaded, the hailstones
poured their volleys, the surf mounted to the assault. As far as eye
could reach, the sea was white; ten leagues of yeasty water filled the
horizon. Doors of fire were opened, clouds seemed burnt by clouds, and
showed like smoke above a nebulous red mass, resembling burning embers.
Floating conflagrations rushed together and amalgamated, each changing
the shape of the other. From the midst of the dark roof a terrible
arsenal appeared to be emptied out, hurling downward from the gulf,
pell-mell, waterspouts, hail torrents, purple fire, phosphoric gleams,
darkness, and lightnings.
Meanwhile Gilliatt seemed to pay no attention to the storm. His head was
bent over his work. The second framework began to approach completion.
To every clap of thunder he replied with a blow of his hammer, making a
cadence which was audible even amidst that tumult. He was bareheaded,
for a gust had carried away his _galérienne_.
He suffered from a burning thirst. Little pools of rain had formed in
the rocks around him. From time to time he took some water in the hollow
of his hand and drank. Then, without even looking upward to observe the
storm, he applied himself anew to his task.
All might depend upon a moment. He knew the fate that awaited him if his
breakwater should not be completed in time. Of what avail could it be to
lose a moment in looking for the approach of death?
The turmoil around him was like that of a vast bubbling cauldron. Crash
and uproar were everywhere. Sometimes the lightning seemed to descend a
sort of ladder. The electric flame returned incessantly to the same
points of the rock, where there were probably metallic veins. Hailstones
fell of enormous size. Gilliatt was compelled to shake the folds of his
overcoat, even the pockets of which became filled with hail.
The storm had now rotated to the west, and was expending its fury upon
the barricades of the two Douvres. But Gilliatt had faith in his
breakwaters, and with good reason. These barricades, made of a great
portion of the fore-part of the Durande, took the shock of the waves
easily. Elasticity is a resistance. The experiments of Stephenson
establish the fact that against the waves, which are themselves elastic,
a raft of timber, joined and chained together in a certain fashion, will
form a more powerful obstacle than a breakwater of masonry. The barriers
of the Douvres fulfilled these conditions. They were, moreover, so
ingeniously made fast, that the waves striking them beneath were like
hammers beating in nails, pressing and consolidating the work upon the
rocks. To demolish them it would have been necessary to overthrow the
Douvres themselves. The surf, in fact, was only able to cast over upon
the sloop some flakes of foam. On that side, thanks to the barrier, the
tempest ended only in harmless insult. Gilliatt turned his back upon the
scene. He heard composedly its useless rage upon the rocks behind him.
The foam-flakes coming from all sides were like flights of down. The
vast irritated ocean deluged the rocks, dashed over them and raged
within, penetrated into the network of their interior fissures, and
issued again from the granitic masses by the narrow chinks, forming a
kind of inexhaustible fountains playing peacefully in the midst of that
deluge. Here and there a silvery network fell gracefully from these
spouts in the sea.
The second frame of the eastern barrier was nearly completed. A few
more knots of rope and ends of chains and this new rampart would be
ready to play its part in barring out the storm.
Suddenly there was a great brightness; the rain ceased; the clouds
rolled asunder; the wind had just shifted; a sort of high, dark window
opened in the zenith, and the lightnings were extinguished. The end
seemed to have come. It was but the commencement.
The change of wind was from the north-west to the north-east.
The storm was preparing to burst forth again with a new legion of
hurricanes. The north was about to mount to the assault. Sailors call
this dreaded moment of transition the "Return storm." The southern wind
brings most rain, the north wind most lightning.
The attack, coming now from the east, was directed against the weak
point of the position.
This time Gilliatt interrupted his work and looked around him.
He stood erect, upon a curved projection of the rock behind the second
barrier, which was nearly finished. If the first frame had been carried
away, it would have broken down the second, which was not yet
consolidated, and must have crushed him. Gilliatt, in the place that he
had chosen, must in that case have been destroyed before seeing the
sloop, the machinery, and all his work shattered and swallowed up in the
gulf. Such was the possibility which awaited him. He accepted it, and
contemplated it sternly.
In that wreck of all his hope, to die at once would have been his
desire; to die first, as he would have regarded it--for the machinery
produced in his mind the effect of a living being. He moved aside his
hair, which was beaten over his eyes by the wind, grasped his trusty
mallet, drew himself up in a menacing attitude, and awaited the event.
He was not kept long in suspense.
A flash of lightning gave the signal; the livid opening in the zenith
closed; a driving torrent of rain fell; then all became dark, save where
the lightnings broke forth once more. The attack had recommenced in
earnest.
A heavy swell, visible from time to time in the blaze of the lightning,
was rolling in the east beyond "The Man Rock." It resembled a huge wall
of glass. It was green and without foam, and it stretched across the
wide expanse. It was advancing towards the breakwater, increasing as it
approached. It was a singular kind of gigantic cylinder, rolling upon
the ocean. The thunder kept up a hollow rumbling.
The great wave struck "The Man Rock," broke in twain, and passed beyond.
The broken wave, rejoined, formed a mountain of water, and instead of
advancing in parallel line as before, came down perpendicularly upon the
breakwater.
The shock was terrific: the whole wave became a roaring surf.
It is impossible for those who have not witnessed them to imagine those
snowy avalanches which the sea thus precipitates, and under which it
engulfs for the moment rocks of more than a hundred feet in height,
such, for example, as the Great Anderlo at Guernsey, and the Pinnacle at
Jersey. At Saint Mary of Madagascar it passes completely over the
promontory of Tintingue.
For some moments the sea drowned everything. Nothing was visible except
the furious waters, an enormous breadth of foam, the whiteness of a
winding-sheet blowing in the draught of a sepulchre; nothing was heard
but the roaring storm working devastation around.
When the foam subsided, Gilliatt was still standing at his post.
The barrier had stood firm. Not a chain was broken, not a nail
displaced. It had exhibited under the trial the two chief qualities of a
breakwater; it had proved flexible as a hurdle and firm as a wall. The
surf falling upon it had dissolved into a shower of drops.
A river of foam rushing along the zigzags of the defile subsided as it
approached the sloop.
The man who had put this curb upon the fury of the ocean took no rest.
The storm fortunately turned aside its fury for a moment. The fierce
attack of the waves was renewed upon the wall of the rock. There was a
respite, and Gilliatt took advantage of it to complete the interior
barrier.
The daylight faded upon his labours. The hurricane continued its
violence upon the flank of the rocks with a mournful solemnity. The
stores of fire and water in the sky poured out incessantly without
exhausting themselves. The undulations of the wind above and below were
like the movements of a dragon.
Nightfall brought scarcely any deeper night. The change was hardly felt,
for the darkness was never complete. Tempests alternately darkening and
illumining by their lightnings, are merely intervals of the visible and
invisible. All is pale glare, and then all is darkness. Spectral shapes
issue forth suddenly, and return as suddenly into the deep shade.
A phosphoric zone, tinged with the hue of the aurora borealis, appeared
like ghastly flames behind the dense clouds, giving to all things a wan
aspect, and making the rain-drifts luminous.
This uncertain light aided Gilliatt, and directed him in his operations.
By its help he was enabled to raise the forward barrier. The breakwater
was now almost complete. As he was engaged in making fast a powerful
cable to the last beam, the gale blew directly in his face. This
compelled him to raise his head. The wind had shifted abruptly to the
north-east. The assault upon the eastern gullet recommenced. Gilliatt
cast his eyes around the horizon. Another great wall of water was
approaching.
The wave broke with a great shock; a second followed; then another and
another still; then five or six almost together; then a last shock of
tremendous force.
This last wave, which was an accumulation of forces, had a singular
resemblance to a living thing. It would not have been difficult to
imagine in the midst of that swelling mass the shapes of fins and
gill-coverings. It fell heavily and broke upon the barriers. Its almost
animal form was torn to pieces in the shape of spouts and gushes,
resembling the crushing to death of some sea hydra upon that block of
rocks and timbers. The swell rushed through, subsiding but devastating
as it went. The huge wave seemed to bite and cling to its victim as it
died. The rock shook to its base. A savage howling mingled with the
roar; the foam flew far like the spouting of a leviathan.
The subsidence exhibited the extent of the ravages of the surf. This
last escalade had not been ineffectual. The breakwater had suffered this
time. A long and heavy beam, torn from the first barrier, had been
carried over the second, and hurled violently upon the projecting rock
on which Gilliatt had stood but a moment before. By good fortune he had
not returned there. Had he done so, his death had been inevitable.
There was a remarkable circumstance in the fall of this beam, which by
preventing the framework rebounding, saved Gilliatt from greater
dangers. It even proved useful to him, as will be seen, in another way.
Between the projecting rock and the interior wall of the defile there
was a large interval, something like the notch of an axe, or the split
of a wedge. One of the extremities of the timber hurled into the air by
the waves had stuck fast into this notch in falling. The gap had become
enlarged.
Gilliatt was struck with an idea. It was that of bearing heavily on the
other extremity.
The beam caught by one end in the nook, which it had widened, projected
from it straight as an outstretched arm. This species of arm projected
parallel with the anterior wall of the defile, and the disengaged end
stretched from its resting place about eighteen or twenty inches. A good
distance for the object to be attained.
Gilliatt raised himself by means of his hands, feet, and knees to the
escarpment, and then turned his back, pressing both his shoulders
against the enormous lever. The beam was long, which increased its
raising power. The rock was already loosened; but he was compelled to
renew his efforts again and again. The sweat-drops rolled from his
forehead as rapidly as the spray. The fourth attempt exhausted all his
powers. There was a cracking noise; the gap spreading in the shape of a
fissure, opened its vast jaws, and the heavy mass fell into the narrow
space of the defile with a noise like the echo of the thunder.
The mass fell straight, and without breaking; resting in its bed like a
Druid cromlech precipitated in one piece.
The beam which had served as a lever descended with the rock, and
Gilliatt, stumbling forward as it gave way, narrowly escaped falling.
The bed of the pass at this part was full of huge round stones, and
there was little water. The monolith lying in the boiling foam, the
flakes of which fell on Gilliatt where he stood, stretched from side to
side of the great parallel rocks of the defile, and formed a transversal
wall, a sort of cross-stroke between the two escarpments. Its two ends
touched the rocks. It had been a little too long to lie flat, but its
summit of soft rock was struck off with the fall. The result of this
fall was a singular sort of _cul-de-sac_, which may still be seen. The
water behind this stony barrier is almost always tranquil.
This was a rampart more invincible still than the forward timbers of the
Durande fixed between the two Douvres.
The barrier came opportunely.
The assaults of the sea had continued. The obstinacy of the waves is
always increased by an obstacle. The first frame began to show signs of
breaking up. One breach, however small, in a breakwater, is always
serious. It inevitably enlarges, and there is no means of supplying its
place, for the sea would sweep away the workmen.
A flash which lighted up the rocks revealed to Gilliatt the nature of
the mischief; the beams broken down, the ends of rope and fragments of
chain swinging in the winds, and a rent in the centre of the apparatus.
The second frame was intact.
Though the block of stone so powerfully overturned by Gilliatt in the
defile behind the breakwater was the strongest possible barrier, it had
a defect. It was too low. The surge could not destroy, but could sweep
over it.
It was useless to think of building it higher. Nothing but masses of
rock could avail upon a barrier of stone; but how could such masses be
detached? or, if detached, how could they be moved, or raised, or piled,
or fixed? Timbers may be added, but rocks cannot.
Gilliatt was not Enceladus.
The very little height of this rocky isthmus rendered him anxious.
The effects of this fault were not long in showing themselves. The
assaults upon the breakwater were incessant; the heavy seas seemed not
merely to rage, but to attack with determination to destroy it. A sort
of trampling noise was heard upon the jolted framework.
Suddenly the end of a binding strake, detached from the dislocated
frame, was swept away over the second barrier and across the transversal
rock, falling in the defile, where the water seized and carried it into
the sinuosities of the pass. Gilliatt lost sight of it. It seemed
probable that it would do some injury to the sloop. Fortunately, the
water in the interior of the rocks, shut in on all sides, felt little of
the commotion without. The waves there were comparatively trifling, and
the shock was not likely to be very severe. For the rest, he had little
time to spare for reflection upon this mishap. Every variety of danger
was arising at once; the tempest was concentrated upon the vulnerable
point; destruction was imminent.
The darkness was profound for a moment: the lightnings paused--a sort of
sinister connivance. The cloud and the sea became one: there was a dull
peal.
This was followed by a terrible outburst. The frame which formed the
front of the barriers was swept away. The fragments of beams were
visible in the rolling waters. The sea was using the first breakwater as
an engine for making a breach in the second.
Gilliatt experienced the feeling of a general who sees his advanced
guard driven in.
The second construction of beams resisted the shock. The apparatus
behind it was powerfully secured and buttressed. But the broken frame
was heavy, and was at the mercy of the waves, which were incessantly
hurling it forward and withdrawing it. The ropes and chains which
remained unsevered prevented its entirely breaking up, and the qualities
which Gilliatt had given it as a means of defence made it, in the end, a
more effective weapon of destruction. Instead of a buckler, it had
become a battering-ram. Besides this, it was now full of irregularities
from breaking; ends of timbers projected from all parts; and it was, as
it were, covered with teeth and spikes. No sort of arm could have been
more effective, or more fitted for the handling of the tempest. It was
the projectile, while the sea played the part of the catapult.
The blows succeeded each other with a dismal regularity. Gilliatt,
thoughtful and anxious, behind that barricaded portal, listened to the
sound of death knocking loudly for admittance.
He reflected with bitterness that, but for the fatal entanglement of the
funnel of the Durande in the wreck, he would have been at that very
moment, and even since the morning, once more at Guernsey, in the port,
with the sloop out of danger and with the machinery saved.
The dreaded moment arrived. The destruction was complete. There was a
sound like a death-rattle. The entire frame of the breakwater, the
double apparatus crushed and mingled confusedly, came in a whirl of
foam, rushing upon the stone barricade like chaos upon a mountain, where
it stopped. Here the fragments lay together, a mass of beams penetrable
by the waves, but still breaking their force. The conquered barrier
struggled nobly against destruction. The waves had shattered it, and in
their turn were shattered against it. Though overthrown, it still
remained in some degree effective. The rock which barred its passage, an
immovable obstacle held it fast. The defile, as we have said, was very
narrow at that point; the victorious whirlwind had driven forward,
mingled and piled up the wreck of the breakwater in this narrow pass.
The very violence of the assault, by heaping up the mass and driving the
broken ends one into the other, had contributed to make the pile firm.
It was destroyed, but immovable. A few pieces of timber only were swept
away and dispersed by the waves. One passed through the air very near
to Gilliatt. He felt the counter current upon his forehead.
Some waves, however, of that kind which in great tempests return with an
imperturbable regularity, swept over the ruins of the breakwater. They
fell into the defile, and in spite of the many angles of the passage,
set the waters within in commotion. The waters began to roll through the
gorge ominously. The mysterious embraces of the waves among the rocks
were audible.
What means were there of preventing this agitation extending as far as
the sloop? It would not require a long time for the blast of wind to
create a tempest through all the windings of the pass. A few heavy seas
would be sufficient to stave in the sloop and scatter her burden.
Gilliatt shuddered as he reflected.
But he was not disconcerted. No defeat could daunt his soul.
The hurricane had now discovered the true plan of attack, and was
rushing fiercely between the two walls of the strait.
Suddenly a crash was heard, resounding and prolonging itself through the
defile at some distance behind him: a crash more terrible than any he
had yet heard.
It came from the direction of the sloop.
Something disastrous was happening there.
Gilliatt hastened towards it.
From the eastern gullet where he was, he could not see the sloop on
account of the sharp turns of the pass. At the last turn he stopped and
waited for the lightning.
The first flash revealed to him the position of affairs.
The rush of the sea through the eastern entrance had been met by a blast
of wind from the other end. A disaster was near at hand.
The sloop had received no visible damage; anchored as she was, the storm
had little power over her, but the carcase of the Durande was
distressed.
In such a tempest, the wreck presented a considerable surface. It was
entirely out of the sea in the air, exposed. The breach which Gilliatt
had made, and which he had passed the engine through, had rendered the
hull still weaker. The keelson was snapped, the vertebral column of the
skeleton was broken.
The hurricane had passed over it. Scarcely more than this was needed to
complete its destruction. The planking of the deck had bent like an
opened book. The dismemberment had begun. It was the noise of this
dislocation which had reached Gilliatt's ears in the midst of the
tempest.
The disaster which presented itself as he approached appeared almost
irremediable.
The square opening which he had cut in the keel had become a gaping
wound. The wind had converted the smooth-cut hole into a ragged
fracture. This transverse breach separated the wreck in two. The
after-part, nearest to the sloop, had remained firm in its bed of rocks.
The forward portion which faced him was hanging. A fracture, while it
holds, is a sort of hinge. The whole mass oscillated, as the wind moved
it, with a doleful noise. Fortunately the sloop was no longer beneath
it.
But this swinging movement shook the other portion of the hull, still
wedged and immovable as it was between the two Douvres. From shaking to
casting down the distance is not far. Under the obstinate assaults of
the gale, the dislocated part might suddenly carry away the other
portion, which almost touched the sloop. In this case, the whole wreck,
together with the sloop and the engine, must be swept into the sea and
swallowed up.
All this presented itself to his eyes. It was the end of all. How could
it be prevented?
Gilliatt was one of those who are accustomed to snatch the means of
safety out of danger itself. He collected his ideas for a moment. Then
he hastened to his arsenal and brought his hatchet.
The mallet had served him well, it was now the turn of the axe.
He mounted upon the wreck, got a footing on that part of the planking
which had not given way, and leaning over the precipice of the pass
between the Douvres, he began to cut away the broken joists and the
planking which supported the hanging portion of the hull.
His object was to effect the separation of the two parts of the wreck,
to disencumber the half which remained firm, to throw overboard what the
waves had seized, and thus share the prey with the storm. The hanging
portion of the wreck, borne down by the wind and by its own weight,
adhered only at one or two points. The entire wreck resembled a
folding-screen, one leaf of which, half-hanging, beat against the other.
Five or six pieces of the planking only, bent and started, but not
broken, still held. Their fractures creaked and enlarged at every gust,
and the axe, so to speak, had but to help the labour of the wind. This
more than half-severed condition, while it increased the facility of the
work, also rendered it dangerous. The whole might give way beneath him
at any moment.
The tempest had reached its highest point. The convulsion of the sea
reached the heavens. Hitherto the storm had been supreme, it had seemed
to work its own imperious will, to give the impulse, to drive the waves
to frenzy, while still preserving a sort of sinister lucidity. Below was
fury--above, anger. The heavens are the breath, the ocean only foam,
hence the authority of the wind. But the intoxication of its own horrors
had confused it. It had become a mere whirlwind; it was a blindness
leading to night. There are times when tempests become frenzied, when
the heavens are attacked with a sort of delirium; when the firmament
raves and hurls its lightnings blindly. No terror is greater than this.
It is a hideous moment. The trembling of the rock was at its height.
Every storm has a mysterious course, but now it loses its appointed
path. It is the most dangerous point of the tempest. "At that moment,"
says Thomas Fuller, "the wind is a furious maniac." It is at that
instant that that continuous discharge of electricity takes place which
Piddington calls "the cascade of lightnings." It is at that instant that
in the blackest spot of the clouds, none know why, unless it be to spy
the universal terror, a circle of blue light appears, which the Spanish
sailors of ancient times called the eye of the tempest, _el ojo de la
tempestad_. That terrible eye looked down upon Gilliatt.
Gilliatt on his part was surveying the heavens. He raised his head now.
After every stroke of his hatchet he stood erect and gazed upwards,
almost haughtily. He was, or seemed to be, too near destruction not to
feel self-sustained. Would he despair? No! In the presence of the
wildest fury of the ocean he was watchful as well as bold. He planted
his feet only where the wreck was firm. He ventured his life, and yet
was careful; for his determined spirit, too, had reached its highest
point. His strength had grown tenfold greater. He had become heated with
his own intrepidity. The strokes of his hatchet were like blows of
defiance. He seemed to have gained in directness what the tempest had
lost. A pathetic struggle! On the one hand, an indefatigable will; on
the other, inexhaustible power. It was a contest with the elements for
the prize at his feet. The clouds took the shape of Gorgon masks in the
immensity of the heavens; every possible form of terror appeared; the
rain came from the sea, the surf from the cloud; phantoms of the wind
bent down; meteoric faces revealed themselves and were again eclipsed,
leaving the darkness more monstrous: then there was nothing seen but the
torrents coming from all sides--a boiling sea; cumuli heavy with hail,
ashen-hued, ragged-edged, appeared seized with a sort of whirling
frenzy; strange rattlings filled the air; the inverse currents of
electricity observed by Volta darted their sudden flashes from cloud to
cloud. The prolongation of the lightnings was terrible; the flashes
passed near to Gilliatt. The very ocean seemed astonished. He passed to
and fro upon the tottering wreck, making the deck tremble under his
steps, striking, cutting, hacking with the hatchet in his hand, pallid
in the gleam of the lightning, his long hair streaming, his feet naked,
in rags, his face covered with the foam of the sea, but grand still amid
that maelstrom of the thunderstorm.
Against these furious powers man has no weapon but his invention.
Invention was Gilliatt's triumph. His object was to allow all the
dislocated portions of the wreck to fall together. For this reason he
cut away the broken portions without entirely separating them, leaving
some parts on which they still swung. Suddenly he stopped, holding his
axe in the air. The operation was complete. The entire portion went with
a crash.
The mass rolled down between the two Douvres, just below Gilliatt, who
stood upon the wreck, leaning over and observing the fall. It fell
perpendicularly into the water, struck the rocks, and stopped in the
defile before touching the bottom. Enough remained out of the water to
rise more than twelve feet above the waves. The vertical mass of
planking formed a wall between the two Douvres; like the rock overturned
crosswise higher up the defile, it allowed only a slight stream of foam
to pass through at its two extremities, and thus was a fifth barricade
improvised by Gilliatt against the tempest in that passage of the seas.
The hurricane itself, in its blind fury, had assisted in the
construction of this last barrier.
It was fortunate that the proximity of the two walls had prevented the
mass of wreck from falling to the bottom. This circumstance gave the
barricade greater height; the water, besides, could flow under the
obstacle, which diminished the power of the waves. That which passes
below cannot pass over. This is partly the secret of the floating
breakwater.
Henceforth, let the storm do what it might, there was nothing to fear
for the sloop or the machinery. The water around them could not become
agitated again. Between the barrier of the Douvres, which covered them
on the west, and the barricade which protected them from the east, no
heavy sea or wind could reach them.
Gilliatt had plucked safety out of the catastrophe itself. The storm had
been his fellow-labourer in the work.
This done, he took a little water in the palm of his hand from one of
the rain-pools, and drank: and then, looking upward at the storm, said
with a smile, "Bungler!"
Human intelligence combating with brute force experiences an ironical
joy in demonstrating the stupidity of its antagonist, and compelling it
to serve the very objects of its fury, and Gilliatt felt something of
that immemorial desire to insult his invisible enemy, which is as old as
the heroes of the _Iliad_.
He descended to the sloop and examined it by the gleam of the lightning.
The relief which he had been able to give to his distressed bark was
well-timed. She had been much shaken during the last hour, and had begun
to give way. A hasty glance revealed no serious injury. Nevertheless, he
was certain that the vessel had been subjected to violent shocks. As
soon as the waves had subsided, the hull had righted itself; the anchors
had held fast; as to the machine, the four chains had supported it
admirably.
While Gilliatt was completing this survey, something white passed before
his eyes and vanished in the gloom. It was a sea-mew.
No sight could be more welcome in tempestuous weather. When the birds
reappear the storm is departing. The thunder redoubled; another good
sign.
The violent efforts of the storm had broken its force. All mariners know
that the last ordeal is severe, but short. The excessive violence of the
thunderstorm is the herald of the end.
The rain stopped suddenly. Then there was only a surly rumbling in the
heavens. The storm ceased with the suddenness of a plank falling to the
ground. The immense mass of clouds became disorganised. A strip of clear
sky appeared between them. Gilliatt was astonished: it was broad
daylight.
The tempest had lasted nearly twenty hours.
The wind which had brought the storm carried it away. A dark pile was
diffused over the horizon, the broken clouds were flying in confusion
across the sky. From one end to the other of the line there was a
movement of retreat: a long muttering was heard, gradually decreasing, a
few last drops of rain fell, and all those dark masses charged with
thunder, departed like a terrible multitude of chariots.
Suddenly the wide expanse of sky became blue.
Gilliatt perceived that he was wearied. Sleep swoops down upon the
exhausted frame like a bird upon its prey. He drooped and sank upon the
deck of the bark without choosing his position, and there slept.
Stretched at length and inert, he remained thus for some hours, scarcely
distinguishable from the beams and joists among which he lay.
BOOK IV
PITFALLS IN THE WAY
I
HE WHO IS HUNGRY IS NOT ALONE
When he awakened he was hungry.
The sea was growing calmer. But there was still a heavy swell, which
made his departure, for the present at least, impossible. The day, too,
was far advanced. For the sloop with its burden to get to Guernsey
before midnight, it was necessary to start in the morning.
Although pressed by hunger, Gilliatt began by stripping himself, the
only means of getting warmth. His clothing was saturated by the storm,
but the rain had washed out the sea-water, which rendered it possible to
dry them.
He kept nothing on but his trousers, which he turned up nearly to the
knees.
His overcoat, jacket, overalls, and sheepskin he spread out and fixed
with large round stones here and there.
Then he thought of eating.
He had recourse to his knife, which he was careful to sharpen, and to
keep always in good condition; and he detached from the rocks a few
limpets, similar in kind to the _clonisses_ of the Mediterranean. It is
well known that these are eaten raw: but after so many labours, so
various and so rude, the pittance was meagre. His biscuit was gone; but
of water he had now abundance.
He took advantage of the receding tide to wander among the rocks in
search of crayfish. There was extent enough of rock to hope for a
successful search.
But he had not reflected that he could do nothing with these without
fire to cook them. If he had taken the trouble to go to his
store-cavern, he would have found it inundated with the rain. His wood
and coal were drowned, and of his store of tow, which served him for
tinder, there was not a fibre which was not saturated. No means remained
of lighting a fire.
For the rest, his blower was completely disorganised. The screen of the
hearth of his forge was broken down; the storm had sacked and devastated
his workshop. With what tools and apparatus had escaped the general
wreck, he could still have done carpentry work; but he could not have
accomplished any of the labours of the smith. Gilliatt, however, never
thought of his workshop for a moment.
Drawn in another direction by the pangs of hunger, he had pursued
without much reflection his search for food. He wandered, not in the
gorge of the rocks, but outside among the smaller breakers. It was there
that the Durande, ten weeks previously, had first struck upon the sunken
reef.
For the search that Gilliatt was prosecuting, this part was more
favourable than the interior. At low water the crabs are accustomed to
crawl out into the air. They seem to like to warm themselves in the sun,
where they swarm sometimes to the disgust of loiterers, who recognise in
these creatures, with their awkward sidelong gait, climbing clumsily
from crack to crack the lower stages of the rocks like the steps of a
staircase, a sort of sea vermin.
For two months Gilliatt had lived upon these vermin of the sea.
On this day, however, the crayfish and crabs were both wanting. The
tempest had driven them into their solitary retreats; and they had not
yet mustered courage to venture abroad. Gilliatt held his open knife in
his hand, and from time to time scraped a cockle from under the bunches
of seaweed, which he ate while still walking.
He could not have been far from the very spot where Sieur Clubin had
perished.
As Gilliatt was determining to content himself with the sea-urchins and
the _châtaignes de mer_, a little clattering noise at his feet aroused
his attention. A large crab, startled by his approach, had just dropped
into a pool. The water was shallow, and he did not lose sight of it.
He chased the crab along the base of the rock; the crab moved fast.
Suddenly it was gone.
It had buried itself in some crevice under the rock.
Gilliatt clutched the projections of the rock, and stretched out to
observe where it shelved away under the water.
As he suspected, there was an opening there in which the creature had
evidently taken refuge. It was more than a crevice; it was a kind of
porch.
The sea entered beneath it, but was not deep. The bottom was visible,
covered with large pebbles. The pebbles were green and clothed with
_confervæ_, indicating that they were never dry. They were like the tops
of a number of heads of infants, covered with a kind of green hair.
Holding his knife between his teeth, Gilliatt descended, by the help of
feet and hands, from the upper part of the escarpment, and leaped into
the water. It reached almost to his shoulders.
He made his way through the porch, and found himself in a blind passage,
with a roof in the form of a rude arch over his head. The walls were
polished and slippery. The crab was nowhere visible. He gained his feet
and advanced in daylight growing fainter, so that he began to lose the
power to distinguish objects.
At about fifteen paces the vaulted roof ended overhead. He had
penetrated beyond the blind passage. There was here more space, and
consequently more daylight. The pupils of his eyes, moreover, had
dilated; he could see pretty clearly. He was taken by surprise.
He had made his way again into the singular cavern which he had visited
in the previous month. The only difference was that he had entered by
the way of the sea.
It was through the submarine arch, that he had remarked before, that he
had just entered. At certain low tides it was accessible.
His eyes became more accustomed to the place. His vision became clearer
and clearer. He was astonished. He found himself again in that
extraordinary palace of shadows; saw again before his eyes that vaulted
roof, those columns, those purple and blood-like stains, that vegetation
rich with gems, and at the farther end, that crypt or sanctuary, and
that altar-like stone. He took little notice of these details, but their
impression was in his mind, and he saw that the place was unchanged.
He observed before him, at a certain height in the wall, the crevice
through which he had penetrated the first time, and which, from the
point where he now stood, appeared inaccessible.
Near the moulded arch, he remarked those low dark grottoes, a sort of
caves within a cavern, which he had already observed from a distance. He
now stood nearer to them. The entrance to the nearest to him was out of
the water, and easily approachable. Nearer still than this recess he
noticed, above the level of the water, and within reach of his hand, a
horizontal fissure. It seemed to him probable that the crab had taken
refuge there, and he plunged his hand in as far as he was able, and
groped about in that dusky aperture.
Suddenly he felt himself seized by the arm. A strange indescribable
horror thrilled through him.
Some living thing, thin, rough, flat, cold, slimy, had twisted itself
round his naked arm, in the dark depth below. It crept upward towards
his chest. Its pressure was like a tightening cord, its steady
persistence like that of a screw. In less than a moment some mysterious
spiral form had passed round his wrist and elbow, and had reached his
shoulder. A sharp point penetrated beneath the armpit.
Gilliatt recoiled; but he had scarcely power to move! He was, as it
were, nailed to the place. With his left hand, which was disengaged, he
seized his knife, which he still held between his teeth, and with that
hand, holding the knife, he supported himself against the rocks, while
he made a desperate effort to withdraw his arm. He succeeded only in
disturbing his persecutor, which wound itself still tighter. It was
supple as leather, strong as steel, cold as night.
A second form, sharp, elongated, and narrow, issued out of the crevice,
like a tongue out of monstrous jaws. It seemed to lick his naked body.
Then suddenly stretching out, it became longer and thinner, as it crept
over his skin, and wound itself round him. At the same time a terrible
sense of pain, comparable to nothing he had ever known, compelled all
his muscles to contract. He felt upon his skin a number of flat rounded
points. It seemed as if innumerable suckers had fastened to his flesh
and were about to drink his blood.
A third long undulating shape issued from the hole in the rock; seemed
to feel its way about his body; lashed round his ribs like a cord, and
fixed itself there.
Agony when at its height is mute. Gilliatt uttered no cry. There was
sufficient light for him to see the repulsive forms which had entangled
themselves about him. A fourth ligature, but this one swift as an arrow,
darted towards his stomach, and wound around him there.
It was impossible to sever or tear away the slimy bands which were
twisted tightly round his body, and were adhering by a number of points.
Each of the points was the focus of frightful and singular pangs. It was
as if numberless small mouths were devouring him at the same time.
A fifth long, slimy, riband-shaped strip issued from the hole. It passed
over the others, and wound itself tightly around his chest. The
compression increased his sufferings. He could scarcely breathe.
These living thongs were pointed at their extremities, but broadened
like a blade of a sword towards its hilt. All belonged evidently to the
same centre. They crept and glided about him; he felt the strange points
of pressure, which seemed to him like mouths, change their places from
time to time.
Suddenly a large, round, flattened, glutinous mass issued from beneath
the crevice. It was the centre; the five thongs were attached to it like
spokes to the nave of a wheel. On the opposite side of this disgusting
monster appeared the commencement of three other tentacles, the ends of
which remained under the rock. In the middle of this slimy mass appeared
two eyes.
The eyes were fixed on Gilliatt.
He recognised the Devil-Fish.
II
THE MONSTER
It is difficult for those who have not seen it to believe in the
existence of the devil-fish.
Compared to this creature, the ancient hydras are insignificant.
At times we are tempted to imagine that the vague forms which float in
our dreams may encounter in the realm of the Possible attractive forces,
having power to fix their lineaments, and shape living beings, out of
these creatures of our slumbers. The Unknown has power over these
strange visions, and out of them composes monsters. Orpheus, Homer, and
Hesiod imagined only the Chimera: Providence has created this terrible
creature of the sea.
Creation abounds in monstrous forms of life. The wherefore of this
perplexes and affrights the religious thinker.
If terror were the object of its creation, nothing could be imagined
more perfect than the devil-fish.
The whale has enormous bulk, the devil-fish is comparatively small; the
jararaca makes a hissing noise, the devil-fish is mute; the rhinoceros
has a horn, the devil-fish has none; the scorpion has a dart, the
devil-fish has no dart; the shark has sharp fins, the devil-fish has no
fins; the vespertilio-bat has wings with claws, the devil-fish has no
wings; the porcupine has his spines, the devil-fish has no spines; the
sword-fish has his sword, the devil-fish has none; the torpedo has its
electric spark, the devil-fish has none; the toad has its poison, the
devil-fish has none; the viper has its venom, the devil-fish has no
venom; the lion has its talons, the devil-fish has no talons; the
griffon has its beak, the devil-fish has no beak; the crocodile has its
jaws, the devil-fish has no teeth.
The devil-fish has no muscular organisation, no menacing cry, no
breastplate, no horn, no dart, no claw, no tail with which to hold or
bruise; no cutting fins, or wings with nails, no prickles, no sword, no
electric discharge, no poison, no talons, no beak, no teeth. Yet he is
of all creatures the most formidably armed.
What, then, is the devil-fish? It is the sea vampire.
The swimmer who, attracted by the beauty of the spot, ventures among
breakers in the open sea, where the still waters hide the splendours of
the deep, or in the hollows of unfrequented rocks, in unknown caverns
abounding in sea plants, testacea, and crustacea, under the deep portals
of the ocean, runs the risk of meeting it. If that fate should be yours,
be not curious, but fly. The intruder enters there dazzled; but quits
the spot in terror.
This frightful apparition, which is always possible among the rocks in
the open sea, is a greyish form which undulates in the water. It is of
the thickness of a man's arm, and in length nearly five feet. Its
outline is ragged. Its form resembles an umbrella closed, and without
handle. This irregular mass advances slowly towards you. Suddenly it
opens, and eight radii issue abruptly from around a face with two eyes.
These radii are alive: their undulation is like lambent flames; they
resemble, when opened, the spokes of a wheel, of four or five feet in
diameter. A terrible expansion! It springs upon its prey.
The devil-fish harpoons its victim.
It winds around the sufferer, covering and entangling him in its long
folds. Underneath it is yellow; above, a dull, earthy hue: nothing could
render that inexplicable shade dust coloured. Its form is spider-like,
but its tints are like those of the chamelion. When irritated it becomes
violet. Its most horrible characteristic is its softness.
Its folds strangle, its contact paralyses.
It has an aspect like gangrened or scabrous flesh. It is a monstrous
embodiment of disease.
It adheres closely to its prey, and cannot be torn away; a fact which is
due to its power of exhausting air. The eight antennæ, large at their
roots, diminish gradually, and end in needle-like points. Underneath
each of these feelers range two rows of pustules, decreasing in size,
the largest ones near the head, the smaller at the extremities. Each row
contains twenty-five of these. There are, therefore, fifty pustules to
each feeler, and the creature possesses in the whole four hundred. These
pustules are capable of acting like cupping-glasses. They are
cartilaginous substances, cylindrical, horny, and livid. Upon the large
species they diminish gradually from the diameter of a five-franc piece
to the size of a split pea. These small tubes can be thrust out and
withdrawn by the animal at will. They are capable of piercing to a depth
of more than an inch.
This sucking apparatus has all the regularity and delicacy of a
key-board. It stands forth at one moment and disappears the next. The
most perfect sensitiveness cannot equal the contractibility of these
suckers; always proportioned to the internal movement of the animal, and
its exterior circumstances. The monster is endowed with the qualities of
the sensitive plant.
This animal is the same as those which mariners call Poulps; which
science designates Cephalopteræ, and which ancient legends call Krakens.
It is the English sailors who call them "Devil-fish," and sometimes
Bloodsuckers. In the Channel Islands they are called _pieuvres_.
They are rare at Guernsey, very small at Jersey; but near the island of
Sark are numerous as well as very large.
An engraving in Sonnini's edition of Buffon represents a Cephaloptera
crushing a frigate. Denis Montfort, in fact, considers the Poulp, or
Octopod, of high latitudes, strong enough to destroy a ship. Bory Saint
Vincent doubts this; but he shows that in our regions they will attack
men. Near Brecq-Hou, in Sark, they show a cave where a devil-fish a few
years since seized and drowned a lobster-fisher. Peron and Lamarck are
in error in their belief that the "poulp" having no fins cannot swim. He
who writes these lines has seen with his own eyes, at Sark, in the
cavern called the Boutiques, a pieuvre swimming and pursuing a bather.
When captured and killed, this specimen was found to be four English
feet broad, and it was possible to count its four hundred suckers. The
monster thrust them out convulsively in the agony of death.
According to Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose marvellous
intuition sinks or raises them to the level of magicians, the poulp is
almost endowed with the passions of man: it has its hatreds. In fact, in
the Absolute to be hideous is to hate.
Hideousness struggles under the natural law of elimination, which
necessarily renders it hostile.
When swimming, the devil-fish rests, so to speak, in its sheath. It
swims with all its parts drawn close. It may be likened to a sleeve sewn
up with a closed fist within. The protuberance, which is the head,
pushes the water aside and advances with a vague undulatory movement.
Its two eyes, though large, are indistinct, being of the colour of the
water.
When in ambush, or seeking its prey, it retires into itself, grows
smaller and condenses itself. It is then scarcely distinguishable in the
submarine twilight.
At such times, it looks like a mere ripple in the water. It resembles
anything except a living creature.
The devil-fish is crafty. When its victim is unsuspicious, it opens
suddenly.
A glutinous mass, endowed with a malignant will, what can be more
horrible?
It is in the most beautiful azure depths of the limpid water that this
hideous, voracious polyp delights. It always conceals itself, a fact
which increases its terrible associations. When they are seen, it is
almost invariably after they have been captured.
At night, however, and particularly in the hot season, it becomes
phosphorescent. These horrible creatures have their passions; their
submarine nuptials. Then it adorns itself, burns and illumines; and from
the height of some rock, it may be seen in the deep obscurity of the
waves below, expanding with a pale irradiation--a spectral sun.
The devil-fish not only swims, it walks. It is partly fish, partly
reptile. It crawls upon the bed of the sea. At these times, it makes use
of its eight feelers, and creeps along in the fashion of a species of
swift-moving caterpillar.
It has no blood, no bones, no flesh. It is soft and flabby; a skin with
nothing inside. Its eight tentacles may be turned inside out like the
fingers of a glove.
It has a single orifice in the centre of its radii, which appears at
first to be neither the vent nor the mouth. It is, in fact, both one and
the other. The orifice performs a double function. The entire creature
is cold.
The jelly-fish of the Mediterranean is repulsive. Contact with that
animated gelatinous substance which envelopes the bather, in which the
hands sink, and the nails scratch ineffectively; which can be torn
without killing it, and which can be plucked off without entirely
removing it--that fluid and yet tenacious creature which slips through
the fingers, is disgusting; but no horror can equal the sudden
apparition of the devil-fish, that Medusa with its eight serpents.
No grasp is like the sudden strain of the cephaloptera.
It is with the sucking apparatus that it attacks. The victim is
oppressed by a vacuum drawing at numberless points: it is not a clawing
or a biting, but an indescribable scarification. A tearing of the flesh
is terrible, but less terrible than a sucking of the blood. Claws are
harmless compared with the horrible action of these natural air-cups.
The talons of the wild beast enter into your flesh; but with the
cephaloptera it is you who enter into the creature. The muscles swell,
the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the
loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the
lymph of the monster, which clings to its victim by innumerable hideous
mouths. The hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man becomes one
with the hydra. The spectre lies upon you: the tiger can only devour
you; the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away. He draws you
to him, and into himself; while bound down, glued to the ground,
powerless, you feel yourself gradually emptied into this horrible pouch,
which is the monster itself.
These strange animals, Science, in accordance with its habit of
excessive caution even in the face of facts, at first rejects as
fabulous; then she decides to observe them; then she dissects,
classifies, catalogues, and labels; then procures specimens, and
exhibits them in glass cases in museums. They enter then into her
nomenclature; are designated mollusks, invertebrata, radiata: she
determines their position in the animal world a little above the
calamaries, a little below the cuttle-fish; she finds for these hydras
of the sea an analogous creature in fresh water called the argyronecte:
she divides them into great, medium, and small kinds; she admits more
readily the existence of the small than of the large species, which is,
however, the tendency of science in all countries, for she is by nature
more microscopic than telescopic. She regards them from the point of
view of their construction, and calls them Cephaloptera; counts their
antennæ, and calls them Octopedes. This done, she leaves them. Where
science drops them, philosophy takes them up.
Philosophy in her turn studies these creatures. She goes both less far
and further. She does not dissect, but meditate. Where the scalpel has
laboured, she plunges the hypothesis. She seeks the final cause. Eternal
perplexity of the thinker. These creatures disturb his ideas of the
Creator. They are hideous surprises. They are the death's-head at the
feast of contemplation. The philosopher determines their characteristics
in dread. They are the concrete forms of evil. What attitude can he take
towards this treason of creation against herself? To whom can he look
for the solution of these riddles? The Possible is a terrible matrix.
Monsters are mysteries in their concrete form. Portions of shade issue
from the mass, and something within detaches itself, rolls, floats,
condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject
to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with
some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit
from the miasma, and wanders ghostlike among living things. It is as if
night itself assumed the forms of animals. But for what good? with what
object? Thus we come again to the eternal questioning.
These animals are indeed phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved
and yet improbable. Their fate is to exist in spite of _à priori_
reasonings. They are the amphibia of the shore which separates life from
death. Their unreality makes their existence puzzling. They touch the
frontier of man's domain and people the region of chimeras. We deny the
possibility of the vampire, and the cephaloptera appears. Their swarming
is a certainty which disconcerts our confidence. Optimism, which is
nevertheless in the right, becomes silenced in their presence. They form
the visible extremity of the dark circles. They mark the transition of
our reality into another. They seem to belong to that commencement of
terrible life which the dreamer sees confusedly through the loophole of
the night.
That multiplication of monsters, first in the Invisible, then in the
Possible, has been suspected, perhaps perceived by magi and philosophers
in their austere ecstasies and profound contemplations. Hence the
conjecture of a material hell. The demon is simply the invisible tiger.
The wild beast which devours souls has been presented to the eyes of
human beings by St. John, and by Dante in his vision of Hell.
If, in truth, the invisible circles of creation continue indefinitely,
if after one there is yet another, and so forth in illimitable
progression; if that chain, which for our part we are resolved to doubt,
really exist, the cephaloptera at one extremity proves Satan at the
other. It is certain that the wrongdoer at one end proves the existence
of wrong at the other.
Every malignant creature, like every perverted intelligence, is a
sphinx. A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible riddle; the riddle of
the existence of Evil.
It is this perfection of evil which has sometimes sufficed to incline
powerful intellects to a faith in the duality of the Deity, towards that
terrible bifrons of the Manichæans.
A piece of silk stolen during the last war from the palace of the
Emperor of China represents a shark eating a crocodile, who is eating a
serpent, who is devouring an eagle, who is preying on a swallow, who in
his turn is eating a caterpillar.
All nature which is under our observation is thus alternately devouring
and devoured. The prey prey on each other.
Learned men, however, who are also philosophers, and therefore optimists
in their view of creation, find, or believe they find, an explanation.
Among others, Bonnet of Geneva, that mysterious exact thinker, who was
opposed to Buffon, as in later times Geoffrey St. Hilaire has been to
Cuvier, was struck with the idea of the final object. His notions may be
summed up thus: universal death necessitates universal sepulture; the
devourers are the sextons of the system of nature. All created things
enter into and form the elements of other. To decay is to nourish. Such
is the terrible law from which not even man himself escapes.
In our world of twilight this fatal order of things produces monsters.
You ask for what purpose. We find the solution here.
But _is_ this the solution? Is this the answer to our questionings? And
if so, why not some different order of things? Thus the question
returns.
Let us live: be it so.
But let us endeavour that death shall be progress. Let us aspire to an
existence in which these mysteries shall be made clear. Let us follow
that conscience which leads us thither.
For let us never forget that the highest is only attained through the
high.
III
ANOTHER KIND OF SEA-COMBAT
Such was the creature in whose power Gilliatt had fallen for some
minutes.
The monster was the inhabitant of the grotto; the terrible genii of the
place. A kind of sombre demon of the water.
All the splendours of the cavern existed for it alone.
On the day of the previous month when Gilliatt had first penetrated into
the grotto, the dark outline, vaguely perceived by him in the ripples of
the secret waters, was this monster. It was here in its home.
When entering for the second time into the cavern in pursuit of the
crab, he had observed the crevice in which he supposed that the crab had
taken refuge, the pieuvre was there lying in wait for prey.
Is it possible to imagine that secret ambush?
No bird would brood, no egg would burst to life, no flower would dare to
open, no breast to give milk, no heart to love, no spirit to soar, under
the influence of that apparition of evil watching with sinister patience
in the dusk.
Gilliatt had thrust his arm deep into the opening; the monster had
snapped at it. It held him fast, as the spider holds the fly.
He was in the water up to his belt; his naked feet clutching the
slippery roundness of the huge stones at the bottom; his right arm bound
and rendered powerless by the flat coils of the long tentacles of the
creature, and his body almost hidden under the folds and cross folds of
this horrible bandage.
Of the eight arms of the devil-fish three adhered to the rock, while
five encircled Gilliatt. In this way, clinging to the granite on the one
hand, and with the other to its human prey, it enchained him to the
rock. Two hundred and fifty suckers were upon him, tormenting him with
agony and loathing. He was grasped by gigantic hands, the fingers of
which were each nearly a yard long, and furnished inside with living
blisters eating into the flesh.
As we have said, it is impossible to tear oneself from the folds of the
devil-fish. The attempt ends only in a firmer grasp. The monster clings
with more determined force. Its effort increases with that of its
victim; every struggle produces a tightening of its ligatures.
Gilliatt had but one resource, his knife.
His left hand only was free; but the reader knows with what power he
could use it. It might have been said that he had two right hands.
His open knife was in his hand.
The antenna of the devil-fish cannot be cut; it is a leathery substance
impossible to divide with the knife, it slips under the edge; its
position in attack also is such that to cut it would be to wound the
victim's own flesh.
The creature is formidable, but there is a way of resisting it. The
fishermen of Sark know this, as does any one who has seen them execute
certain movements in the sea. The porpoises know it also; they have a
way of biting the cuttle-fish which decapitates it. Hence the frequent
sight on the sea of pen-fish, poulps, and cuttle-fish without heads.
The cephaloptera, in fact, is only vulnerable through the head.
Gilliatt was not ignorant of this fact.
He had never seen a devil-fish of this size. His first encounter was
with one of the larger species. Another would have been powerless with
terror.
With the devil-fish, as with a furious bull, there is a certain moment
in the conflict which must be seized. It is the instant when the bull
lowers the neck; it is the instant when the devil-fish advances its
head. The movement is rapid. He who loses that moment is destroyed.
The things we have described occupied only a few moments. Gilliatt,
however, felt the increasing power of its innumerable suckers.
The monster is cunning; it tries first to stupefy its prey. It seizes
and then pauses awhile.
Gilliatt grasped his knife; the sucking increased.
He looked at the monster, which seemed to look at him.
Suddenly it loosened from the rock its sixth antenna, and darting it at
him, seized him by the left arm.
At the same moment it advanced its head with a violent movement. In one
second more its mouth would have fastened on his breast. Bleeding in the
sides, and with his two arms entangled, he would have been a dead man.
But Gillian was watchful. He avoided the antenna, and at the moment when
the monster darted forward to fasten on his breast, he struck it with
the knife clenched in his left hand. There were two convulsions in
opposite directions; that of the devil-fish and that of its prey. The
movement was rapid as a double flash of lightnings.
He had plunged the blade of his knife into the flat slimy substance, and
by a rapid movement, like the flourish of a whip in the air, describing
a circle round the two eyes, he wrenched the head off as a man would
draw a tooth.
The struggle was ended. The folds relaxed. The monster dropped away,
like the slow detaching of bands. The four hundred suckers, deprived of
their sustaining power, dropped at once from the man and the rock. The
mass sank to the bottom of the water.
Breathless with the struggle, Gilliatt could perceive upon the stones at
his feet two shapeless, slimy heaps, the head on one side, the remainder
of the monster on the other.
Fearing, nevertheless, some convulsive return of his agony, he recoiled
to avoid the reach of the dreaded tentacles.
But the monster was quite dead.
Gilliatt closed his knife.
IV
NOTHING IS HIDDEN, NOTHING LOST
It was time that he killed the devil-fish. He was almost suffocated. His
right arm and his chest were purple. Numberless little swellings were
distinguishable upon them; the blood flowed from them here and there.
The remedy for these wounds is sea-water. Gilliatt plunged into it,
rubbing himself at the same time with the palms of his hands. The
swellings disappeared under the friction.
By stepping further into the waters he had, without perceiving,
approached to the species of recess already observed by him near the
crevice where he had been attacked by the devil-fish.
This recess stretched obliquely under the great walls of the cavern, and
was dry. The large pebbles which had become heaped up there had raised
the bottom above the level of ordinary tides. The entrance was a rather
large elliptical arch; a man could enter by stooping. The green light of
the submarine grotto penetrated into it and lighted it feebly.
It happened that, while hastily rubbing his skin, Gilliatt raised his
eyes mechanically.
He was able to see far into the cavern.
He shuddered.
He fancied that he perceived, in the furthest depth of the dusky recess,
something smiling.
Gilliatt had never heard the word "hallucination," but he was familiar
with the idea. Those mysterious encounters with the invisible, which,
for the sake of avoiding the difficulty of explaining them, we call
hallucinations, are in nature. Illusions or realities, visions are a
fact. He who has the gift will see them. Gilliatt, as we have said, was
a dreamer. He had, at times, the faculty of a seer. It was not in vain
that he had spent his days in musing among solitary places.
He imagined himself the dupe of one of those mirages which he had more
than once beheld when in his dreamy moods.
The opening was somewhat in the shape of a chalk-burner's oven. It was a
low niche with projections like basket-handles. Its abrupt groins
contracted gradually as far as the extremity of the crypt, where the
heaps of round stones and the rocky roof joined.
Gilliatt entered, and lowering his head, advanced towards the object in
the distance.
There was indeed something smiling.
It was a death's head; but it was not only the head. There was the
entire skeleton. A complete human skeleton was lying in the cavern.
In such a position a bold man will continue his researches.
Gilliatt cast his eyes around. He was surrounded by a multitude of
crabs. The multitude did not stir. They were but empty shells.
These groups were scattered here and there among the masses of pebbles
in irregular constellations.
Gilliatt, having his eyes fixed elsewhere, had walked among them without
perceiving them.
At this extremity of the crypt, where he had now penetrated, there was a
still greater heap of remains. It was a confused mass of legs, antennæ,
and mandibles. Claws stood wide open; bony shells lay still under their
bristling prickles; some reversed showed their livid hollows. The heap
was like a _mêlée_ of besiegers who had fallen, and lay massed together.
The skeleton was partly buried in this heap.
Under this confused mass of scales and tentacles, the eye perceived the
cranium with its furrows, the vertebræ, the thigh bones, the tibias, and
the long-jointed finger bones with their nails. The frame of the ribs
was filled with crabs. Some heart had once beat there. The green mould
of the sea had settled round the sockets of the eyes. Limpets had left
their slime upon the bony nostrils. For the rest, there were not in this
cave within the rocks either sea-gulls, or weeds, or a breath of air.
All was still. The teeth grinned.
The sombre side of laughter is that strange mockery of expression which
is peculiar to a human skull.
This marvellous palace of the deep, inlaid and incrusted with all the
gems of the sea, had at length revealed and told its secret. It was a
savage haunt; the devil-fish inhabited it; it was also a tomb, in which
the body of a man reposed.
The skeleton and the creatures around it oscillated vaguely in the
reflections of the subterranean water which trembled upon the roof and
wall. The horrible multitude of crabs looked as if finishing their
repast. These crustacea seemed to be devouring the carcase. Nothing
could be more strange than the aspect of the dead vermin upon their dead
prey.
Gilliatt had beneath his eyes the storehouse of the devil-fish.
It was a dismal sight. The crabs had devoured the man: the devil-fish
had devoured the crabs.
There were no remains of clothing anywhere visible. The man must have
been seized naked.
Gilliatt, attentively examining, began to remove the shells from the
skeleton. What had this man been? The body was admirably dissected; it
looked as if prepared for the study of anatomy; all the flesh was
stripped; not a muscle remained; not a bone was missing. If Gilliatt had
been learned in science, he might have demonstrated the fact. The
periostea, denuded of their covering, were white and smooth, as if they
had been polished. But for some green mould of sea-mosses here and
there, they would have been like ivory. The cartilaginous divisions were
delicately inlaid and arranged. The tomb sometimes produces this dismal
mosaic work.
The body was, as it were, interred under the heap of dead crabs.
Gilliatt disinterred it.
Suddenly he stooped, and examined more closely.
He had perceived around the vertebral column a sort of belt.
It was a leathern girdle, which had evidently been worn buckled upon the
waist of the man when alive.
The leather was moist; the buckle rusty.
Gilliatt pulled the girdle; the vertebra of the skeleton resisted, and
he was compelled to break through them in order to remove it. A crust of
small shells had begun to form upon it.
He felt it, and found a hard substance within, apparently of square
form. It was useless to endeavour to unfasten the buckle, so he cut the
leather with his knife.
The girdle contained a little iron box and some pieces of gold. Gilliatt
counted twenty guineas.
The iron box was an old sailor's tobacco-box, opening and shutting with
a spring. It was very tight and rusty. The spring being completely
oxidised would not work.
Once more the knife served Gilliatt in a difficulty. A pressure with the
point of the blade caused the lid to fly up.
The box was open.
There was nothing inside but pieces of paper.
A little roll of very thin sheets, folded in four, was fitted in the
bottom of the box. They were damp, but not injured. The box,
hermetically sealed, had preserved them. Gilliatt unfolded them.
They were three bank-notes of one thousand pounds sterling each; making
together seventy-five thousand francs.
Gilliatt folded them again, replaced them in the box, taking advantage
of the space which remained to add the twenty guineas; and then reclosed
the box as well as he could.
Next he examined the girdle.
The leather, which had originally been polished outside, was rough
within. Upon this tawny ground some letters had been traced in black
thick ink. Gilliatt deciphered them, and read the words, "Sieur Clubin."
V
THE FATAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SIX INCHES AND TWO FEET
Gilliatt replaced the box in the girdle, and placed the girdle in the
pocket of his trousers.
He left the skeleton among the crabs, with the remains of the devil-fish
beside it.
While he had been occupied with the devil-fish and the skeleton, the
rising tide had submerged the entrance to the cave. He was only enabled
to leave it by plunging under the arched entrance. He got through
without difficulty; for he knew the entrance well, and was master of
these gymnastics in the sea.
It is easy to understand the drama which had taken place there during
the ten weeks preceding. One monster had preyed upon another; the
devil-fish had seized Clubin.
These two embodiments of treachery had met in the inexorable darkness.
There had been an encounter at the bottom of the sea between these two
compounds of mystery and watchfulness; the monster had destroyed the
man: a horrible fulfilment of justice.
The crab feeds on carrion, the devil-fish on crabs. The devil-fish
seizes as it passes any swimming animal--an otter, a dog, a man if it
can--sucks the blood, and leaves the body at the bottom of the water.
The crabs are the spider-formed scavengers of the sea. Putrefying flesh
attracts them; they crowd round it, devour the body, and are in their
turn consumed by the devil-fish. Dead creatures disappear in the crab,
the crab disappears in the pieuvre. This is the law which we have
already pointed out.
The devil-fish had laid hold of him, and drowned him. Some wave had
carried his body into the cave, and deposited it at the extremity of the
inner cavern, where Gilliatt had discovered it.
He returned searching among the rocks for sea-urchins and limpets. He
had no desire for crabs; to have eaten them now would have seemed to him
like feeding upon human flesh.
For the rest, he thought of nothing but of eating what he could before
starting. Nothing now interposed to prevent his departure. Great
tempests are always followed by a calm, which lasts sometimes several
days. There was, therefore, no danger from the sea. Gilliatt had
resolved to leave the rocks on the following day. It was important, on
account of the tide, to keep the barrier between the two Douvres during
the night, but he intended to remove it at daybreak, to push the sloop
out to sea, and set sail for St. Sampson. The light breeze which was
blowing came from the south-west, which was precisely the wind which he
would want.
It was in the first quarter of the moon, in the month of May; the days
were long.
When Gilliatt, having finished his wanderings among the rocks, and
appeased his appetite to some extent, returned to the passage between
the two Douvres, where he had left the sloop, the sun had set, the
twilight was increased by that pale light which comes from a crescent
moon; the tide had attained its height, and was beginning to ebb. The
funnel standing upright above the sloop had been covered by the foam
during the tempest with a coating of salt which glittered white in the
light of the moon.
This circumstance reminded Gilliatt that the storm had inundated the
sloop, both with surf and rain-water, and that if he meant to start in
the morning, it would be necessary to bail it out.
Before leaving to go in quest of crabs, he had ascertained that it had
about six inches of water in the hold. The scoop which he used for the
purpose would, he thought, be sufficient for throwing the water
overboard.
On arriving at the barrier, Gilliatt was struck with terror. There were
nearly two feet of water in the sloop. A terrible discovery; the bark
had sprung a leak.
She had been making water gradually during his absence. Burdened as she
was, two feet of water was a perilous addition. A little more, and she
must inevitably founder. If he had returned but an hour later, he would
probably have found nothing above water but the funnel and the mast.
There was not a minute to be lost in deliberation. It was absolutely
necessary to find the leakage, stop it, and then empty the vessel, or at
all events, lighten it. The pumps of the Durande had been lost in the
break-up of the wreck. He was reduced to use the scoop of the bark.
To find the leak was the most urgent necessity.
Gilliatt set to work immediately, and without even giving himself time
to dress. He shivered; but he no longer felt either hunger or cold.
The water continued to gain upon his vessel. Fortunately there was no
wind. The slightest swell would have been fatal.
The moon went down.
Bent low, and plunged in the water deeper than his waist he groped about
for a long time. He discovered the mischief at last.
During the gale, at the critical moment when the sloop had swerved, the
strong bark had bumped and grazed rather violently on the rocks. One of
the projections of the Little Douvre had made a fracture in the
starboard side of the hull.
The leak unluckily--it might almost have been said, maliciously--had
been made near the joint of the two riders, a fact which, joined with
the fury of the hurricane, had prevented him perceiving it during his
dark and rapid survey in the height of the storm.
The fracture was alarming on account of its size; but fortunately,
although the vessel was sunk lower than usual by the weight of water, it
was still above the ordinary water-line.
At the moment when the accident had occurred, the waves had rolled
heavily into the defile, and had flooded through the breach; and the
vessel had sunk a few inches under the additional weight, so that, even
after the subsidence of the water, the weight having raised the
water-line, had kept the hole still under the surface. Hence the
imminence of the danger. But if he could succeed in stopping the leak,
he could empty the sloop; the hole once staunched, the vessel would rise
to its usual water-line, the fracture would be above water, and in this
position the repair would be easy, or at least possible. He had still,
as we have already said, his carpenters' tools in good condition.
But meanwhile what uncertainty must he not endure! What perils, what
chances of accidents! He heard the water rising inexorably. One shock,
and all would have perished. What misery seemed in store for him.
Perhaps his endeavours were even now too late.
He reproached himself bitterly. He thought that he ought to have seen
the damage immediately. The six inches of water in the hold ought to
have suggested it to him. He had been stupid enough to attribute these
six inches of water to the rain and the foam. He was angry with himself
for having slept and eaten; he taxed himself even with his weariness,
and almost with the storm and the dark night. All seemed to him to have
been his own fault.
These bitter self-reproaches filled his mind while engaged in his
labour, but they did not prevent his considering well the work he was
engaged in.
The leak had been found; that was the first step: to staunch it was the
second. That was all that was possible for the moment. Joinery work
cannot be carried on under water.
It was a favourable circumstance that the breach in the hull was in the
space between the two chains which held the funnel fast on the starboard
side. The stuffing with which it was necessary to stop it could be fixed
to these chains.
The water meanwhile was gaining. Its depth was now between two and three
feet; and it reached above his knees.
VI
DE PROFUNDIS AD ALTUM
Gilliatt had to his hand among his reserve of rigging for the sloop a
pretty large tarpaulin, furnished with long laniards at the four
corners.
He took this tarpaulin, made fast the two corners by the laniards to the
two rings of the chains of the funnel on the same side as the leak, and
threw it over the gunwale. The tarpaulin hung like a sheet between the
Little Douvre and the bark, and sunk in the water. The pressure of the
water endeavouring to enter into the hold, kept it close to the hull
upon the gap. The heavier the pressure the closer the sail adhered. It
was stuck by the water itself right upon the fracture. The wound of the
bark was staunched.
The tarred canvas formed an effectual barrier between the interior of
the hold and the waves without. Not a drop of water entered. The leak
was masked, but was not stopped. It was a respite only.
Gilliatt took the scoop and began to bale the sloop. It was time that
she were lightened. The labour warmed him a little, but his weariness
was extreme. He was forced to acknowledge to himself that he could not
complete the work of staunching the hold. He had scarcely eaten
anything, and he had the humiliation of feeling himself exhausted.
He measured the progress of his work by the sinking of the level of
water below his knees. The fall was slow.
Moreover, the leakage was only interrupted; the evil was moderated, not
repaired. The tarpaulin pushed into the gap began to bulge inside;
looking as if a fist were under the canvas, endeavouring to force it
through. The canvas, strong and pitchy, resisted; but the swelling and
the tension increased; it was not certain that it would not give way,
and at any moment the swelling might become a rent. The irruption of
water must then recommence.
In such a case, as the crews of vessels in distress know well, there is
no other remedy than stuffing. The sailors take rags of every kind which
they can find at hand, everything, in fact, which in their language is
called "service;" and with this they push the bulging sail-cloth as far
as they can into the leak.
Of this "service," Gilliatt had none. All the rags and tow which he had
stored up had been used in his operations, or carried away by the storm.
If necessary, he might possibly have been able to find some remains by
searching among the rocks. The sloop was sufficiently lightened for him
to leave it with safety for a quarter of an hour; but how could he make
this search without a light? The darkness was complete. There was no
longer any moon; nothing but the starry sky. He had no dry tow with
which to make a match, no tallow to make a candle, no fire to light one,
no lantern to shelter it from the wind. In the sloop and among the rocks
all was confused and indistinct. He could hear the water lapping against
the wounded hull, but he could not even see the crack. It was with his
hands that he had ascertained the bulging of the tarpaulin. In that
darkness it was impossible to make any useful search for rags of canvas
or pieces of tow scattered among the breakers. Who could glean these
waifs and strays without being able to see his path? Gilliatt looked
sorrowfully at the sky; all those stars, he thought, and yet no light!
The water in the bark having diminished, the pressure from without
increased. The bulging of the canvas became larger, and was still
increasing, like a frightful abscess ready to burst. The situation,
which had been improved for a short time, began to be threatening.
Some means of stopping it effectually was absolutely necessary. He had
nothing left but his clothes, which he had stretched to dry upon the
projecting rocks of the Little Douvre.
He hastened to fetch them, and placed them upon the gunwale of the
sloop.
Then he took his tarpaulin overcoat, and kneeling in the water, thrust
it into the crevice, and pushing the swelling of the sail outward,
emptied it of water. To the tarpaulin coat he added the sheepskin, then
his Guernsey shirt, and then his jacket. The hole received them all. He
had nothing left but his sailor's trousers, which he took off, and
pushed in with the other articles. This enlarged and strengthened the
stuffing.
The stopper was made, and it appeared to be sufficient.
These clothes passed partly through the gap, the sail-cloth outside
enveloping them. The sea making an effort to enter, pressed against the
obstacle, spread it over the gap, and blocked it. It was a sort of
exterior compression.
Inside, the centre only of the bulging having been driven out, there
remained all around the gap and the stuffing just thrust through a sort
of circular pad formed by the tarpaulin, which was rendered still firmer
by the irregularities of the fracture with which it had become
entangled.
The leak was staunched, but nothing could be more precarious. Those
sharp splinters of the gap which fixed the tarpaulin might pierce it and
make holes, by which the water would enter; while he would not even
perceive it in the darkness. There was little probability of the
stoppage lasting until daylight. Gilliatt's anxiety changed its form;
but he felt it increasing at the same time that he found his strength
leaving him.
He had again set to work to bale out the hold, but his arms, in spite of
all his efforts, could scarcely lift a scoopfull of water. He was naked
and shivering. He felt as if the end were now at hand.
One possible chance flashed across his mind. There might be a sail in
sight. A fishing-boat which should by any accident be in the
neighbourhood of the Douvres, might come to his assistance. The moment
had arrived when a helpmate was absolutely necessary. With a man and a
lantern all might yet be saved. If there were two persons, one might
easily bale the vessel. Since the leak was temporarily staunched, as
soon as she could be relieved of this burden, she would rise, and regain
her ordinary water-line. The leak would then be above the surface of the
water, the repairs would be practicable, and he would be able
immediately to replace the stuff by a piece of planking, and thus
substitute for the temporary stoppage a complete repair. If not, it
would be necessary to wait till daylight--to wait the whole night long;
a delay which might prove ruinous. If by chance some ship's lantern
should be in sight, Gilliatt would be able to signal it from the height
of the Great Douvre. The weather was calm, there was no wind or rolling
sea; there was a possibility of the figure of a man being observed
moving against the background of the starry sky. A captain of a ship, or
even the master of a fishing-boat, would not be at night in the waters
of the Douvres without directing his glass upon the rock, by way of
precaution.
Gilliatt hoped that some one might perceive him.
He climbed upon the wreck, grasped the knotted rope, and mounted upon
the Great Douvre.
Not a sail was visible around the horizon; not a boat's lantern. The
wide expanse, as far as eye could reach, was a desert. No assistance was
possible, and no resistance possible.
Gilliatt felt himself without resources; a feeling which he had not felt
until then.
A dark fatality was now his master. With all his labour, all his
success, all his courage, he and his bark, and its precious burden, were
about to become the sport of the waves. He had no other means of
continuing the struggle; he became listless. How could he prevent the
tide from returning, the water from rising, the night from continuing?
The temporary stoppage which he had made was his sole reliance. He had
exhausted and stripped himself in constructing and completing it; he
could neither fortify nor add to it. The stopgap was such that it must
remain as it was; and every further effort was useless. The apparatus,
hastily constructed, was at the mercy of the waves. How would this inert
obstacle work? It was this obstacle now, not Gilliatt, which had to
sustain the combat, that handfull of rags, not that intelligence. The
swell of a wave would suffice to re-open the fracture. More or less of
pressure; the whole question was comprised in that formula.
All depended upon a brute struggle between two mechanical quantities.
Henceforth he could neither aid his auxiliary, nor stop his enemy. He
was no longer any other than a mere spectator of this struggle, which
was one for him of life or death. He who had ruled over it, a supreme
intelligence, was at the last moment compelled to resign all to a mere
blind resistance.
No trial, no terror that he had yet undergone, could bear comparison
with this.
From the time when he had taken up his abode upon the Douvres, he had
found himself environed, and, as it were, possessed by solitude. This
solitude more than surrounded, it enveloped him. A thousand menaces at
once had met him face to face. The wind was always there, ready to
become furious; the sea, ready to roar. There was no stopping that
terrible mouth the wind, no imprisoning that dread monster the sea. And
yet he had striven, he, a solitary man, had combated hand to hand with
the ocean, had wrestled even with the tempest.
Many other anxieties, many other necessities had he made head against.
There was no form of distress with which he had not become familiar. He
had been compelled to execute great works without tools, to move vast
burdens without aid, without science to resolve problems, without
provisions to find food, without bed or roof to cover it, to find
shelter and sleep.
Upon that solitary rock he had been subjected by turns to all the
varied and cruel tortures of nature; oftentimes a gentle mother, not
less often a pitiless destroyer.
He had conquered his isolation, conquered hunger, conquered thirst,
conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered labour, conquered sleep. He
had encountered a mighty coalition of obstacles formed to bar his
progress. After his privations there were the elements; after the sea
the tempest, after the tempest the devil-fish, after the monster the
spectre.
A dismal irony was then the end of all. Upon this rock, whence he had
thought to arise triumphant, the spectre of Clubin had only arisen to
mock him with a hideous smile.
The grin of the spectre was well founded. Gilliatt saw himself ruined;
saw himself no less than Clubin in the grasp of death.
Winter, famine, fatigue, the dismemberment of the wreck, the removal of
the machinery, the equinoctial gale, the thunder, the monster, were all
as nothing compared with this small fracture in a vessel's planks.
Against the cold one could procure--and he had procured--fire; against
hunger, the shell-fish of the rocks; against thirst, the rain; against
the difficulties of his great task, industry and energy; against the sea
and the storm, the breakwater; against the devil-fish, the knife; but
against the terrible leak he had no weapon.
The hurricane had bequeathed him this sinister farewell. The last
struggle, the traitorous thrust, the treacherous side blow of the
vanquished foe. In its flight the tempest had turned and shot this arrow
in the rear. It was the final and deadly stab of his antagonist.
It was possible to combat with the tempest, but how could he struggle
with that insidious enemy who now attacked him.
If the stoppage gave way, if the leak re-opened, nothing could prevent
the sloop foundering. It would be the bursting of the ligature of the
artery; and once under the water with its heavy burden, no power could
raise it. The noble struggle, with two months' Titanic labour, ended
then in annihilation. To recommence would be impossible. He had neither
forge nor materials. At daylight, in all probability, he was about to
see all his work sink slowly and irrecoverably into the gulf. Terrible,
to feel that sombre power beneath. The sea snatched his prize from his
hands.
With his bark engulfed, no fate awaited him but to perish of hunger and
cold, like the poor shipwrecked sailor on "The Man Rock."
During two long months the intelligences which hover invisibly over the
world had been the spectators of these things; on one hand the wide
expanse, the waves, the winds, the lightnings, the meteors; on the other
a man. On one hand the sea, on the other a human mind; on the one hand
the infinite, on the other an atom.
The battle had been fierce, and behold the abortive issue of these
prodigies of valour.
Thus did this heroism without parallel end in powerlessness; thus ended
in despair that formidable struggle; that struggle of a nothing against
all; that Iliad against one.
Gilliatt gazed wildly into space.
He had no clothing. He stood naked in the midst of that immensity.
Then overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one
bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night,
in the presence of that impenetrable darkness, in the midst of the
murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the breeze, under the clouds,
under that vast diffusion of force, under that mysterious firmament of
wings, of stars, of gulfs, having around him and beneath him the ocean,
above him the constellations, under the great unfathomable deep, he
sank, gave up the struggle, lay down upon the rock, his face towards the
stars, humbled, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible
depths, he cried aloud, "Have mercy."
Weighed down to earth by that immensity, he prayed.
He was there alone, in the darkness upon the rock, in the midst of that
sea, stricken down with exhaustion like one smitten by lightning, naked
like the gladiator in the circus, save that for circus he had the vast
horizon, instead of wild beasts the shadows of darkness, instead of the
faces of the crowd the eyes of the Unknown, instead of the Vestals the
stars, instead of Cæsar the All-powerful.
His whole being seemed to dissolve in cold, fatigue, powerlessness,
prayer, and darkness, and his eyes closed.
VII
THE APPEAL IS HEARD
Some hours passed.
The sun rose in an unclouded sky.
Its first ray shone upon a motionless form upon the Great Douvre. It was
Gilliatt.
He was still outstretched upon the rock.
He was naked, cold, and stiff; but he did not shiver. His closed eyelids
were wan. It would have been difficult for a beholder to say whether the
form before him was not a corpse.
The sun seemed to look upon him.
If he were not dead, he was already so near death that the slightest
cold wind would have sufficed to extinguish life.
The wind began to breathe, warm and animating: it was the opening breath
of May.
Meanwhile the sun ascended in the deep blue sky; its rays, less
horizontal, flushed the sky. Its light became warmth. It enveloped the
slumbering form.
Gilliatt moved not. If he breathed, it was only that feeble respiration
which could scarcely tarnish the surface of a mirror.
The sun continued its ascent; its rays striking less and less obliquely
upon the naked man. The gentle breeze which had been merely tepid became
hot.
The rigid and naked body remained still without movement; but the skin
seemed less livid.
The sun, approaching the zenith, shone almost perpendicularly upon the
plateau of the Douvres. A flood of light descended from the heavens; the
vast reflection from the glassy sea increased its splendour: the rock
itself imbibed the rays and warmed the sleeper.
A sigh raised his breast.
He lived.
The sun continued its gentle offices. The wind, which was already the
breath of summer and of noon, approached him like loving lips that
breathed upon him softly.
Gilliatt moved.
The peaceful calm upon the sea was perfect. Its murmur was like the
droning of the nurse beside the sleeping infant. The rock seemed cradled
in the waves.
The sea-birds, who knew that form, fluttered above it; not with their
old wild astonishment, but with a sort of fraternal tenderness. They
uttered plaintive cries: they seemed to be calling to him. A sea-mew,
who no doubt knew him, was tame enough to come near him. It began to caw
as if speaking to him. The sleeper seemed not to hear. The bird hopped
upon his shoulder, and pecked his lips softly.
Gilliatt opened his eyes.
The birds dispersed, chattering wildly.
Gilliatt arose, stretched himself like a roused lion, ran to the edge
of the platform, and looked down into the space between the two Douvres.
The sloop was there, intact; the stoppage had held out; the sea had
probably disturbed it but little.
All was saved.
He was no longer weary. His powers had returned. His swoon had ended in
a deep sleep.
He descended and baled out the sloop, emptied the hold, raised the
leakage above the water-line, dressed himself, ate, drank some water,
and was joyful.
The gap in the side of his vessel, examined in broad daylight, proved to
require more labour than he had thought. It was a serious fracture. The
entire day was not too much for its repair.
At daybreak on the morrow, after removing the barrier and re-opening the
entrance to the defile, dressed in the tattered clothing which had
served to stop the leak, having about him Clubin's girdle and the
seventy-five thousand francs, standing erect in the sloop, now repaired,
by the side of the machinery which he had rescued, with a favourable
breeze and a good sea, Gilliatt pushed off from the Douvres.
He put the sloop's head for Guernsey.
At the moment of his departure from the rocks, any one who had been
there might have heard him singing, in an undertone, the air of "Bonnie
Dundee."
PART III.--DÉRUCHETTE
BOOK I
NIGHT AND THE MOON
I
THE HARBOUR BELL
The St. Sampson of the present day is almost a city; the St. Sampson of
forty years since was almost a village.
When the winter evenings were ended and spring had come, the inhabitants
were not long out of bed after sundown. St. Sampson was an ancient
parish which had long been accustomed to the sound of the curfew-bell,
and which had a traditional habit of blowing out the candle at an early
hour. Those old Norman villages are famous for early roosting, and the
villagers are generally great rearers of poultry.
The people of St. Sampson, except a few rich families among the
townsfolk, are also a population of quarriers and carpenters. The port
is a port of ship repairing. The quarrying of stone and the fashioning
of timber go on all day long; here the labourer with the pickaxe, there
the workman with the mallet. At night they sink with fatigue, and sleep
like lead. Rude labours bring heavy slumbers.
One evening, in the commencement of the month of May, after watching the
crescent moon for some instants through the trees, and listening to the
step of Déruchette, walking alone in the cool air in the garden of the
Bravées, Mess Lethierry had returned to his room looking on the harbour,
and had retired to rest; Douce and Grace were already a-bed. Except
Déruchette, the whole household were sleeping. Doors and shutters were
everywhere closed. Footsteps were silent in the streets. Some few
lights, like winking eyes about to close in rest, showed here and there
in windows in the roofs, indicating the hour of domestics going to bed.
Nine had already struck in the old Romanesque belfry, surrounded by ivy,
which shares with the church of St. Brélade at Jersey the peculiarity of
having for its date four ones (IIII), which are used to signify eleven
hundred and eleven.
The popularity of Mess Lethierry at St. Sampson had been founded on his
success. The success at an end, there had come a void. It might be
imagined that ill-fortune is contagious, and that the unsuccessful have
a plague, so rapidly are they put in quarantine. The young men of
well-to-do families avoided Déruchette. The isolation around the Bravées
was so complete that its inmates had not even yet heard the news of the
great local event which had that day set all St. Sampson in a ferment.
The rector of the parish, the Rev. Ebenezer Caudray, had become rich.
His uncle, the magnificent Dean of St. Asaph, had just died in London.
The news had been brought by the mail sloop, the _Cashmere_, arrived
from England that very morning, and the mast of which could be perceived
in the roads of St. Peter's Port. The _Cashmere_ was to depart for
Southampton at noon on the morrow, and, so the rumour ran, to convey the
reverend gentleman, who had been suddenly summoned to England, to be
present at the official opening of the will, not to speak of other
urgent matters connected with an important inheritance. All day long St.
Sampson had been conversing on this subject. The _Cashmere_, the Rev.
Ebenezer, his deceased uncle, his riches, his departure, his possible
preferment in the future, had formed the foundations of that perpetual
buzzing. A solitary house, still uninformed on these matters, had
remained at peace. This was the Bravées.
Mess Lethierry had jumped into his hammock, and lay down in his
clothing.
Since the catastrophe of the Durande, to get into his hammock had been
his resource. Every captive has recourse to stretching himself upon his
pallet, and Mess Lethierry was the captive of his grief. To go to bed
was a truce, a gain in breathing time, a suspension of ideas. He neither
slept nor watched. Strictly speaking, for two months and a half--for so
long was it since his misfortune--Mess Lethierry had been in a sort of
somnambulism. He had not yet regained possession of his faculties. He
was in that cloudy and confused condition of intellect with which those
are familiar who have undergone overwhelming afflictions. His
reflections were not thought, his sleep was no repose. By day he was not
awake, by night not asleep. He was up, and then gone to rest, that was
all. When he was in his hammock forgetfulness came to him a little. He
called that sleeping. Chimeras floated about him, and within him. The
nocturnal cloud, full of confused faces, traversed his brain. Sometimes
it was the Emperor Napoleon dictating to him the story of his life;
sometimes there were several Déruchettes; strange birds were in the
trees; the streets of Lons-le-Saulnier became serpents. Nightmares were
the brief respites of despair. He passed his nights in dreaming, and his
days in reverie.
Sometimes he remained all the afternoon at the window of his room, which
looked out upon the port, with his head drooping, his elbows on the
stone, his ears resting on his fists, his back turned to the whole
world, his eye fixed on the old massive iron ring fastened in the wall
of the house, at only a few feet from his window, where in the old days
he used to moor the Durande. He was looking at the rust which gathered
on the ring.
He was reduced to the mere mechanical habit of living.
The bravest men, when deprived of their most cherished idea, will come
to this. His life had become a void. Life is a voyage; the idea is the
itinerary. The plan of their course gone, they stop. The object is lost,
the strength of purpose gone. Fate has a secret discretionary power. It
is able to touch with its rod even our moral being. Despair is almost
the destitution of the soul. Only the greatest minds resist, and for
what?
Mess Lethierry was always meditating, if absorption can be called
meditation, in the depth of a sort of cloudy abyss. Broken words
sometimes escaped him like these, "There is nothing left for me now, but
to ask yonder for leave to go."
There was a certain contradiction in that nature, complex as the sea, of
which Mess Lethierry was, so to speak, the product. Mess Lethierry's
grief did not seek relief in prayer.
To be powerless is a certain strength. In the presence of our two great
expressions of this blindness--destiny and nature--it is in his
powerlessness that man has found his chief support in prayer.
Man seeks succour from his terror; his anxiety bids him kneel. Prayer,
that mighty force of the soul, akin to mystery. Prayer addresses itself
to the magnanimity of the Shades; prayer regards mystery with eyes
themselves overshadowed by it, and beneath the power of its fixed and
appealing gaze, we feel the possibility of the great Unknown unbending
to reply.
The mere thought of such a possibility becomes a consolation.
But Mess Lethierry prayed not.