already sacrificed, the engines became the topic of conversation among
the crowd. They took an interest in it as in a living thing. They felt a
delight in praising its good qualities. "That's what I call a well-built
machine," said a French sailor. "Something like a good one," cried a
Guernsey fisherman. "She must have some good stuff in her," said the
captain of the _Shealtiel_, "to come out of that affair with only a few
scratches."

By degrees the machinery of the Durande became the absorbing object of
their thoughts. Opinions were warm for and against. It had its enemies
and its friends. More than one who possessed a good old sailing cutter,
and who hoped to get a share of the business of the Durande, was not
sorry to find that the Douvres rock had disposed of the new invention.
The whispering became louder. The discussion grew noisy, though the
hubbub was evidently a little restrained; and now and then there was a
simultaneous lowering of voices out of respect to Lethierry's death-like
silence.

The result of the colloquy, so obstinately maintained on all sides, was
as follows:--

The engines were the vital part of the vessel. To rescue the Durande was
impossible; but the machinery might still be saved. These engines were
unique. To construct others similar, the money was wanting; but to find
the artificer would have been still more difficult. It was remembered
that the constructor of the machinery was dead. It had cost forty
thousand francs. No one would risk again such a sum upon such a chance:
particularly as it was now discovered that steamboats could be lost like
other vessels. The accident of the Durande destroyed the prestige of all
her previous success. Still, it was deplorable to think that at that
very moment this valuable mechanism was still entire and in good
condition, and that in five or six days it would probably go to pieces,
like the vessel herself. As long as this existed, it might almost be
said that there was no shipwreck. The loss of the engines was alone
irreparable. To save the machinery would be almost to repair the
disaster.

Save the machinery! It was easy to talk of it; but who would undertake
to do it? Was it possible, even? To scheme and to execute are two
different things; as different as to dream and to do. Now if ever a
dream had appeared wild and impracticable, it was that of saving the
engines then embedded between the Douvres. The idea of sending a ship
and a crew to work upon those rocks was absurd. It could not be thought
of. It was the season of heavy seas. In the first gale the chains of the
anchors would be worn away and snapped upon the submarine peaks, and the
vessel must be shattered on the rocks. That would be to send a second
shipwreck to the relief of the first. On the miserable narrow height
where the legend of the place described the shipwrecked sailor as
having perished of hunger, there was scarcely room for one person. To
save the engines, therefore, it would be necessary for a man to go to
the Douvres, to be alone in that sea, alone in that desert, alone at
five leagues from the coast, alone in that region of terrors, alone for
entire weeks, alone in the presence of dangers foreseen and
unforeseen--without supplies in the face of hunger and nakedness,
without succour in the time of distress, without token of human life
around him save the bleached bones of the miserable being who had
perished there in his misery, without companionship save that of death.
And besides, how was it possible to extricate the machinery? It would
require not only a sailor, but an engineer; and for what trials must he
not prepare. The man who would attempt such a task must be more than a
hero. He must be a madman: for in certain enterprises, in which
superhuman power appears necessary, there is a sort of madness which is
more potent than courage. And after all, would it not be a folly to
immolate oneself for a mass of rusted iron. No: it was certain that
nobody would undertake to go to the Douvres on such an errand. The
engine must be abandoned like the rest. The engineer for such a task
would assuredly not be forthcoming. Where, indeed, should they look for
such a man?

All this, or similar observations, formed the substance of the confused
conversations of the crowd.

The captain of the _Shealtiel_, who had been a pilot, summed up the
views of all by exclaiming aloud:--

"No; it is all over. The man does not exist who could go there and
rescue the machinery of the Durande."

"If I don't go," said Imbrancam, "it is because nobody could do it."

The captain of the _Shealtiel_ shook his left hand in the air with that
sudden movement which expresses a conviction that a thing is impossible.

"If he existed--" continued the captain.

Déruchette turned her head impulsively, and interrupted.

"I would marry him," she said, innocently.

There was a pause.

A man made his way out of the crowd, and standing before her, pale and
anxious, said:

"You would marry him, Miss Déruchette?"

It was Gilliatt.

All eyes were turned towards him. Mess Lethierry had just before stood
upright, and gazed about him. His eyes glittered with a strange light.

He took off his sailor's cap, and threw it on the ground: then looked
solemnly before him, and without seeing any of the persons present,
said:

"Déruchette should be his. I pledge myself to it in God's name."

II

MUCH ASTONISHMENT ON THE WESTERN COAST

The full moon rose at ten o'clock on the following night; but however
fine the night, however favourable the wind and sea, no fisherman
thought of going out that evening either from Hogue la Perre, or
Bourdeaux harbour, or Houmet Benet, or Platon, or Port Grat, or Vazon
Bay, or Perrelle Bay, or Pezeries, or the Tielles or Saints' Bay, or
Little Bo, or any other port or little harbour in Guernsey; and the
reason was very simple. A cock had been heard to crow at noonday.

When the cock is heard to crow at an extraordinary hour, fishing is
suspended.

At dusk on that evening, however, a fisherman returning to Omptolle, met
with a remarkable adventure. On the height above Houmet Paradis, beyond
the Two Brayes and the Two Grunes, stands to the left the beacon of the
Plattes Tougères, representing a tub reversed; and to the right, the
beacon of St. Sampson, representing the face of a man. Between these
two, the fisherman thought that he perceived for the first time a third
beacon. What could be the meaning of this beacon? When had it been
erected on that point? What shoal did it indicate? The beacon responded
immediately to these interrogations. It moved, it was a mast. The
astonishment of the fisherman did not diminish. A beacon would have been
remarkable; a mast was still more so: it could not be a fishing-boat.
When everybody else was returning, some boat was going out. Who could it
be? and what was he about?

Ten minutes later the vessel, moving slowly, came within a short
distance of the Omptolle fisherman. He did not recognise it. He heard
the sound of rowing: there were evidently only two oars. There was
probably, then, only one man aboard. The wind was northerly. The man,
therefore, was evidently paddling along in order to take the wind off
Point Fontenelle. There he would probably take to his sails. He
intended then to double the Ancresse and Mount Crevel. What could that
mean?

The vessel passed, the fisherman returned home. On that same night, at
different hours, and at different points, various persons scattered and
isolated on the western coast of Guernsey, observed certain facts.

As the Omptolle fisherman was mooring his bark, a carter of seaweed
about half-a-mile off, whipping his horses along the lonely road from
the Clôtures near the Druid stones, and in the neighbourhood of the
Martello Towers 6 and 7, saw far off at sea, in a part little
frequented, because it requires much knowledge of the waters, and in the
direction of North Rock and the Jablonneuse, a sail being hoisted. He
paid little attention to the circumstance, not being a seaman, but a
carter of seaweed.

Half-an-hour had perhaps elapsed since the carter had perceived this
vessel, when a plasterer returning from his work in the town, and
passing round Pelée Pool, found himself suddenly opposite a vessel
sailing boldly among the rocks of the Quenon, the Rousse de Mer, and the
Gripe de Rousse. The night was dark, but the sky was light over the sea,
an effect common enough; and he could distinguish a great distance in
every direction. There was no sail visible except this vessel.

A little lower, a gatherer of crayfish, preparing his fish wells on the
beach which separates Port Soif from the Port Enfer, was puzzled to make
out the movements of a vessel between the Boue Corneille and the
Moubrette. The man must have been a good pilot, and in great haste to
reach some destination to risk his boat there.

Just as eight o'clock was striking at the Catel, the tavern-keeper at
Cobo Bay observed with astonishment a sail out beyond the Boue du Jardin
and the Grunettes, and very near the Susanne and the Western Grunes.

Not far from Cobo Bay, upon the solitary point of the Houmet of Vason
Bay, two lovers were lingering, hesitating before they parted for the
night. The young woman addressed the young man with the words, "I am not
going because I don't care to stay with you: I've a great deal to do."
Their farewell kiss was interrupted by a good sized sailing boat which
passed very near them, making for the direction of the Messellettes.

Monsieur le Peyre des Norgiots, an inhabitant of Cotillon Pipet, was
engaged about nine o'clock in the evening in examining a hole made by
some trespassers in the hedge of his property called La Jennerotte, and
his "_friquet_ planted with trees." Even while ascertaining the amount
of the damage, he could not help observing a fishing-boat audaciously
making its way round the Crocq Point at that hour of night.

On the morrow of a tempest, when there is always some agitation upon the
sea, that route was extremely unsafe. It was rash to choose it, at
least, unless the steersman knew all the channels by heart.

At half-past nine o'clock, at L'Equerrier, a trawler carrying home his
net stopped for a time to observe between Colombelle and the Soufleresse
something which looked like a boat. The boat was in a dangerous
position. Sudden gusts of wind of a very dangerous kind are very common
in that spot. The _Soufleresse_, or Blower, derives its name from the
sudden gusts of wind which it seems to direct upon the vessels, which by
rare chance find their way thither.

At the moment when the moon was rising, the tide being high and the sea
being quiet, in the little strait of Li-Hou, the solitary keeper of the
island of Li-Hou was considerably startled. A long black object slowly
passed between the moon and him. This dark form, high and narrow,
resembled a winding-sheet spread out and moving. It glided along the
line of the top of the wall formed by the ridges of rock. The keeper of
Li-Hou fancied that he had beheld the Black Lady.

The White Lady inhabits the Tau de Pez d'Amont; the Grey Lady, the Tau
de Pez d'Aval; the Red Lady, the Silleuse, to the north of the Marquis
Bank; and the Black Lady, the Grand Etacré, to the west of Li-Houmet. At
night, when the moon shines, these ladies stalk abroad, and sometimes
meet.

That dark form might undoubtedly be a sail. The long groups of rocks on
which she appeared to be walking, might in fact be concealing the hull
of a bark navigating behind them, and allowing only her sail to be seen.
But the keeper asked himself, what bark would dare, at that hour, to
venture herself between Li-Hou and the Pécheresses, and the Anguillières
and Lérée Point? And what object could she have? It seemed to him much
more probable that it was the Black Lady.

As the moon was passing the clock-tower of St. Peter in the Wood, the
serjeant at Castle Rocquaine, while in the act of raising the drawbridge
of the castle, distinguished at the end of the bay beyond the Haute
Canée, but nearer than the Sambule, a sailing-vessel which seemed to be
steadily dropping down from north to south.

On the southern coast of Guernsey behind Pleinmont, in the curve of a
bay composed entirely of precipices and rocky walls rising peak-shaped
from the sea, there is a singular landing-place, to which a French
gentleman, a resident of the island since 1855, has given the name of
"The Port on the Fourth Floor," a name now generally adopted. This port,
or landing-place, which was then called the Moie, is a rocky plateau
half-formed by nature, half by art, raised about forty feet above the
level of the waves, and communicating with the water by two large beams
laid parallel in the form of an inclined plane. The fishing-vessels are
hoisted up there by chains and pulleys from the sea, and are let down
again in the same way along these beams, which are like two rails. For
the fishermen there is a ladder. The port was, at the time of our story,
much frequented by the smugglers. Being difficult of access, it was well
suited to their purposes.

Towards eleven o'clock, some smugglers--perhaps the same upon whose aid
Clubin had counted--stood with their bales of goods on the summit of
this platform of the Moie. A smuggler is necessarily a man on the look
out, it is part of his business to watch. They were astonished to
perceive a sail suddenly make its appearance beyond the dusky outline of
Cape Pleinmont. It was moonlight. The smugglers observed the sail
narrowly, suspecting that it might be some coast-guard cutter about to
lie in ambush behind the Great Hanway. But the sail left the Hanways
behind, passed to the north-west of the Boue Blondel, and was lost in
the pale mists of the horizon out at sea.

"Where the devil can that boat be sailing?" asked the smuggler.

That same evening, a little after sunset, some one had been heard
knocking at the door of the old house of the Bû de la Rue. It was a boy
wearing brown clothes and yellow stockings, a fact that indicated that
he was a little parish clerk. An old fisherwoman prowling about the
shore with a lantern in her hand, had called to the boy, and this
dialogue ensued between the fisherwoman and the little clerk, before the
entrance to the Bû de la Rue:--

"What d'ye want, lad?"

"The man of this place."

"He's not there."

"Where is he?"

"I don't know."

"Will he be there to-morrow?"

"I don't know."

"Is he gone away?"

"I don't know."

"I've come, good woman, from the new rector of the parish, the Reverend
Ebenezer Caudray, who desires to pay him a visit."

"I don't know where he is."

"The rector sent me to ask if the man who lives at the Bû de la Rue
would be at home to-morrow morning."

"I don't know."

A QUOTATION FROM THE BIBLE

During the twenty-four hours which followed, Mess Lethierry slept not,
ate nothing, drank nothing. He kissed Déruchette on the forehead, asked
after Clubin, of whom there was as yet no news, signed a declaration
certifying that he had no intention of preferring a charge against
anyone, and set Tangrouille at liberty.

All the morning of the next day he remained half supporting himself on
the table of the office of the Durande, neither standing nor sitting:
answering kindly when anyone spoke to him. Curiosity being satisfied,
the Bravées had become a solitude. There is a good deal of curiosity
generally mingled with the haste of condolences. The door had closed
again, and left the old man again alone with Déruchette. The strange
light that had shone in Lethierry's eyes was extinguished. The mournful
look which filled them after the first news of the disaster had
returned.

Déruchette, anxious for his sake, had, on the advice of Grace and Douce,
laid silently beside him a pair of stockings, which he had been
knitting, sailor fashion, when the bad news had arrived.

He smiled bitterly, and said:

"They must think me foolish."

After a quarter of an hour's silence, he added:

"These things are well when you are happy."

Déruchette carried away the stockings, and took advantage of the
opportunity to remove also the compass and the ship's papers which
Lethierry had been brooding over too long.

In the afternoon, a little before tea-time, the door opened and two
strangers entered, attired in black. One was old, the other young.

The young one has, perhaps, already been observed in the course of this
story.

The two men had each a grave air; but their gravity appeared different.
The old man possessed what might be called state gravity; the gravity of
the young man was in his nature. Habit engenders the one; thought the
other.

They were, as their costume indicated, two clergymen, each belonging to
the Established Church.

The first fact in the appearance of the younger man which might have
first struck the observer was, that his gravity, though conspicuous in
the expression of his features, and evidently springing from the mind,
was not indicated by his person. Gravity is not inconsistent with
passion, which it exalts by purifying it; but the idea of gravity could
with difficulty be associated with an exterior remarkable above all for
personal beauty. Being in holy orders, he must have been at least
four-and-twenty, but he seemed scarcely more than eighteen. He possessed
those gifts at once in harmony with, and in opposition to, each other. A
soul which seemed created for exalted passion, and a body created for
love. He was fair, rosy-fresh, slim, and elegant in his severe attire,
and he had the cheeks of a young girl, and delicate hands. His movements
were natural and lively, though subdued. Everything about him was
pleasing, elegant, almost voluptuous. The beauty of his expression
served to correct this excess of personal attraction. His open smile,
which showed his teeth, regular and white as those of a child, had
something in it pensive, even devotional. He had the gracefulness of a
page, mingled with the dignity of a bishop.

His fair hair, so fair and golden as to be almost effeminate, clustered
over his white forehead, which was high and well-formed. A slight double
line between the eyebrows awakened associations with studious thought.

Those who saw him felt themselves in the presence of one of those
natures, benevolent, innocent, and pure, whose progress is in inverse
sense with that of vulgar minds; natures whom illusion renders wise, and
whom experience makes enthusiasts.

His older companion was no other than Doctor Jaquemin Hérode. Doctor
Jaquemin Hérode belonged to the High Church; a party whose system is a
sort of popery without a pope. The Church of England was at that epoch
labouring with the tendencies which have since become strengthened and
condensed in the form of Puseyism. Doctor Jaquemin Hérode belonged to
that shade of Anglicanism which is almost a variety of the Church of
Rome. He was haughty, precise, stiff, and commanding. His inner sight
scarcely penetrated outwardly. He possessed the letter in the place of
the spirit. His manner was arrogant; his presence imposing. He had less
the appearance of a "Reverend" than of a _Monsignore_. His frock-coat
was cut somewhat in the fashion of a cassock. His true centre would have
been Rome. He was a born Prelate of the Antechamber. He seemed to have
been created expressly to fill a part in the Papal Court, to walk behind
the Pontifical litter, with all the Court of Rome in _abitto paonazzo_.
The accident of his English birth and his theological education,
directed more towards the Old than the New Testament, had deprived him
of that destiny. All his splendours were comprised in his preferments as
Rector of St. Peter's Port, Dean of the Island of Guernsey, and
Surrogate of the Bishop of Winchester. These were, undoubtedly, not
without their glories. These glories did not prevent M. Jaquemin Hérode
being, on the whole, a worthy man.

As a theologian he was esteemed by those who were able to judge of such
matters; he was almost an authority in the Court of Arches--that
Sorbonne of England.

He had the true air of erudition; a learned contraction of the eyes;
bristling nostrils; teeth which showed themselves at all times; a thin
upper lip and a thick lower one. He was the possessor of several learned
degrees, a valuable prebend, titled friends, the confidence of the
bishop, and a Bible, which he carried always in his pocket.

Mess Lethierry was so completely absorbed that the entrance of the two
priests produced no effect upon him, save a slight movement of the
eyebrows.

M. Jaquemin Hérode advanced, bowed, alluded in a few sober and dignified
words to his recent promotion, and mentioned that he came according to
custom to introduce among the inhabitants, and to Mess Lethierry in
particular, his successor in the parish, the new Rector of St. Sampson,
the Rev. Ebenezer Caudray, henceforth the pastor of Mess Lethierry.

Déruchette rose.

The young clergyman, who was the Rev. Ebenezer, saluted her.

Mess Lethierry regarded Monsieur Ebenezer Caudray, and muttered, "A bad
sailor."

Grace placed chairs. The two visitors seated themselves near the table.

Doctor Hérode commenced a discourse. It had reached his ears that a
serious misfortune had befallen his host. The Durande had been lost. He
came as Lethierry's pastor to offer condolence and advice. This
shipwreck was unfortunate, and yet not without compensations. Let us
examine our own hearts. Are we not puffed up with prosperity? The waters
of felicity are dangerous. Troubles must be submitted to cheerfully. The
ways of Providence are mysterious. Mess Lethierry was ruined, perhaps.
But riches were a danger. You may have false friends; poverty will
disperse them, and leave you alone. The Durande was reported to have
brought a revenue of one thousand pounds sterling per annum. It was more
than enough for the wise. Let us fly from temptations; put not our faith
in gold; bow the head to losses and neglect. Isolation is full of good
fruits. It was in solitude that Ajah discovered the warm springs while
leading the asses of his father Zibeon. Let us not rebel against the
inscrutable decrees of Providence. The holy man Job, after his misery,
had put faith in riches. Who can say that the loss of the Durande may
not have its advantages even of a temporal kind. He, for instance,
Doctor Jaquemin Hérode had invested some money in an excellent
enterprise, now in progress at Sheffield. If Mess Lethierry, with the
wealth which might still remain to him, should choose to embark in the
same affair, he might transfer his capital to that town. It was an
extensive manufactory of arms for the supply of the Czar, now engaged in
repressing insurrection in Poland. There was a good prospect of
obtaining three hundred per cent. profit.

The word Czar appeared to awaken Lethierry. He interrupted Dr. Hérode.

"I want nothing to do with the Czar."

The Reverend Jaquemin Hérode replied:

"Mess Lethierry, princes are recognised by God. It is written, 'Render
unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's.' The Czar is Cæsar."

Lethierry partly relapsed into his dream and muttered:

"Cæsar? who is Cæsar? I don't know."

The Rev. Jaquemin Hérode continued his exhortations. He did not press
the question of Sheffield.

To contemn a Cæsar was republicanism. He could understand a man being a
republican. In that case he could turn his thoughts towards a republic.
Mess Lethierry might repair his fortune in the United States, even
better than in England. If he desired to invest what remained to him at
great profit, he had only to take shares in the great company for
developing the resources of Texas, which employed more than twenty
thousand negroes.

"I want nothing to do with slavery," said Lethierry.

"Slavery," replied the Reverend Hérode, "is an institution recognised by
Scripture. It is written, 'If a man smite his slave, he shall not be
punished, for he is his money.'"

Grace and Douce at the door of the room listened in a sort of ecstacy to
the words of the Reverend Doctor.

The doctor continued. He was, all things considered, as we have said, a
worthy man; and whatever his differences, personal or connected with
caste, with Mess Lethierry, he had come very sincerely to offer him that
spiritual and even temporal aid which he, Doctor Jaquemin Hérode,
dispensed.

If Mess Lethierry's fortune had been diminished to that point that he
was unable to take a beneficial part in any speculation, Russian or
American, why should he not obtain some government appointment suited to
him? There were many very respectable places open to him, and the
reverend gentleman was ready to recommend him. The office of
Deputy-Vicomte was just vacant. Mess Lethierry was popular and
respected, and the Reverend Jaquemin Hérode, Dean of Guernsey and
Surrogate of the Bishop, would make an effort to obtain for Mess
Lethierry this post. The Deputy-Vicomte is an important officer. He is
present as the representative of His Majesty at the holding of the
Sessions, at the debates of the _Cohue_, and at executions of justice.

Lethierry fixed his eye upon Doctor Hérode.

"I don't like hanging," he said.

Doctor Hérode, who, up to this point, had pronounced his words with the
same intonation, had now a fit of severity; his tone became slightly
changed.

"Mess Lethierry, the pain of death is of divine ordination. God has
placed the sword in the hands of governors. It is written, 'An eye for
an eye, a tooth for a tooth.'"

The Reverend Ebenezer imperceptibly drew his chair nearer to the
Reverend Doctor and said, so as to be heard only by him:

"What this man says, is dictated to him."

"By whom? By what?" demanded the Reverend Jaquemin Hérode, in the same
tone.

The young man replied in a whisper, "By his conscience."

The Reverend Jaquemin Hérode felt in his pocket, drew out a thick little
bound volume with clasps, and said aloud:

"Conscience is here."

The book was a Bible.

Then Doctor Hérode's tone became softer. "His wish was to render a
service to Mess Lethierry, whom he respected much. As his pastor, it was
his right and duty to offer counsel. Mess Lethierry, however, was free."

Mess Lethierry, plunged once more in his overwhelming absorption, no
longer listened. Déruchette, seated near him, and thoughtful, also did
not raise her eyes, and by her silent presence somewhat increased the
embarrassment of a conversation not very animated. A witness who says
nothing is a species of indefinable weight. Doctor Hérode, however, did
not appear to feel it.

Lethierry no longer replying, Doctor Hérode expatiated freely. Counsel
is from man; inspiration is from God. In the counsels of the priests
there is inspiration. It is good to accept, dangerous to refuse them.
Sochoh was seized by eleven devils for disdaining the exhortations of
Nathaniel. Tiburianus was struck with a leprosy for having driven from
his house the Apostle Andrew. Barjesus, a magician though he was, was
punished with blindness for having mocked at the words of St. Paul.
Elxai and his sisters, Martha and Martena, are in eternal torments for
despising the warnings of Valentianus, who proved to them clearly that
their Jesus Christ, thirty-eight leagues in height, was a demon.
Aholibamah, who is also called Judith, obeyed the Councils, Reuben and
Peniel listened to the counsels from on high, as their names indeed
indicate. Reuben signifies son of the vision; and Peniel, "the face of
God."

Mess Lethierry struck the table with his fist.

"Parbleu!" he cried; "it was my fault."

"What do you mean?" asked M. Jaquemin Hérode.

"I say that it is my fault."

"Your fault? Why?"

"Because I allowed the Durande to return on Fridays."

M. Jaquemin Hérode whispered in Caudray's ear:

"This man is superstitious."

He resumed, raising his voice, and in a didactic tone:

"Mess Lethierry, it is puerile to believe in Fridays. You ought not to
put faith in fables. Friday is a day just like any other. It is very
often a propitious day. Melendez founded the city of Saint Augustin on a
Friday; it was on a Friday that Henry the Seventh gave his commission
to John Cabot; the Pilgrims of the _Mayflower_ landed at Province Town
on a Friday. Washington was born on Friday, the 22nd of February 1732;
Christopher Columbus discovered America on Friday, the 12th of October
1492."

Having delivered himself of these remarks, he rose.

Caudray, whom he had brought with him, rose also.

Grace and Douce, perceiving that the two clergymen were about to take
their leave, opened the folding-doors.

Mess Lethierry saw nothing; heard nothing.

M. Jaquemin Hérode said, apart to M. Caudray:

"He does not even salute us. This is not sorrow; it is vacancy. He must
have lost his reason."

He took his little Bible, however, from the table, and held it between
his hands outstretched, as one holds a bird in fear that it may fly
away. This attitude awakened among the persons present a certain amount
of attention. Grace and Douce leaned forward eagerly.

His voice assumed all the solemnity of which it was capable.

"Mess Lethierry," he began, "let us not part without reading a page of
the Holy Book. It is from books that wise men derive consolation in the
troubles of life. The profane have their oracles; but believers have
their ready resource in the Bible. The first book which comes to hand,
opened by chance may afford counsel; but the Bible, opened at any page,
yields a revelation. It is, above all, a boon to the afflicted. Yes,
Holy Scripture is an unfailing balm for their wounds. In the presence of
affliction, it is good to consult its sacred pages--to open even without
choosing the place, and to read with faith the passage which we find.
What man does not choose is chosen by God. He knoweth best what suiteth
us. His finger pointeth invisibly to that which we read. Whatever be the
page, it will infallibly enlighten. Let us seek, then, no other light;
but hold fast to His. It is the word from on high. In the text which is
evoked with confidence and reverence, often do we find a mysterious
significance in our present troubles. Let us hearken, then, and obey.
Mess Lethierry, you are in affliction, but I hold here the book of
consolation. You are sick at heart, but I have here the book of
spiritual health."

The Reverend Jaquemin Hérode touched the spring of the clasp, and let
his finger slip between the leaves. Then he placed his hand a moment
upon the open volume, collected his thoughts, and, raising his eyes
impressively, began to read in a loud voice.

The passage which he had lighted on was as follows:

"And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide, and he
lifted up his eyes and saw and beheld the camels were coming.

"And Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she lighted off
the camel.

"For she had said unto the servant, What man is this that walketh in the
field to meet us?

"And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah,
and she became his wife, and he loved her; and Isaac was comforted after
his mother's death."

Caudray and Déruchette glanced at each other.

PART II.--MALICIOUS GILLIATT

BOOK I

THE ROCK

THE PLACE WHICH IS DIFFICULT TO REACH, AND DIFFICULT TO LEAVE

The bark which had been observed at so many points on the coast of
Guernsey on the previous evening was, as the reader has guessed, the old
Dutch barge or sloop. Gilliatt had chosen the channel along the coast
among the rocks. It was the most dangerous way, but it was the most
direct. To take the shortest route was his only thought. Shipwrecks will
not wait; the sea is a pressing creditor; an hour's delay may be
irreparable. His anxiety was to go quickly to the rescue of the
machinery in danger.

One of his objects in leaving Guernsey was to avoid arousing attention.
He set out like one escaping from justice, and seemed anxious to hide
from human eyes. He shunned the eastern coast, as if he did not care to
pass in sight of St. Sampson and St. Peter's Port, and glided silently
along the opposite coast, which is comparatively uninhabited. Among the
breakers, it was necessary to ply the oars; but Gilliatt managed them on
scientific principles; taking the water quietly, and dropping it with
exact regularity, he was able to move in the darkness with as little
noise and as rapidly as possible. So stealthy were his movements, that
he might have seemed to be bent upon some evil errand.

In truth, though embarking desperately in an enterprise which might well
be called impossible, and risking his life with nearly every chance
against him, he feared nothing but the possibility of some rival in the
work which he had set before him.

As the day began to break, those unknown eyes which look down upon the
world from boundless space might have beheld, at one of the most
dangerous and solitary spots at sea, two objects, the distance between
which was gradually decreasing, as the one was approaching the other.
One, which was almost imperceptible in the wide movement of the waters,
was a sailing boat. In this was a man. It was the sloop. The other,
black, motionless, colossal, rose above the waves, a singular form. Two
tall pillars issuing from the sea bore aloft a sort of cross-beam which
was like a bridge between them. This bridge, so singular in shape that
it was impossible to imagine what it was from a distance, touched each
of the two pillars. It resembled a vast portal. Of what use could such
an erection be in that open plain, the sea, which stretched around it
far and wide? It might have been imagined to be a Titanic Cromlech,
planted there in mid-ocean by an imperious whim, and built up by hands
accustomed to proportion their labours to the great deep. Its wild
outline stood well-defined against the clear sky.

The morning light was growing stronger in the east; the whiteness in the
horizon deepened the shadow on the sea. In the opposite sky the moon was
sinking.

The two perpendicular forms were the Douvres. The huge mass held fast
between them, like an architrave between two pillars, was the wreck of
the Durande.

The rock, thus holding fast and exhibiting its prey, was terrible to
behold. Inanimate things look sometimes as if endowed with a dark and
hostile spirit towards man. There was a menace in the attitude of the
rocks. They seemed to be biding their time.

Nothing could be more suggestive of haughtiness and arrogance than their
whole appearance: the conquered vessel; the triumphant abyss. The two
rocks, still streaming with the tempest of the day before, were like two
wrestlers sweating from a recent struggle. The wind had sunk; the sea
rippled gently; here and there the presence of breakers might be
detected in the graceful streaks of foam upon the surface of the waters.
A sound came from the sea like the murmuring of bees. All around was
level except the Douvres, rising straight, like two black columns. Up to
a certain height they were completely bearded with seaweed; above this
their steep haunches glittered at points like polished armour. They
seemed ready to commence the strife again. The beholder felt that they
were rooted deep in mountains whose summits were beneath the sea. Their
aspect was full of a sort of tragic power.

Ordinarily the sea conceals her crimes. She delights in privacy. Her
unfathomable deeps keep silence. She wraps herself in a mystery which
rarely consents to give up its secrets. We know her savage nature, but
who can tell the extent of her dark deeds? She is at once open and
secret; she hides away carefully, and cares not to divulge her actions;
wrecks a vessel, and, covering it with the waves, engulfs it deep, as if
conscious of her guilt. Among her crimes is hypocrisy. She slays and
steals, conceals her booty, puts on an air of unconsciousness, and
smiles.

Here, however, was nothing of the kind. The Douvres, lifting above the
level of the waters the shattered hull of the Durande, had an air of
triumph. The imagination might have pictured them as two monstrous arms,
reaching upwards from the gulf, and exhibiting to the tempest the
lifeless body of the ship. Their aspect was like that of an assassin
boasting of his evil deeds.

The solemnity of the hour contributed something to the impression of the
scene. There is a mysterious grandeur in the dawn, as of the border-land
between the region of consciousness and the world of our dreams. There
is something spectral in that confused transition time. The immense form
of the two Douvres, like a capital letter H, the Durande forming its
cross stroke, appeared against the horizon in all their twilight
majesty.

Gilliatt was attired in his seaman's clothing: a Guernsey shirt, woollen
stockings, thick shoes, a homespun jacket, trousers of thick stuff, with
pockets, and a cap upon his head of red worsted, of a kind then much in
use among sailors, and known in the last century as a _galérienne_.

He recognised the rocks, and steered towards them.

The situation of the Durande was exactly the contrary of that of a
vessel gone to the bottom: it was a vessel suspended in the air.

No problem more strange was ever presented to a salvor.

It was broad daylight when Gilliatt arrived in the waters about the
rock.

As we have said, there was but little sea. The slight agitation of the
water was due almost entirely to its confinement among the rocks. Every
passage, small or large, is subject to this chopping movement. The
inside of a channel is always more or less white with foam. Gilliatt did
not approach the Douvres without caution.

He cast the sounding lead several times.

He had a cargo to disembark.

Accustomed to long absences, he had at home a number of necessaries
always ready. He had brought a sack of biscuit, another of rye-meal, a
basket of salt fish and smoked beef, a large can of fresh water; a
Norwegian chest painted with flowers, containing several coarse woollen
shirts, his tarpaulin and his waterproof overalls, and a sheepskin which
he was accustomed to throw at night over his clothes. On leaving the Bû
de la Rue he had put all these things hastily into the barge, with the
addition of a large loaf. In his hurry he had brought no other tools but
his huge forge-hammer, his chopper and hatchet, and a knotted rope.
Furnished with a grappling-iron and with a ladder of that sort, the
steepest rocks become accessible, and a good sailor will find it
possible to scale the rudest escarpment. In the island of Sark the
visitor may see what the fishermen of the Havre Gosselin can accomplish
with a knotted cord.

His nets and lines and all his fishing apparatus were in the barge. He
had placed them there mechanically and by habit; for he intended, if his
enterprise continued, to sojourn for some time in an archipelago of
rocks and breakers, where fishing nets and tackle are of little use.

At the moment when Gilliatt was skirting the great rock the sea was
retiring; a circumstance favourable to his purpose. The departing tide
laid bare, at the foot of the smaller Douvre, one or two table-rocks,
horizontal, or only slightly inclined, and bearing a fanciful
resemblance to boards supported by crows. These table-rocks, sometimes
narrow, sometimes broad, standing at unequal distances along the side of
the great perpendicular column, were continued in the form of a thin
cornice up to a spot just beneath the Durande, the hull of which stood
swelling out between the two rocks. The wreck was held fast there as in
a vice.

This series of platforms was convenient for approaching and surveying
the position. It was convenient also for disembarking the contents of
the barge provisionally; but it was necessary to hasten, for it was only
above water for a few hours. With the rising tide the table-rocks would
be again beneath the foam.

It was before these table-rocks, some level, some slanting, that
Gilliatt pushed in and brought the barge to a stand. A thick mass of wet
and slippery sea-wrack covered them, rendered more slippery here and
there by their inclined surfaces.

Gilliatt pulled off his shoes and sprang bare-footed on to the slimy
weeds, and made fast the barge to a point of rock.

Then he advanced as far as he could along the granite cornice, reached
the rock immediately beneath the wreck, looked up, and examined it.

The Durande had been caught suspended, and, as it were, fitted in
between the two rocks, at about twenty feet above the water. It must
have been a heavy sea which had cast her there.

Such effects from furious seas have nothing surprising for those who are
familiar with the ocean. To cite one example only:--On the 25th January
1840, in the Gulf of Stora, a tempest struck with its expiring force a
brig, and casting it almost intact completely over the broken wreck of
the corvette _La Marne_, fixed it immovable, bowsprit first, in a gap
between the cliffs.

The Douvres, however, held only a part of the Durande.

The vessel snatched from the waves had been, as it were, uprooted from
the waters by the hurricane. A whirlwind had wrenched it against the
counteracting force of the rolling waves, and the vessel thus caught in
contrary directions by the two claws of the tempest had snapped like a
lath. The after-part with the engine and the paddles, lifted out of the
foam and driven by all the fury of the cyclone into the defile of the
Douvres, had plunged in up to her midship beam, and remained there. The
blow had been well directed. To drive it in this fashion between the two
rocks, the storm had struck it as with an enormous hammer. The
forecastle carried away and rolled down by the sea, had gone to
fragments among the breakers.

The hold, broken in, had scattered out the bodies of the drowned cattle
upon the sea.

A large portion of the forward side and bulwarks still hung to the
riders by the larboard paddle-box, and by some shattered braces easy to
strike off with the blow of a hatchet.

Here and there, among beams, planks, rags of canvas, pieces of chains,
and other remains of wreck were seen lying about among the rugged
fragments of shattered rock.

Gilliatt surveyed the Durande attentively. The keel formed a roofing
over his head.

A serene sky stretched far and wide over the waters, scarcely wrinkled
with a passing breath. The sun rose gloriously in the midst of the vast
azure circle.

From time to time a drop of water was detached from the wreck and fell
into the sea.

II

A CATALOGUE OF DISASTERS

The Douvres differed in shape as well as in height.

Upon the Little Douvre, which was curved and pointed, long veins of
reddish-coloured rock, of a comparatively soft kind, could be seen
branching out and dividing the interior of the granite. At the edges of
these red dykes were fractures, favourable to climbing. One of these
fractures, situated a little above the wreck, had been so laboriously
worn and scooped out by the splashing of the waves, that it had become a
sort of niche, in which it would have been quite possible to place a
statue. The granite of the Little Douvre was rounded at the surface,
and, to the feel at least, soft like touchstone; but this feeling
detracted nothing from its durability. The Little Douvre terminated in a
point like a horn. The Great Douvre, polished, smooth, glossy,
perpendicular, and looking as if cut out by the builder's square, was in
one piece, and seemed made of black ivory. Not a hole, not a break in
its smooth surface. The escarpment looked inhospitable. A convict could
not have used it for escape, nor a bird for a place for its nest. On the
summit there was a horizontal surface as upon "The Man Rock;" but the
summit of the Great Douvre was inaccessible.

It was possible to scale the Little Douvre, but not to remain on the
summit; it would have been possible to rest on the summit of the Great
Douvre, but impossible to scale it.

Gilliatt, having rapidly surveyed the situation of affairs, returned to
the barge, landed its contents upon the largest of the horizontal
cornice rocks, made of the whole compact mass a sort of bale, which he
rolled up in tarpaulin, fitted a sling rope to it with a hoisting block,
pushed the package into a corner of the rocks where the waves could not
reach it, and then clutching the Little Douvre with his hands, and
holding on with his naked feet, he clambered from projection to
projection, and from niche to niche, until he found himself level with
the wrecked vessel high up in the air.

Having reached the height of the paddles, he sprang upon the poop.

The interior of the wreck presented a mournful aspect.

Traces of a great struggle were everywhere visible. There were plainly
to be seen the frightful ravages of the sea and wind. The action of the
tempest resembles the violence of a band of pirates. Nothing is more
like the victim of a criminal outrage than a wrecked ship violated and
stripped by those terrible accomplices, the storm-cloud, the thunder,
the rain, the squall, the waves, and the breakers.

Standing upon the dismantled deck, it was natural to dream of the
presence of something like a furious stamping of the spirits of the
storm. Everywhere around were the marks of their rage. The strange
contortions of certain portions of the ironwork bore testimony to the
terrific force of the winds. The between-decks were like the cell of a
lunatic, in which everything has been broken.

No wild beast can compare with the sea for mangling its prey. The waves
are full of talons. The north wind bites, the billows devour, the waves
are like hungry jaws. The ocean strikes like a lion with its heavy paw,
seizing and dismembering at the same moment.

The ruin conspicuous in the Durande presented the peculiarity of being
detailed and minute. It was a sort of horrible stripping and plucking.
Much of it seemed done with design. The beholder was tempted to exclaim,
"What wanton mischief!" The ripping of the planking was edged here and
there artistically. This peculiarity is common with the ravages of the
cyclone. To chip and tear away is the caprice of the great devastator.
Its ways are like those of the professional torturer. The disasters
which it causes wear a look of ingenious punishments. One might fancy it
actuated by the worst passions of man. It refines in cruelty like a
savage. While it is exterminating it dissects bone by bone. It torments
its victim, avenges itself, and takes delight in its work. It even
appears to descend to petty acts of malice.

Cyclones are rare in our latitudes, and are, for that reason, the more
dangerous, being generally unexpected. A rock in the path of a heavy
wind may become the pivot of a storm. It is probable that the squall had
thus rotated upon the point of the Douvres, and had turned suddenly into
a waterspout on meeting the shock of the rocks, a fact which explained
the casting of the vessel so high among them. When the cyclone blows, a
vessel is of no more weight in the wind than a stone in a sling.

The damage received by the Durande was like the wound of a man cut in
twain. It was a divided trunk from which issued a mass of _débris_ like
the entrails of a body. Various kinds of cordage hung floating and
trembling, chains swung chattering; the fibres and nerves of the vessel
were there naked and exposed. What was not smashed was disjointed.

Fragments of the sheeting resembled currycombs bristling with nails;
everything bore the appearance of ruin; a handspike had become nothing
but a piece of iron; a sounding-lead, nothing but a lump of metal; a
dead-eye had become a mere piece of wood; a halliard, an end of rope; a
strand of cord, a tangled skein; a bolt-rope, a thread in the hem of a
sail. All around was the lamentable work of demolition. Nothing remained
that was not unhooked, unnailed, cracked, wasted, warped, pierced with
holes, destroyed: nothing hung together in the dreadful mass, but all
was torn, dislocated, broken. There was that air of drift which
characterises the scene of all struggles--from the melées of men, which
are called battles, to the melées of the elements, to which we give the
name of chaos. Everything was sinking and dropping away; a rolling mass
of planks, panelling, ironwork, cables, and beams had been arrested just
at the great fracture of the hull, whence the least additional shock
must have precipitated them into the sea. What remained of her powerful
frame, once so triumphant, was cracked here and there, showing through
large apertures the dismal gloom within.

The foam from below spat its flakes contemptuously upon this broken and
forlorn outcast of the sea.

SOUND; BUT NOT SAFE

Gilliatt did not expect to find only a portion of the ship existing.
Nothing in the description, in other respects so precise, of the captain
of the _Shealtiel_ had led him to anticipate this division of the vessel
in the centre. It was probable that the "diabolical crash" heard by the
captain of the _Shealtiel_ marked the moment when this destruction had
taken place under the blows of a tremendous sea. The captain had,
doubtless, worn ship just before this last heavy squall; and what he had
taken for a great sea was probably a waterspout. Later, when he drew
nearer to observe the wreck, he had only been able to see the stern of
the vessel--the remainder, that is to say, the large opening where the
fore-part had given way, having been concealed from him among the masses
of rock.

With that exception, the information given by the captain of the
_Shealtiel_ was strictly correct. The hull was useless, but the engine
remained intact.

Such chances are common in the history of shipwreck. The logic of
disaster at sea is beyond the grasp of human science.

The masts having snapped short, had fallen over the side; the chimney
was not even bent. The great iron plating which supported the machinery
had kept it together, and in one piece. The planks of the paddle-boxes
were disjointed, like the leaves of wooden sunblinds; but through their
apertures the paddles themselves could be seen in good condition. A few
of their floats only were missing.

Besides the machinery, the great stern capstan had resisted the
destruction. Its chain was there, and, thanks to its firm fixture in a
frame of joists, might still be of service, unless the strain of the
voyal should break away the planking. The flooring of the deck bent at
almost every point, and was tottering throughout.

On the other hand, the trunk of the hull, fixed between the Douvres,
held together, as we have already said, and it appeared strong.

There was something like derision in this preservation of the machinery;
something which added to the irony of the misfortune. The sombre malice
of the unseen powers of mischief displays itself sometimes in such
bitter mockeries. The machinery was saved, but its preservation did not
make it any the less lost. The ocean seemed to have kept it only to
demolish it at leisure. It was like the playing of the cat with her
prey.

Its fate was to suffer there and to be dismembered day by day. It was to
be the plaything of the savage amusements of the sea. It was slowly to
dwindle, and, as it were, to melt away. For what could be done? That
this vast block of mechanism and gear, at once massive and delicate,
condemned to fixity by its weight, delivered up in that solitude to the
destructive elements, exposed in the gripe of the rock to the action of
the wind and wave, could, under the frown of that implacable spot,
escape from slow destruction, seemed a madness even to imagine.

The Durande was the captive of the Douvres.

How could she be extricated from that position?

How could she be delivered from her bondage?

The escape of a man is difficult; but what a problem was this--the
escape of a vast and cumbrous machine.

IV

A PRELIMINARY SURVEY

Gilliatt was pressed on all sides by demands upon his labours. The most
pressing, however, was to find a safe mooring for the barge; then a
shelter for himself.

The Durande having settled down more on the larboard than on the
starboard side, the right paddle-box was higher than the left.

Gilliatt ascended the paddle-box on the right. From that position,
although the gut of rocks stretching in abrupt angles behind the Douvres
had several elbows, he was able to study the ground-plan of the group.

This survey was the preliminary step of his operations.

The Douvres, as we have already described them, were like two high
gable-ends, forming the narrow entrance to a straggling alley of small
cliffs with perpendicular faces. It is not rare to find in primitive
submarine formations these singular kinds of passages, which seem cut
out with a hatchet.

This defile was extremely tortuous, and was never without water even in
the low tides. A current, much agitated, traversed it at all times from
end to end. The sharpness of its turnings was favourable or
unfavourable, according to the nature of the prevailing wind; sometimes
it broke the swell and caused it to fall; sometimes it exasperated it.
This latter effect was the most frequent. An obstacle arouses the anger
of the sea, and pushes it to excesses. The foam is the exaggeration of
the waves.

The stormy winds in these narrow and tortuous passages between the rocks
are subjected to a similar compression, and acquire the same malignant
character. The tempest frets in its sudden imprisonment. Its bulk is
still immense, but sharpened and contracted; and it strikes with the
massiveness of a huge club and the keenness of an arrow. It pierces even
while it strikes down. It is a hurricane contracted, like the draught
through the crevice of a door.

The two chains of rocks, leaving between them this kind of street in the
sea, formed stages at a lower level than the Douvres, gradually
decreasing, until they sunk together at a certain distance beneath the
waves.

There was another such gullet of less height than the gullet of the
Douvres, but narrower still, and which formed the eastern entrance of
the defile. It was evident that the double prolongation of the ridge of
rocks continued the kind of street under the water as far as "The Man
Rock," which stood like a square citadel at the extremity of the group.

At low water, indeed, which was the time at which Gilliatt was observing
them, the two rows of sunken rock showed their tips, some high and dry,
and all visible and preserving their parallel without interruption.

"The Man" formed the boundary, and buttressed on the eastern side the
entire mass of the group, which was protected on the opposite side by
the two Douvres.

The whole, from a bird's-eye view, appeared like a winding chaplet of
rocks, having the Douvres at one extremity and "The Man" at the other.

The Douvres, taken together, were merely two gigantic shafts of granite
protruding vertically and almost touching each other, and forming the
crest of one of the mountainous ranges lying beneath the ocean. Those
immense ridges are not only found rising out of the unfathomable deep.
The surf and the squall had broken them up and divided them like the
teeth of a saw. Only the tip of the ridge was visible; this was the
group of rocks. The remainder, which the waves concealed, must have been
enormous. The passage in which the storm had planted the Durande was the
way between these two colossal shafts.

This passage, zigzag in form as the forked lightning, was of about the
same width in all parts. The ocean had so fashioned it. Its eternal
commotion produces sometimes those singular regularities. There is a
sort of geometry in the action of the sea.

From one extremity to the other of the defile, the two parallel granite
walls confronted each other at a distance which the midship frame of the
Durande measured exactly. Between the two Douvres, the widening of the
Little Douvre, curved and turned back as it was, had formed a space for
the paddles. In any other part they must have been shattered to
fragments.

The high double façade of rock within the passage was hideous to the
sight. When, in the exploration of the desert of water which we call the
ocean, we come upon the unknown world of the sea, all is uncouth and
shapeless. So much as Gilliatt could see of the defile from the height
of the wreck, was appalling. In the rocky gorges of the ocean we may
often trace a strange permanent impersonation of shipwreck. The defile
of the Douvres was one of these gorges, and its effect was exciting to
the imagination. The oxydes of the rock showed on the escarpment here
and there in red places, like marks of clotted blood; it resembled the
splashes on the walls of an abattoir. Associations of the charnel-house
haunted the place. The rough marine stones, diversely tinted--here by
the decomposition of metallic amalgams mingling with the rock, there by
the mould of dampness, manifested in places by purple scales, hideous
green blotches, and ruddy splashes, awakened ideas of murder and
extermination. It was like the unwashed walls of a chamber which had
been the scene of an assassination; or it might have been imagined that
men had been crushed to death there, leaving traces of their fate. The
peaked rocks produced an indescribable impression of accumulated
agonies. Certain spots appeared to be still dripping with the carnage;
here the wall was wet, and it looked impossible to touch it without
leaving the fingers bloody. The blight of massacre seemed everywhere. At
the base of the double parallel escarpment, scattered along the water's
edge, or just below the waves, or in the worn hollows of the rocks, were
monstrous rounded masses of shingle, some scarlet, others black or
purple, which bore a strange resemblance to internal organs of the body;
they might have been taken for human lungs, or heart, or liver,
scattered and putrefying in that dismal place. Giants might have been
disembowelled there. From top to bottom of the granite ran long red
lines, which might have been compared to oozings from a funeral bier.

Such aspects are frequent in sea caverns.

V

A WORD UPON THE SECRET CO-OPERATIONS OF THE ELEMENTS

Those who, by the disastrous chances of sea-voyages, happen to be
condemned to a temporary habitation upon a rock in mid-ocean, find that
the form of their inhospitable refuge is by no means a matter of
indifference. There is the pyramidal-shaped rock, a single peak rising
from the water; there is the circle rock somewhat resembling a round of
great stones; and there is the corridor-rock. The latter is the most
alarming of all. It is not only the ceaseless agony of the waves
between its walls, or the tumult of the imprisoned sea; there are also
certain obscure meteorological characteristics which appear to appertain
to this parallelism of two marine rocks. The two straight sides seem a
veritable electric battery.

The first result of the peculiar position of these corridor-rocks is an
action upon the air and the water. The corridor-rock acts upon the waves
and the wind mechanically by its form; galvanically, by the different
magnetic action rendered possible by its vertical height, its masses in
juxtaposition and contrary to each other.

This form of rock attracts to itself all the forces scattered in the
winds, and exercises over the tempest a singular power of concentration.

Hence there is in the neighbourhood of these breakers a certain
accentuation of storms.

It must be borne in mind that the wind is composite. The wind is
believed to be simple; but it is by no means simple. Its power is not
merely dynamic, it is chemical also; but this is not all, it is
magnetic. Its effects are often inexplicable. The wind is as much
electrical as aerial. Certain winds coincide with the _aurores
boreales_. The wind blowing from the bank of the Aiguilles rolls the
waves one hundred feet high; a fact observed with astonishment by
Dumont-d'Urville. The corvette, he says, "knew not what to obey."

In the south seas the waters will sometimes become inflated like an
outbreak of immense tumours; and at such times the ocean becomes so
terrible that the savages fly to escape the sight of it. The blasts in
the north seas are different. They are mingled with sharp points of ice;
and their gusts, unfit to breathe, will blow the sledges of the
Esquimaux backwards in the snow. Other winds burn. The simoon of Africa
is the typhoon of China and the samiel of India. Simoon, typhoon, and
samiel, are believed to be the names of demons. They descend from the
heights of the mountains. A storm vitrified the volcano of Toluca. This
hot wind, a whirlwind of inky colour, rushing upon red clouds, is
alluded to in the Vedas: "Behold the black god, who comes to steal the
red cows." In all these facts we trace the presence of the electric
mystery.

The wind indeed is full of it; so are the waves. The sea, too, is
composite in its nature. Under its waves of water which we see, it has
its waves of force which are invisible. Its constituents are
innumerable. Of all the elements the ocean is the most indivisible and
the most profound.

Endeavour to conceive this chaos so enormous that it dwarfs all other
things to one level. It is the universal recipient, reservoir of germs
of life, and mould of transformations. It amasses and then disperses, it
accumulates and then sows, it devours and then creates. It receives all
the waste and refuse waters of the earth, and converts them into
treasure. It is solid in the iceberg, liquid in the wave, fluid in the
estuary. Regarded as matter, it is a mass; regarded as a force, it is an
abstraction. It equalises and unites all phenomena. It may be called the
infinite in combination. By force and disturbance, it arrives at
transparency. It dissolves all differences, and absorbs them into its
own unity. Its elements are so numerous that it becomes identity. One of
its drops is complete, and represents the whole. From the abundance of
its tempests, it attains equilibrium. Plato beheld the mazy dances of
the spheres. Strange fact, though not the less real, the ocean, in the
vast terrestrial journey round the sun, becomes, with its flux and
reflux, the balance of the globe.

In a phenomenon of the sea, all other phenomena are resumed. The sea is
blown out of a waterspout as from a syphon; the storm observes the
principle of the pump; the lightning issues from the sea as from the
air. Aboard ships dull shocks are sometimes felt, and an odour of
sulphur issues from the receptacles of chain cables. The ocean boils.
"The devil has put the sea in his cauldron," said De Ruyter. In certain
tempests, which characterise the equinoxes and the return to equilibrium
of the prolific power of nature, vessels breasting the foam seem to give
out a kind of fire, phosphoric lights chase each other along the
rigging, so close sometimes to the sailors at their work that the latter
stretch forth their hands and try to catch, as they fly, these birds of
flame. After the great earthquake of Lisbon, a blast of hot air, as from
a furnace, drove before it towards the city a wave sixty feet high. The
oscillation of the ocean is closely related to the convulsions of the
earth.

These immeasurable forces produce sometimes extraordinary inundations.
At the end of the year 1864, one of the Maldive Islands, at a hundred
leagues from the Malabar coast, actually foundered in the sea. It sunk
to the bottom like a shipwrecked vessel. The fishermen who sailed from
it in the morning, found nothing when they returned at night; scarcely
could they distinguish their villages under the sea. On this occasion
boats were the spectators of the wrecks of houses.

In Europe, where nature seems restrained by the presence of
civilisation, such events are rare and are thought impossible.
Nevertheless, Jersey and Guernsey originally formed part of Gaul, and at
the moment while we are writing these lines, an equinoctial gale has
demolished a great portion of the cliff of the Firth of Forth in
Scotland.

Nowhere do these terrific forces appear more formidably conjoined than
in the surprising strait known as the Lyse-Fiord. The Lyse-Fiord is the
most terrible of all the gut rocks of the ocean. Their terrors are there
complete. It is in the northern sea, near the inhospitable Gulf of
Stavanger, and in the 59th degree of latitude. The water is black and
heavy, and subject to intermitting storms. In this sea, and in the midst
of this solitude, rises a great sombre street--a street for no human
footsteps. None ever pass through there; no ship ever ventures in. It is
a corridor ten leagues in length, between two rocky walls of three
thousand feet in height. Such is the passage which presents an entrance
to the sea. The defile has its elbows and angles like all these streets
of the sea--never straight, having been formed by the irregular action
of the water. In the Lyse-Fiord, the sea is almost always tranquil; the
sky above is serene; the place terrible. Where is the wind? Not on high.
Where is the thunder? Not in the heavens. The wind is under the sea; the
lightnings within the rock. Now and then there is a convulsion of the
water. At certain moments, when there is perhaps not a cloud in the sky,
nearly half way up the perpendicular rock, at a thousand or fifteen
hundred feet above the water, and rather on the southern than on the
northern side, the rock suddenly thunders, lightnings dart forth, and
then retire like those toys which lengthen out and spring back again in
the hands of children. They contract and enlarge; strike the opposite
cliff, re-enter the rock, issue forth again, recommence their play,
multiply their heads and tips of flame, grow bristling with points,
strike wherever they can, recommence again, and then are extinguished
with a sinister abruptness. Flocks of birds fly wide in terror. Nothing
is more mysterious than that artillery issuing out of the invisible. One
cliff attacks the other, raining lightning blows from side to side.
Their war concerns not man. It signals the ancient enmity of two rocks
in the impassable gulf.

In the Lyse-Fiord, the wind whirls like the water in an estuary; the
rock performs the function of the clouds; and the thunder breaks forth
like volcanic fire. This strange defile is a voltaic pile; the plates of
which are the double line of cliffs.

VI

A STABLE FOR THE HORSE

Gilliatt was sufficiently familiar with marine rocks to grapple in
earnest with the Douvres. Before all, as we have just said, it was
necessary to find a safe shelter for the barge.

The double row of reefs, which stretched in a sinuous form behind the
Douvres, connected itself here and there with other rocks, and suggested
the existence of blind passages and hollows opening out into the
straggling way, and joining again to the principal defile like branches
to a trunk.

The lower part of these rocks was covered with kelp, the upper part with
lichens. The uniform level of the seaweed marked the line of the water
at the height of the tide, and the limit of the sea in calm weather. The
points which the water had not touched presented those silver and golden
hues communicated to marine granite by the white and yellow lichen.

A crust of conoidical shells covered the rock at certain points, the dry
rot of the granite.

At other points in the retreating angles, where fine sand had
accumulated, ribbed on its surface rather by the wind than by the waves,
appeared tufts of blue thistles.

In the indentations, sheltered from the winds, could be traced the
little perforations made by the sea-urchin. This shelly mass of
prickles, which moves about a living ball, by rolling on its spines, and
the armour of which is composed of ten thousand pieces, artistically
adjusted and welded together--the sea-urchin, which is popularly called,
for some unknown reason, "Aristotle's lantern," wears away the granite
with his five teeth, and lodges himself in the hole. It is in such holes
that the samphire gatherers find them. They cut them in halves and eat
them raw, like an oyster. Some steep their bread in the soft flesh.
Hence its other name, "Sea-egg."

The tips of the further reefs, left out of the water by the receding
tide, extended close under the escarpment of "The Man" to a sort of
creek, enclosed nearly on all sides by rocky walls. Here was evidently a
possible harbourage. It had the form of a horse-shoe, and opened only on
one side to the east wind, which is the least violent of all winds in
that sea labyrinth. The water was shut in there, and almost motionless.
The shelter seemed comparatively safe. Gilliatt, moreover, had not much
choice.

If he wished to take advantage of the low water, it was important to
make haste.

The weather continued to be fine and calm. The insolent sea was for a
while in a gentle mood.

Gilliatt descended, put on his shoes again, unmoored the cable,
re-embarked, and pushed out into the water. He used the oars, coasting
the side of the rock.

Having reached "The Man Rock," he examined the entrance to the little
creek.

A fixed, wavy line in the motionless sea, a sort of wrinkle,
imperceptible to any eye but that of a sailor, marked the channel.

Gilliatt studied for a moment its lineament, almost indistinct under the
water; then he held off a little in order to veer at ease, and steer
well into channel; and suddenly with a stroke of the oars he entered the
little bay.

He sounded.

The anchorage appeared to be excellent.

The sloop would be protected there against almost any of the
contingencies of the season.

The most formidable reefs have quiet nooks of this sort. The ports which
are thus found among the breakers are like the hospitality of the fierce
Bedouin--friendly and sure.

Gilliatt placed the sloop as near as he could to "The Man," but still
far enough to escape grazing the rock; and he cast his two anchors.

That done, he crossed his arms, and reflected on his position.

The sloop was sheltered. Here was one problem solved. But another
remained. Where could he now shelter himself?

He had the choice of two places: the sloop itself, with its corner of
cabin, which was scarcely habitable, and the summit of "The Man Rock,"
which was not difficult to scale.

From one or other of these refuges it was possible at low water, by
jumping from rock to rock, to gain the passage between the Douvres where
the Durande was fixed, almost without wetting the feet.

But low water lasts but a short while, and all the rest of the time he
would be cut off either from his shelter or from the wreck by more than
two hundred fathoms. Swimming among breakers is difficult at all times;
if there is the least commotion in the sea it is impossible.

He was driven to give up the idea of shelter in the sloop or on "The
Man."

No resting-place was possible among the neighbouring rocks.

The summits of the lower ones disappeared twice a day beneath the rising
tide.

The summits of the higher ones were constantly swept by the flakes of
foam, and promised nothing but an inhospitable drenching.

No choice remained but the wreck itself.

Was it possible to seek refuge there?

Gilliatt hoped it might be.

VII

A CHAMBER FOR THE VOYAGER

Half-an-hour afterwards, Gilliatt having returned to the wreck, climbed
to the deck, went below, and descended into the hold, completing the
summary survey of his first visit.

By the help of the capstan he had raised to the deck of the Durande the
package which he had made of the lading of the sloop. The capstan had
worked well. Bars for turning it were not wanting. Gilliatt had only to
take his choice among the heap of wreck.

He found among the fragments a chisel, dropped, no doubt, from the
carpenter's box, and which he added to his little stock of tools.

Besides this--for in poverty of appliances so complete everything counts
for a little--he had his jack-knife in his pocket.

Gilliatt worked the whole day long on the wreck, clearing away,
propping, arranging.

At nightfall he observed the following facts:

The entire wreck shook in the wind. The carcass trembled at every step
he took. There was nothing stable or strong except the portion of the
hull jammed between the rocks which contained the engine. There the
beams were powerfully supported by the granite walls.

Fixing his home in the Durande would be imprudent. It would increase the
weight; but far from adding to her burden, it was important to lighten
it. To burden the wreck in any way was indeed the very contrary of what
he wanted.

The mass of ruin required, in fact, the most careful management. It was
like a sick man at the approach of dissolution. The wind would do
sufficient to help it to its end.

It was, moreover, unfortunate enough to be compelled to work there. The
amount of disturbance which the wreck would have to withstand would
necessarily distress it, perhaps beyond its strength.

Besides, if any accident should happen in the night while Gilliatt was
sleeping, he must necessarily perish with the vessel. No assistance was
possible; all would be over. In order to help the shattered vessel, it
was absolutely necessary to remain outside it.

How to be outside and yet near it, this was the problem.

The difficulty became more complicated as he considered it.

Where could he find a shelter under such conditions?

Gilliatt reflected.

There remained nothing but the two Douvres. They seemed hopeless enough.

From below, it was possible to distinguish upon the upper plateau of the
Great Douvre a sort of protuberance.

High rocks with flattened summits, like the Great Douvre and "The Man,"
are a sort of decapitated peaks. They abound among the mountains and in
the ocean. Certain rocks, particularly those which are met with in the
open sea, bear marks like half-felled trees. They have the appearance of
having received blows from a hatchet. They have been subjected, in fact,
to the blows of the gale, that indefatigable pioneer of the sea.

There are other still more profound causes of marine convulsions. Hence
the innumerable bruises upon these primeval masses of granite. Some of
these sea giants have their heads struck off.

Sometimes these heads, from some inexplicable cause, do not fall, but
remain shattered on the summit of the mutilated trunk. This singularity
is by no means rare. The Devil's Rock, at Guernsey, and the Table, in
the Valley of Anweiler, illustrate some of the most surprising features
of this strange geological enigma.

Some such phenomena had probably fashioned the summit of the Great
Douvre.

If the protuberance which could be observed on the plateau were not a
natural irregularity in the stone, it must necessarily be some remaining
fragment of the shattered summit.

Perhaps the fragment might contain some excavation--some hole into which
a man could creep for cover. Gilliatt asked for no more.

But how could he reach the plateau? How could he scale that
perpendicular wall, hard and polished as a pebble, half covered with
the growth of glutinous confervæ, and having the slippery look of a
soapy surface?

The ridge of the plateau was at least thirty feet above the deck of the
Durande.

Gilliatt took out of his box of tools the knotted cord, hooked it to his
belt by the grapnel, and set to work to scale the Little Douvre. The
ascent became more difficult as he climbed. He had forgotten to take off
his shoes, a fact which increased the difficulty. With great labour and
straining, however, he reached the point. Safely arrived there, he
raised himself and stood erect. There was scarcely room for his two
feet. To make it his lodging would be difficult. A Stylite might have
contented himself there; Gilliatt, more luxurious in his requirements,
wanted something more commodious.

The Little Douvre, leaning towards the great one, looked from a distance
as if it was saluting it, and the space between the Douvres, which was
some score of feet below, was only eight or ten at the highest points.

From the spot to which he had climbed, Gilliatt saw more distinctly the
rocky excrescence which partly covered the plateau of the Great Douvre.

This plateau rose three fathoms at least above his head.

A precipice separated him from it. The curved escarpment of the Little
Douvre sloped away out of sight beneath him.

He detached the knotted rope from his belt, took a rapid glance at the
dimensions of the rock, and slung the grapnel up to the plateau.

The grapnel scratched the rock, and slipped. The knotted rope with the
hooks at its end fell down beneath his feet, swinging against the side
of the little Douvre.

He renewed the attempt; slung the rope further, aiming at the granite
protuberance, in which he could perceive crevices and scratches.

The cast was, this time, so neat and skilful, that the hooks caught.

He pulled from below. A portion of the rock broke away, and the knotted
rope with its heavy iron came down once more, striking the escarpment
beneath his feet.

He slung the grapnel a third time.

It did not fall.

He put a strain upon the rope; it resisted. The grapnel was firmly
anchored.

The hooks had caught in some fracture of the plateau which he could not
see.

It was necessary to trust his life to that unknown support.

He did not hesitate.

The matter was urgent. He was compelled to take the shortest route.

Moreover, to descend again to the deck of the Durande, in order to
devise some other step, was impossible. A slip was probable, and a fall
almost certain. It was easier to climb than to descend.

Gilliatt's movements were decisive, as are those of all good sailors. He
never wasted force. He always proportioned his efforts to the work in
hand. Hence the prodigies of strength which he executed with ordinary
muscles. His biceps were no more powerful than that of ordinary men; but
his heart was firmer. He added, in fact, to strength which is physical,
energy which belongs to the moral faculties.

The feat to be accomplished was appalling.

It was to cross the space between the two Douvres, hanging only by this
slender line.

Oftentimes in the path of duty and devotedness, the figure of death
rises before men to present these terrible questions:

Wilt thou do this? asks the shadow.

Gilliatt tested the cord again; the grappling-iron held firm.

Wrapping his left hand in his handkerchief, he grasped the knotted cord
with his right hand, which he covered with his left; then stretching out
one foot, and striking out sharply with the other against the rock, in
order that the impetus might prevent the rope twisting, he precipitated
himself from the height of the Little Douvre on to the escarpment of the
great one.

The shock was severe.

There was a rebound.

His clenched fists struck the rocks in their turn; the handkerchief had
loosened, and they were scratched; they had indeed narrowly escaped
being crushed.

Gilliatt remained hanging there a moment dizzy.

He was sufficiently master of himself not to let go his hold of the
cord.

A few moments passed in jerks and oscillations before he could catch the
cord with his feet; but he succeeded at last.

Recovering himself, and holding the cord at last between his naked feet
as with two hands, he gazed into the depth below.

He had no anxiety about the length of the cord, which had many a time
served him for great heights. The cord, in fact, trailed upon the deck
of the Durande.

Assured of being able to descend again, he began to climb hand over
hand, and still clinging with his feet.

In a few moments he had gained the summit.

Never before had any creature without wings found a footing there. The
plateau was covered in parts with the dung of birds. It was an irregular
trapezium, a mass struck off from the colossal granitic prism of the
Great Douvre. This block was hollowed in the centre like a basin--a work
of the rain.

Gilliatt, in fact, had guessed correctly.

At the southern angle of the block, he found a mass of superimposed
rocks, probably fragments of the fallen summit. These rocks, looking
like a heap of giant paving-stones, would have left room for a wild
beast, if one could have found its way there, to secrete himself between
them. They supported themselves confusedly one against the other,
leaving interstices like a heap of ruins. They formed neither grottoes
nor caves, but the pile was full of holes like a sponge. One of these
holes was large enough to admit a man.

This recess had a flooring of moss and a few tufts of grass. Gilliatt
could fit himself in it as in a kind of sheath. The recess at its
entrance was about two feet high. It contracted towards the bottom.
Stone coffins sometimes have this form. The mass of rocks behind lying
towards the south-west, the recess was sheltered from the showers, but
was open to the cold north wind.

Gilliatt was satisfied with the place.

The two chief problems were solved; the sloop had a harbour, and he had
found a shelter.

The chief merit of his cave was its accessibility from the wreck.

The grappling-iron of the knotted cord having fallen between two blocks,
had become firmly hooked, but Gilliatt rendered it more difficult to
give way by rolling a huge stone upon it.

He was now free to operate at leisure upon the Durande.

Henceforth he was at home.

The Great Douvre was his dwelling; the Durande was his workshop.

Nothing was more simple for him than going to and fro, ascending and
descending.

He dropped down easily by the knotted cord on to the deck.

The day's work was a good one, the enterprise had begun well; he was
satisfied, and began to feel hungry.

He untied his basket of provisions, opened his knife, cut a slice of
smoked beef, took a bite out of his brown loaf, drank a draught from his
can of fresh water, and supped admirably.

To do well and eat well are two satisfactions. A full stomach resembles
an easy conscience.

This supper was ended, and there was still before him a little more
daylight. He took advantage of it to begin the lightening of the
wreck--an urgent necessity.

He had passed part of the day in gathering up the fragments. He put on
one side, in the strong compartment which contained the machine, all
that might become of use to him, such as wood, iron, cordage, and
canvas. What was useless he cast into the sea.

The cargo of the sloop hoisted on to the deck by the capstan, compact as
he had made it, was an encumbrance. Gilliatt surveyed the species of
niche, at a height within his reach, in the side of the Little Douvre.
These natural closets, not shut in, it is true, are often seen in the
rocks. It struck him that it was possible to trust some stores to this
depôt, and he accordingly placed in the back of the recess his two boxes
containing his tools and his clothing, and his two bags holding the
rye-meal and the biscuit. In the front--a little too near the edge
perhaps, but he had no other place--he rested his basket of provisions.

He had taken care to remove from the box of clothing his sheepskin, his
loose coat with a hood, and his waterproof overalls.

To lessen the hold of the wind upon the knotted cord, he made the lower
extremity fast to one of the riders of the Durande.

The Durande being much driven in, this rider was bent a good deal, and
it held the end of the cord as firmly as a tight hand.

There was still the difficulty of the upper end of the cord. To control
the lower part was well, but at the summit of the escarpment at the spot
where the knotted cord met the ridge of the plateau, there was reason to
fear that it would be fretted and worn away by the sharp angle of the
rock.

Gilliatt searched in the heap of rubbish in reserve, and took from it
some rags of sail-cloth, and from a bunch of old cables he pulled out
some strands of rope-yarn with which he filled his pockets.

A sailor would have guessed that he intended to bind with these pieces
of sail-cloth and ends of yarn the part of the knotted rope upon the
edge of the rock, so as to preserve it from all friction--an operation
which is called "keckling."

Having provided himself with these things, he drew on his overalls over
his legs, put on his waterproof coat over his jacket, drew its hood over
his red cap, hung the sheepskin round his neck by the two legs, and
clothed in this complete panoply, he grasped the cord, now firmly fixed
to the side of the Great Douvre, and mounted to the assault of that
sombre citadel in the sea.

In spite of his scratched hands, Gilliatt easily regained the summit.

The last pale tints of sunset were fading in the sky. It was night upon
the sea below. A little light still lingered upon the height of the
Douvre.

Gilliatt took advantage of this remains of daylight to bind the knotted
rope. He wound it round again and again at the part which passed over
the edge of the rock, with a bandage of several thicknesses of canvas
strongly tied at every turn. The whole resembled in some degree the
padding which actresses place upon their knees, to prepare them for the
agonies and supplications of the fifth act.

This binding completely accomplished, Gilliatt rose from his stooping
position.

For some moments, while he had been busied in his task, he had had a
confused sense of a singular fluttering in the air.

It resembled, in the silence of the evening, the noise which an immense
bat might make with the beating of its wings.

Gilliatt raised his eyes.

A great black circle was revolving over his head in the pale twilight
sky.

Such circles are seen in pictures round the heads of saints. These,
however, are golden on a dark ground, while the circle around Gilliatt
was dark upon a pale ground. The effect was strange. It spread round the
Great Douvre like the aureole of night.

The circle drew nearer, then retired; grew narrower, and then spread
wide again.

It was an immense flight of gulls, seamews, and cormorants; a vast
multitude of affrighted sea birds.

The Great Douvre was probably their lodging, and they were coming to
rest for the night. Gilliatt had taken a chamber in their home. It was
evident that their unexpected fellow-lodger disturbed them.

A man there was an object they had never beheld before.

Their wild flutter continued for some time.

They seemed to be waiting for the stranger to leave the place.

Gilliatt followed them dreamily with his eyes.

The flying multitude seemed at last to give up their design. The circle
suddenly took a spiral form, and the cloud of sea birds came down upon
"The Man Rock" at the extremity of the group, where they seemed to be
conferring and deliberating.

Gilliatt, after settling down in his alcove of granite, and covering a
stone for a pillow for his head, could hear the birds for a long time
chattering one after the other, or croaking, as if in turns.

Then they were silent, and all were sleeping--the birds upon their rock,
Gilliatt upon his.

VIII

IMPORTUNÆQUE VOLUCRES

Gilliatt slept well; but he was cold, and this awoke him from time to
time. He had naturally placed his feet at the bottom, and his head at
the entrance to his cave. He had not taken the precaution to remove from
his couch a number of angular stones, which did not by any means conduce
to sleep.

Now and then he half-opened his eyes.

At intervals he heard loud noises. It was the rising tide entering the
caverns of the rocks with a sound like the report of a cannon.

All the circumstances of his position conspired to produce the effect of
a vision. Hallucinations seemed to surround him. The vagueness of night
increased this effect; and Gilliatt felt himself plunged into some
region of unrealities. He asked himself if all were not a dream?

Then he dropped to sleep again; and this time, in a veritable dream,
found himself at the Bû de la Rue, at the Bravées, at St. Sampson. He
heard Déruchette singing; he was among realities. While he slept he
seemed to wake and live; when he awoke again he appeared to be sleeping.

In truth, from this time forward he lived in a dream.

Towards the middle of the night a confused murmur filled the air.
Gilliatt had a vague consciousness of it even in his sleep. It was
perhaps a breeze arising.

Once, when awakened by a cold shiver, he opened his eyes a little wider
than before. Clouds were moving in the zenith; the moon was flying
through the sky, with one large star following closely in her footsteps.

Gilliatt's mind was full of the incidents of his dreams. The wild
outlines of things in the darkness were exaggerated by this confusion
with the impressions of his sleeping hours.

At daybreak he was half-frozen; but he slept soundly.

The sudden daylight aroused him from a slumber which might have been
dangerous. The alcove faced the rising sun.

Gilliatt yawned, stretched himself, and sprang out of his sleeping
place.

His sleep had been so deep that he could not at first recall the
circumstances of the night before.

By degrees the feeling of reality returned, and he began to think of
breakfast.

The weather was calm; the sky cool and serene. The clouds were gone; the
night wind had cleared the horizon, and the sun rose brightly. Another
fine day was commencing. Gilliatt felt joyful.

He threw off his overcoat and his leggings; rolled them up in the
sheepskin with the wool inside, fastened the roll with a length of
rope-yarn, and pushed it into the cavern for a shelter in case of rain.

This done, he made his bed--an operation which consisted in removing the
stones which had annoyed him in the night.

His bed made, he slid down the cord on to the deck of the Durande, and
approached the niche where he had placed his basket of provisions. As it
was very near the edge, the wind in the night had swept it down, and
rolled it into the sea.

It was evident that it would not be easy to recover it. There was a
spirit of mischief and malice in a wind which had sought out his basket
in that position.

It was the commencement of hostilities. Gilliatt understood the token.

To those who live in a state of rude familiarity with the sea, it
becomes natural to regard the wind as an individuality, and the rocks as
sentient beings.

Nothing remained but the biscuit and the rye-meal, except the
shell-fish, on which the shipwrecked sailor had supported a lingering
existence upon "The Man Rock."

It was useless to think of subsisting by net or line fishing. Fish are
naturally averse to the neighbourhood of rocks. The drag and bow net
fishers would waste their labour among the breakers, the points of which
would be destructive only to their nets.

Gilliatt breakfasted on a few limpets which he plucked with difficulty
from the rocks. He narrowly escaped breaking his knife in the attempt.

While he was making his spare meal, he was sensible of a strange
disturbance on the sea. He looked around.

It was a swarm of gulls and seamews which had just alighted upon some
low rocks, and were beating their wings, tumbling over each other,
screaming, and shrieking. All were swarming noisily upon the same point.
This horde with beaks and talons were evidently pillaging something.

It was Gilliatt's basket.

Rolled down upon a sharp point by the wind, the basket had burst open.
The birds had gathered round immediately. They were carrying off in
their beaks all sorts of fragments of provisions. Gilliatt recognised
from the distance his smoked beef and his salted fish.

It was their turn now to be aggressive. The birds had taken to
reprisals. Gilliatt had robbed them of their lodging, they deprived him
of his supper.

IX

THE ROCK, AND HOW GILLIATT USED IT

A week passed.

Although it was in the rainy season no rain fell, a fact for which
Gilliatt felt thankful. But the work he had entered upon surpassed, in
appearance at least, the power of human hand or skill. Success appeared
so improbable that the attempt seemed like madness.

It is not until a task is fairly grappled with that its difficulties and
perils become fully manifest. There is nothing like making a
commencement for making evident how difficult it will be to come to the
end. Every beginning is a struggle against resistance. The first step is
an exorable undeceiver. A difficulty which we come to touch pricks like
a thorn.

Gilliatt found himself immediately in the presence of obstacles.

In order to raise the engine of the Durande from the wreck in which it
was three-fourths buried, with any chance of success--in order to
accomplish a salvage in such a place and in such a season, it seemed
almost necessary to be a legion of men. Gilliatt was alone; a complete
apparatus of carpenters' and engineers' tools and implements were
wanted. Gilliatt had a saw, a hatchet, a chisel, and a hammer. He wanted
both a good workshop and a good shed; Gilliatt had not a roof to cover
him. Provisions, too, were necessary, but he had not even bread.

Any one who could have seen Gilliatt working on the rock during all that
first work might have been puzzled to determine the nature of his
operations. He seemed to be no longer thinking either of the Durande or
the two Douvres. He was busy only among the breakers: he seemed absorbed
in saving the smaller parts of the shipwreck. He took advantage of every
high tide to strip the reefs of everything which the shipwreck had
distributed among them. He went from rock to rock, picking up whatever
the sea had scattered--tatters of sail-cloth, pieces of iron, splinters
of panels, shattered planking, broken yards--here a beam, there a chain,
there a pulley.

At the same time he carefully surveyed all the recesses of the rocks. To
his great disappointment none were habitable. He had suffered from the
cold in the night, where he lodged between the stones on the summit of
the rock, and he would gladly have found some better refuge.

Two of those recesses were somewhat extensive. Although the natural
pavement of rock was almost everywhere oblique and uneven it was
possible to stand upright, and even to walk within them. The wind and
the rain wandered there at will, but the highest tides did not reach
them. They were near the Little Douvre, and were approachable at any
time. Gilliatt decided that one should serve him as a storehouse, the
other as a forge.

With all the sail, rope-bands, and all the reef-earrings he could
collect, he made packages of the fragments of wreck, tying up the wood
and iron in bundles, and the canvas in parcels. He lashed all these
together carefully. As the rising tide approached these packages, he
began to drag them across the reefs to his storehouse. In the hollow of
the rocks he had found a top rope, by means of which he had been able to
haul even the large pieces of timber. In the same manner he dragged from
the sea the numerous portions of chains which he found scattered among
the breakers.

Gilliatt worked at these tasks with astonishing activity and tenacity.
He accomplished whatever he attempted--nothing could withstand his
ant-like perseverance.

At the end of the week he had gathered into this granite warehouse of
marine stores, and ranged into order, all this miscellaneous and
shapeless mass of salvage. There was a corner for the tacks of sails and
a corner for sheets. Bow-lines were not mixed with halliards; parrels
were arranged according to their number of holes. The coverings of
rope-yarn, unwound from the broken anchorings, were tied in bunches; the
dead-eyes without pulleys were separated from the tackle-blocks.
Belaying-pins, bullseyes, preventer-shrouds, down-hauls, snatch-blocks,
pendents, kevels, trusses, stoppers, sailbooms, if they were not
completely damaged by the storm, occupied different compartments. All
the cross-beams, timber-work, uprights, stanchions, mast-heads,
binding-strakes, portlids, and clamps, were heaped up apart. Wherever it
was possible, he had fixed the fragments of planks, from the vessel's
bottom, one in the other. There was no confusion between reef-points and
nippers of the cable, nor of crow's-feet with towlines; nor of pulleys
of the small with pulleys of the large ropes; nor of fragments from the
waist with fragments from the stern. A place had been reserved for a
portion of the cat-harpings of the Durande, which had supported the
shrouds of the topmast and the futtock-shrouds. Every portion had its
place. The entire wreck was there classed and ticketed. It was a sort of
chaos in a storehouse.

A stay-sail, fixed by huge stones, served, though torn and damaged, to
protect what the rain might have injured.

Shattered as were the bows of the wreck, he had succeeded in saving the
two cat-heads with their three pulley-blocks.

He had found the bowsprit too, and had had much trouble in unrolling its
gammoning; it was very hard and tight, having been, according to custom,
made by the help of the windlass, and in dry weather. Gilliatt, however,
persevered until he had detached it, this thick rope promising to be
very useful to him.

He had been equally successful in discovering the little anchor which
had become fast in the hollow of a reef, where the receding tide had
left it uncovered.

In what had been Tangrouille's cabin he had found a piece of chalk,
which he preserved carefully. He reflected that he might have some marks
to make.

A fire-bucket and several pails in pretty good condition completed this
stock of working materials.

All that remained of the store of coal of the Durande he carried into
the warehouse.

In a week this salvage of débris was finished; the rock was swept clean,
and the Durande was lightened. Nothing remained now to burden the hull
except the machinery.

The portion of the fore-side bulwarks which hung to it did not distress
the hull. The mass hung without dragging, being partly sustained by a
ledge of rock. It was, however, large and broad, and heavy to drag, and
would have encumbered his warehouse too much. This bulwarking looked
something like a boat-builder's stocks. Gilliatt left it where it was.

He had been profoundly thoughtful during all this labour. He had sought
in vain for the figure-head--the "doll," as the Guernsey folks called
it, of the Durande. It was one of the things which the waves had carried
away for ever. Gilliatt would have given his hands to find it--if he had
not had such peculiar need of them at that time.

At the entrance to the storehouse and outside were two heaps of
refuse--a heap of iron good for forging, and a heap of wood good for
burning.

Gilliatt was always at work at early dawn. Except his time of sleep, he
did not take a moment of repose.

The wild sea birds, flying hither and thither, watched him at his work.

X

THE FORGE

The warehouse completed, Gilliatt constructed his forge.

The other recess which he had chosen had within it a species of passage
like a gallery in a mine of pretty good depth. He had had at first an
idea of making this his lodging, but the draught was so continuous and
so persevering in this passage that he had been compelled to give it up.
This current of air, incessantly renewed, first gave him the notion of
the forge. Since it could not be his chamber, he was determined that
this cabin should be his smithy. To bend obstacles to our purposes is a
great step towards triumph. The wind was Gilliatt's enemy. He had set
about making it his servant.

The proverb applied to certain kinds of men--"Fit for everything, good
for nothing"--may also be applied to the hollows of rocks. They give no
advantages gratuitously. On one side we find a hollow fashioned
conveniently in the shape of a bath; but it allows the water to run away
through a fissure. Here is a rocky chamber, but without a roof; here a
bed of moss, but oozy with wet; here an arm-chair, but one of hard
stone.

The forge which Gilliatt intended was roughly sketched out by nature;
but nothing could be more troublesome than to reduce this rough sketch
to manageable shape, to transform this cavern into a laboratory and
smith's shop. With three or four large rocks, shaped like a funnel, and
ending in a narrow fissure, chance had constructed there a species of
vast ill-shapen blower, of very different power to those huge old forge
bellows of fourteen feet long, which poured out at every breath
ninety-eight thousand inches of air. This was quite a different sort of
construction. The proportions of the hurricane cannot be definitely
measured.

This excess of force was an embarrassment. The incessant draught was
difficult to regulate.

The cavern had two inconveniences; the wind traversed it from end to
end; so did the water.

This was not the water of the sea, but a continual little trickling
stream, more like a spring than a torrent.

The foam, cast incessantly by the surf upon the rocks and sometimes more
than a hundred feet in the air, had filled with sea water a natural cave
situated among the high rocks overlooking the excavation. The
overflowings of this reservoir caused, a little behind the escarpment, a
fall of water of about an inch in breadth, and descending four or five
fathoms. An occasional contribution from the rains also helped to fill
the reservoir. From time to time a passing cloud dropped a shower into
the rocky basin, always overflowing. The water was brackish, and unfit
to drink, but clear. This rill of water fell in graceful drops from the
extremities of the long marine grasses, as from the ends of a length of
hair.

He was struck with the idea of making this water serve to regulate the
draught in the cave. By the means of a funnel made of planks roughly and
hastily put together to form two or three pipes, one of which was fitted
with a valve, and of a large tub arranged as a lower reservoir, without
checks or counterweight, and completed solely by air-tight stuffing
above and air-holes below, Gilliatt, who, as we have already said, was
handy at the forge and at the mechanic's bench, succeeded in
constructing, instead of the forge-bellows, which he did not possess, an
apparatus less perfect than what is known now-a-days by the name of a
"cagniardelle," but less rude than what the people of the Pyrenees
anciently called a "trompe."

He had some rye-meal, and he manufactured with it some paste. He had
also some white rope, which picked out into tow. With this paste and
tow, and some bits of wood, he stopped all the crevices of the rock,
leaving only a little air passage made of a powder-flask which he had
found aboard the Durande, and which had served for loading the signal
gun. This powder-flask was directed horizontally to a large stone, which
Gilliatt made the hearth of the forge. A stopper made of a piece of tow
served to close it in case of need.

After this, he heaped up the wood and coal upon the hearth, struck his
steel against the bare rock, caught a spark upon a handful of loose tow,
and having ignited it, soon lighted his forge fire.

He tried the blower: it worked well.

Gilliatt felt the pride of a Cyclops: he was the master of air, water,
and fire. Master of the air; for he had given a kind of lungs to the
wind, and changed the rude draught into a useful blower. Master of
water, for he had converted the little cascade into a "trompe." Master
of fire, for out of this moist rock he had struck a flame.

The cave being almost everywhere open to the sky, the smoke issued
freely, blackening the curved escarpment. The rocks which seemed
destined for ever to receive only the white foam, became now familiar
with the blackening smoke.

Gilliatt selected for an anvil a large smooth round stone, of about the
required shape and dimensions. It formed a base for the blows of his
hammer; but one that might fly and was very dangerous. One of the
extremities of this block, rounded and ending in a point, might, for
want of anything better, serve instead of a conoid bicorn; but the other
kind of bicorn of the pyramidal form was wanting. It was the ancient
stone anvil of the Troglodytes. The surface, polished by the waves, had
almost the firmness of steel.

He regretted not having brought his anvil. As he did not know that the
Durande had been broken in two by the tempest, he had hoped to find the
carpenter's chest and all his tools generally kept in the forehold. But
it was precisely the fore-part of the vessel which had been carried
away.

These two excavations which he had found in the rock were contiguous.
The warehouse and the forge communicated with each other.

Every evening, when his work was ended, he supped on a little biscuit,
moistened in water, a sea-urchin or a crab, or a few _châtaignes de
mer_, the only food to be found among those rocks; and shivering like
his knotted cord, mounted again to sleep in his cell upon the Great
Douvre.

The very materialism of his daily occupation increased the kind of
abstraction in which he lived. To be steeped too deeply in realities is
in itself a cause of visionary moods. His bodily labour, with its
infinite variety of details, detracted nothing from the sensation of
stupor which arose from the strangeness of his position and his work.
Ordinary bodily fatigue is a thread which binds man to the earth; but
the very peculiarity of the enterprise he was engaged in kept him in a
sort of ideal twilight region. There were times when he seemed to be
striking blows with his hammer in the clouds. At other moments his tools
appeared to him like arms. He had a singular feeling, as if he was
repressing or providing against some latent danger of attack. Untwisting
ropes, unravelling threads of yarn in a sail, or propping up a couple of
beams, appeared to him at such times like fashioning engines of war. The
thousand minute pains which he took about his salvage operations
produced at last in his mind the effect of precautions against
aggressions little concealed, and easy to anticipate. He did not know
the words which express the ideas, but he perceived them. His instincts
became less and less those of the worker; his habits more and more those
of the savage man.

His business there was to subdue and direct the powers of nature. He had
an indistinct perception of it. A strange enlargement of his ideas!

Around him, far as eye could reach, was the vast prospect of endless
labour wasted and lost. Nothing is more disturbing to the mind than the
contemplation of the diffusion of forces at work in the unfathomable and
illimitable space of the ocean. The mind tends naturally to seek the
object of these forces. The unceasing movement in space, the unwearying
sea, the clouds that seem ever hurrying somewhere, the vast mysterious
prodigality of effort, all this is a problem. Whither does this
perpetual movement tend? What do these winds construct? What do these
giant blows build up? These howlings, shocks, and sobbings of the storm,
what do they end in? and what is the business of this tumult? The ebb
and flow of these questionings is eternal, as the flux and reflux of
the sea itself. Gilliatt could answer for himself; his work he knew, but
the agitation which surrounded him far and wide at all times perplexed
him confusedly with its eternal questionings. Unknown to himself,
mechanically, by the mere pressure of external things, and without any
other effect than a strange, unconscious bewilderment, Gilliatt, in this
dreamy mood, blended his own toil somehow with the prodigious wasted
labour of the sea-waves. How, indeed, in that position, could he escape
the influence of that mystery of the dread, laborious ocean? how do
other than meditate, so far as meditation was possible, upon the
vacillation of the waves, the perseverance of the foam, the
imperceptible wearing down of rocks, the furious beatings of the four
winds? How terrible that perpetual recommencement, that ocean bed, those
Danaïdes-like clouds, all that travail and weariness for no end!

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

XI

DISCOVERY

A rock near the coast is sometimes visited by men; a rock in mid-ocean
never. What object could any one have there? No supplies can be drawn
thence; no fruit-trees are there, no pasturage, no beasts, no springs of
water fitted for man's use. It stands aloft, a rock with its steep sides
and summits above water, and its sharp points below. Nothing is to be
found there but inevitable shipwreck.

This kind of rocks, which in the old sea dialect were called _Isolés_,
are, as we have said, strange places. The sea is alone there; she works
her own will. No token of terrestrial life disturbs her. Man is a terror
to the sea; she is shy of his approach, and hides from him her deeds.
But she is bolder among the lone sea rocks. The everlasting soliloquy of
the waves is not troubled there. She labours at the rock, repairs its
damage, sharpens its peaks, makes them rugged or renews them. She
pierces the granite, wears down the soft stone, and denudes the hard;
she rummages, dismembers, bores, perforates, and grooves; she fills the
rock with cells, and makes it sponge-like, hollows out the inside, or
sculptures it without. In that secret mountain which is hers, she makes
to herself caves, sanctuaries, palaces. She has her splendid and
monstrous vegetation, composed of floating plants which bite, and of
monsters which take root; and she hides away all this terrible
magnificence in the twilight of her deeps. Among the isolated rocks no
eye watches over her; no spy embarrasses her movements. It is there that
she develops at liberty her mysterious side, which is inaccessible to
man. Here she keeps all strange secretions of life. Here that the
unknown wonders of the sea are assembled.

Promontories, forelands, capes, headlands, breakers, and shoals are
veritable constructions. The geological changes of the earth are
trifling compared with the vast operations of the ocean. These breakers,
these habitations in the sea, these pyramids, and spouts of the foam are
the practicers of a mysterious art which the author of this book has
somewhere called "the Art of Nature." Their style is known by its
vastness. The effects of chance seem here design. Its works are
multiform. They abound in the mazy entanglement of the rock-coral
groves, the sublimity of the cathedral, the extravagance of the pagoda,
the amplitude of the mountain, the delicacy of the jeweller's work, the
horror of the sepulchre. They are filled with cells like the wasps'
nest, with dens like menageries, with subterranean passages like the
haunts of moles, with dungeons like Bastiles, with ambuscades like a
camp. They have their doors, but they are barricaded; their columns, but
they are shattered; their towers, but they are tottering; their bridges,
but they are broken. Their compartments are unaccommodating; these are
fitted for the birds only, those only for fish. They are impassable.
Their architectural style is variable and inconsistent; it regards or
disregards at will the laws of equilibrium, breaks off, stops short,
begins in the form of an archivolt, and ends in an architrave, block on
block. Enceladus is the mason. A wondrous science of dynamics exhibits
here its problems ready solved. Fearful overhanging blocks threaten, but
fall not: the human mind cannot guess what power supports their
bewildering masses. Blind entrances, gaps, and ponderous suspensions
multiply and vary infinitely. The laws which regulate this Babel baffle
human induction. The great unknown architect plans nothing, but succeeds
in all. Rocks massed together in confusion form a monstrous monument,
defy reason, yet maintain equilibrium. Here is something more than
strength; it is eternity. But order is wanting. The wild tumult of the
waves seems to have passed into the wilderness of stone. It is like a
tempest petrified and fixed for ever. Nothing is more impressive than
that wild architecture; always standing, yet always seeming to fall; in
which everything appears to give support, and yet to withdraw it. A
struggle between opposing lines has resulted in the construction of an
edifice, filled with traces of the efforts of those old antagonists, the
ocean and the storm.

This architecture has its terrible masterpieces, of which the Douvres
rock was one.

The sea had fashioned and perfected it with a sinister solicitude. The
snarling waters licked it into shape. It was hideous, treacherous, dark,
full of hollows.

It had a complete system of submarine caverns ramifying and losing
themselves in unfathomed depths. Some of the orifices of this labyrinth
of passages were left exposed by the low tides. A man might enter there,
but at his risk and peril.

Gilliatt determined to explore all these grottoes, for the purpose of
his salvage labour. There was not one which was not repulsive.
Everywhere about the caverns that strange aspect of an abattoir, those
singular traces of slaughter, appeared again in all the exaggeration of
the ocean. No one who has not seen in excavations of this kind, upon the
walls of everlasting granite, these hideous natural frescoes, can form a
notion of their singularity.

These pitiless caverns, too, were false and sly. Woe betide him who
would loiter there. The rising tide filled them to their roofs.

Rock limpets and edible mosses abounded among them.

They were obstructed by quantities of shingle, heaped together in their
recesses. Some of their huge smooth stones weighed more than a ton. They
were of every proportion, and of every hue; but the greater part were
blood coloured. Some, covered with a hairy and glutinous seaweed, seemed
like large green moles boring a way into the rock.

Several of the caverns terminated abruptly in the form of a demi-cupola.
Others, main arteries of a mysterious circulation, lengthened out in the
rock in dark and tortuous fissures. They were the alleys of the
submarine city; but they gradually contracted from their entrances, and
at length left no way for a man to pass. Peering in by the help of a
lighted torch, he could see nothing but dark hollows dripping with
moisture.

One day, Gilliatt, exploring, ventured into one of these fissures. The
state of the tide favoured the attempt. It was a beautiful day of calm
and sunshine. There was no fear of any accident from the sea to increase
the danger.

Two necessities, as we have said, compelled him to undertake these
explorations. He had to gather fragments of wreck and other things to
aid him in his labour, and to search for crabs and crayfish for his
food. Shell-fish had begun to fail him on the rocks.

The fissure was narrow, and the passage difficult. Gilliatt could see
daylight beyond. He made an effort, contorted himself as much as he
could, and penetrated into the cave as far as he was able.

He had reached, without suspecting it, the interior of the rock, upon
the point of which Clubin had steered the Durande. Though abrupt and
almost inaccessible without, it was hollowed within. It was full of
galleries, pits, and chambers, like the tomb of an Egyptian king. This
network of caverns was one of the most complicated of all that
labyrinth, a labour of the water, the undermining of the restless sea.
The branches of the subterranean maze probably communicated with the sea
without by more than one issue, some gaping at the level of the waves,
the others profound and invisible. It was near here, but Gilliatt knew
it not, that Clubin had dived into the sea.

In this crocodile cave--where crocodiles, it is true, were not among the
dangers--Gilliatt wound about, clambered, struck his head occasionally,
bent low and rose again, lost his footing and regained it many times,
advancing laboriously. By degrees the gallery widened; a glimmer of
daylight appeared, and he found himself suddenly at the entrance to a
cavern of a singular kind.

XII

THE INTERIOR OF AN EDIFICE UNDER THE SEA

The gleam of daylight was fortunate.

One step further, and Gilliatt must have fallen into a pool, perhaps
without bottom. The waters of these cavern pools are so cold and
paralysing as to prove fatal to the strongest swimmers.

There is, moreover, no means of remounting or of hanging on to any part
of their steep walls.

He stopped short. The crevice from which he had just issued ended in a
narrow and slippery projection, a species of corbel in the peaked wall.
He leaned against the side and surveyed it.

He was in a large cave. Over his head was a roofing not unlike the
inside of a vast skull, which might have been imagined to have been
recently dissected. The dripping ribs of the striated indentations of
the roof seemed to imitate the branching fibres and jagged sutures of
the bony cranium. A stony ceiling and a watery floor. The rippled waters
between the four walls of the cave were like wavy paving tiles. The
grotto was shut in on all sides. Not a window, not even an air-hole
visible. No breach in the wall, no crack in the roof. The light came
from below and through the water, a strange, sombre light.

Gilliatt, the pupils of whose eyes had contracted during his
explorations of the dusky corridor, could distinguish everything about
him in the pale glimmer.

He was familiar, from having often visited them, with the caves of
Plémont in Jersey, the Creux-Maillé at Guernsey, the Boutiques at Sark;
but none of these marvellous caverns could compare with the subterranean
and submarine chamber into which he had made his way.

Under the water at his feet he could see a sort of drowned arch. This
arch, a natural ogive, fashioned by the waves, was glittering between
its two dark and profound supports. It was by this submerged porch that
the daylight entered into the cavern from the open sea. A strange light
shooting upward from a gulf.

The glimmer spread out beneath the waters like a large fan, and was
reflected on the rocks. Its direct rays, divided into long, broad
shafts, appeared in strong relief against the darkness below, and
becoming brighter or more dull from one rock to another, looked as if
seen here and there through plates of glass. There was light in that
cave it is true; but it was the light that was unearthly. The beholder
might have dreamed that he had descended in some other planet. The
glimmer was an enigma, like the glaucous light from the eye-pupil of a
Sphinx. The whole cave represented the interior of a death's-head of
enormous proportions, and of a strange splendour. The vault was the
hollow of the brain, the arch the mouth; the sockets of the eyes were
wanting. The cavern, alternately swallowing and rendering up the flux
and reflux through its mouth wide opened to the full noonday without,
seemed to drink in the light and vomit forth bitterness; a type of some
beings intelligent and evil. The light, in traversing this inlet through
the vitreous medium of the sea-water, became green, like a ray of
starlight from Aldebaran. The water, filled with the moist light,
appeared like a liquid emerald. A tint of aqua-marina of marvellous
delicacy spread a soft hue throughout the cavern. The roof, with its
cerebral lobes, and its rampant ramifications, like the fibres of
nerves, gave out a tender reflection of chrysoprase. The ripples
reflected on the roof were falling in order and dissolving again
incessantly, and enlarging and contracting their glittering scales in a
mysterious and mazy dance. They gave the beholder an impression of
something weird and spectral: he wondered what prey secured, or what
expectation about to be realised, moved with a joyous thrill this
magnificent network of living fire. From the projections of the vault,
and the angles of the rock, hung lengths of delicate fibrous plants,
bathing their roots probably through the granite in some upper pool of
water, and distilling from their silky ends one after the other, a drop
of water like a pearl. These drops fell in the water now and then with a
gentle splash. The effect of the scene was singular. Nothing more
beautiful could be imagined; nothing more mournful could anywhere be
found.

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

XIII

WHAT WAS SEEN THERE; AND WHAT PERCEIVED DIMLY

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

The beating of the sea made itself felt throughout the cavern. The
oscillation without raised and depressed the level of the waters within,
with the regularity of respiration. A mysterious spirit seemed to fill
this great organism, as it swelled and subsided in silence.

The water had a magical transparency, and Gilliatt distinguished at
various depths submerged recesses, and surfaces of jutting rocks ever of
a deeper and a deeper green. Certain dark hollows, too, were there,
probably too deep for soundings.

On each side of the submarine porch, rude elliptical arches, filled with
shallows, indicated the position of small lateral caves, low alcoves of
the central cavern, accessible, perhaps, at certain tides. These
openings had roofs in the form of inclined planes, and at angles more or
less acute. Little sandy beaches of a few feet wide, laid bare by the
action of the water, stretched inward, and were lost in these recesses.

Here and there seaweeds of more than a fathom in length undulated
beneath the water, like the waving of long tresses in the wind; and
there were glimpses of a forest of sea plants.

Above and below the surface of the water, the wall of the cavern from
top to bottom--from the vault down to the depth at which it became
invisible--was tapestried with that prodigious efflorescence of the sea,
rarely perceived by human eyes, which the old Spanish navigators called
_praderias del mar_. A luxuriant moss, having all the tints of the
olive, enlarged and concealed the protuberances of granite. From all the
jutting points swung the thin fluted strips of varech, which sailors use
as their barometers. The light breath which stirred in the cavern waved
to and fro their glossy bands.

Under these vegetations there showed themselves from time to time some
of the rarest _bijoux_ of the casket of the ocean; ivory shells,
strombi, purple-fish, univalves, struthiolaires, turriculated cerites.
The bell-shaped limpet shells, like tiny huts, were everywhere adhering
to the rocks, distributed in settlements, in the alleys between which
prowled oscabrions, those beetles of the sea. A few large pebbles found
their way into the cavern; shell-fish took refuge there. The crustacea
are the grandees of the sea, who, in their lacework and embroidery,
avoid the rude contact of the pebbly crowd. The glittering heap of their
shells, in certain spots under the wave, gave out singular irradiations,
amidst which the eye caught glimpses of confused azure and gold, and
mother-of-pearl, of every tint of the water.

Upon the side of the cavern, a little above the water-line, a
magnificent and singular plant, attaching itself, like a fringe, to the
border of seaweed, continued and completed it. This plant, thick,
fibrous, inextricably intertwined, and almost black, exhibited to the
eye large confused and dusky festoons, everywhere dotted with
innumerable little flowers of the colour of lapis-lazuli. In the water
they seemed to glow like small blue flames. Out of the water they were
flowers; beneath it they were sapphires. The water rising and inundating
the basement of the grotto clothed with these plants, seemed to cover
the rock with gems.

At every swelling of the wave these flowers increased in splendour, and
at every subsidence grew dull again. So it is with the destiny of man;
aspiration is life, the outbreathing of the spirit is death.

One of the marvels of the cavern was the rock itself. Forming here a
wall, there an arch, and here again a pillar or pilaster, it was in
places rough and bare, and sometimes close beside, was wrought with the
most delicate natural carving. Strange evidences of mind mingled with
the massive stolidity of the granite. It was the wondrous art-work of
the ocean. Here a sort of panel, cut square, and covered with round
embossments in various positions, simulated a vague bas-relief. Before
this sculpture, with its obscure designs, a man might have dreamed of
Prometheus roughly sketching for Michael Angelo. It seemed as if that
great genius with a few blows of his mallet could have finished the
indistinct labours of the giant. In other places the rock was damasked
like a Saracen buckler, or engraved like a Florentine vase. There were
portions which appeared like Corinthian brass, then like arabesques, as
on the door of a mosque; then like Runic stones with obscure and mystic
prints of claws. Plants with twisted creepers and tendrils, crossing and
recrossing upon the groundwork of golden lichens, covered it with
filigree. The grotto resembled in some wise a Moorish palace. It was a
union of barbarism and of goldsmith's work, with the imposing and rugged
architecture of the elements.

The magnificent stains and moulderings of the sea covered, as with
velvet, the angles of granite. The escarpments were festooned with
large-flowered bindweed, sustaining itself with graceful ease, and
ornamenting the walls as by intelligent design. Wall-pellitories showed
their strange clusters in tasteful arrangement. The wondrous light which
came from beneath the water, at once a submarine twilight and an Elysian
radiance, softened down and blended all harsh lineaments. Every wave was
a prism. The outlines of things under these rainbow-tinted undulations
produced the chromatic effects of optical glasses made too convex. Solar
spectra shot through the waters. Fragments of rainbows seemed floating
in that transparent dawn. Elsewhere--in other corners--there was
discernible a kind of moonlight in the water. Every kind of splendour
seemed to mingle there, forming a strange sort of twilight. Nothing
could be more perplexing or enigmatical than the sumptuous beauties of
this cavern. Enchantment reigned over all. The fantastic vegetation,
the rude masonry of the place seemed to harmonise. It was a happy
marriage this, between these strange wild things. The branches seeming
but to touch one another clung closely each to each. The stern rock and
the pale flower met in a passionate embrace. Massive pillars had
capitals and entwining wreaths of delicate garlands, that quivered
through every fibre, suggestive of fairy fingers tickling the feet of a
Behemoth, and the rock upheld the plant, and the plant clasped the rock
with unnatural joy of attraction.

The effect produced by the mysterious reconciliation of these strange
forms was of a supreme and inexpressible beauty.

The works of nature, not less than the works of genius, contain the
absolute, and produce an impression of awe. Something unexpected about
them imperiously insists on our mental submission; we are conscious of a
premeditation beyond our human scope, and at no time are they more
startling than when we suddenly become aware of the beauty that is
mingled with their terror.

This hidden grotto was, if we may use the expression, siderealised.
There was everything in it to surprise and overwhelm. An apocalyptic
light illuminated this crypt. One could not tell if that which the eyes
looked upon was a reality, for reality bore the impress of the
impossible. One could see, and touch, and know that one was standing
there, and yet it was difficult to believe in it all.

Was it daylight which entered by this casement beneath the sea? Was it
indeed water which trembled in this dusky pool? Were not these arched
roofs and porches fashioned out of sunset clouds to imitate a cavern to
men's eyes? What stone was that beneath the feet? Was not this solid
shaft about to melt and pass into thin air? What was that cunning
jewellery of glittering shells, half seen beneath the wave? How far away
were life, and the green earth, and human faces? What strange
enchantment haunted that mystic twilight? What blind emotion, mingling
its sympathies with the uneasy restlessness of plants beneath the wave?

At the extremity of the cavern, which was oblong, rose a Cyclopean
archivolte, singularly exact in form. It was a species of cave within a
cave, of tabernacle within a sanctuary. Here, behind a sheet of bright
verdure, interposed like the veil of a temple, arose a stone out of the
waves, having square sides, and bearing some resemblance to an altar.
The water surrounded it in all parts. It seemed as if a goddess had
just descended from it. One might have dreamed there that some
celestial form beneath that crypt or upon that altar dwelt for ever