The Toilers of the Sea

  This passage, following a zigzag course like a shaft of lightning, was of about the same width throughout its length. It had been shaped in this form by the ocean. The eternal tumult of the sea sometimes reveals bizarre regularities of this kind. There is a geometry of the waves. From one end of the defile to the other the two parallel rock walls faced each other at a distance that was almost exactly the same as the width of the Durande's midship frame. Thanks to the backward curving line of the Little Douvre, the gap between the two Douvres was wide enough to accommodate the paddle boxes: anywhere else they would have been crushed into matchwood.

  The inner walls of the reef were hideous to see. When, in our exploration of the wilderness of water that we call the ocean, we encounter the unknown things of the sea, everything is surprising and misshapen. What Gilliatt could see of the defile from the wreck of the Durande was a sight of horror. In the granite gorges of the ocean there is often a strange permanent figuration of shipwreck. The defile on the Douvres reef had one such, of fearful effect. Here and there the oxides in the rock had created blotches of red, like patches of congealed blood. They resembled the bloody exudations on the walls of a slaughterhouse.

  There was something of the air of a charnel house about the reef. The rough marine stone, in many shades of color--produced here by the decomposition of metallic compounds in the rock, there by molds--had patches of hideous purple, sinister greens, and splashes of vermilion, calling up ideas of murder and extermination. It was like the walls of an execution chamber, left unwashed; as if men crushed to death here had left their traces. The sheer rock walls seemed to bear the imprint of accumulated death agonies. Certain spots looked as if they were still dripping from the carnage; the rock was wet, and it seemed that if you touched it your fingers would be covered with blood. The rust of massacre was to be seen everywhere. At the foot of the parallel walls, scattered about under the water or just above it, or in hollows in the rocks, were monstrous round boulders--scarlet, black, purple--that looked like human organs; fresh lungs, rotting livers. It was as if giants had been disemboweled here. From top to bottom of the granite ran long veins of red, like blood oozing from a corpse.

  All these features are common in sea caves.

  V

  A WORD ON THE SECRET COOPERATION OF THE ELEMENTS

  For those who, by the chances of travel, may be condemned to spend some time on a reef in the ocean, the form of the reef is not a matter of indifference. There is the pyramid-shaped reef, with a single peak emerging from the sea; there is the circular reef, rather like a ring of large stones; and there is the corridor-shaped reef. The corridor type is the most alarming: not only on account of the anguish of the waves caught between its walls and of the tumultuous movements of the sea to which this gives rise but also because of the obscure meteorological properties that appear to result from the parallelism of two rocks in the open sea. These two sheets of rock form a regular voltaic pile.

  A corridor-shaped reef has a certain orientation, and its particular orientation is important. It has an immediate effect on the surrounding air and water. The corridor shape acts on the waves and on the wind-- mechanically by its form and galvanically by the magnetization, which may differ between one side and the other, of its vertical planes, which are juxtaposed and opposed to each other.

  Reefs of this type attract to themselves all the wild forces dispersed in the hurricane and have a remarkable ability to concentrate the storm. Hence the greater violence of the tempest around them.

  It must be remembered that wind is composite. It is believed to be simple but is by no means so. It is not only a dynamic force, it is also a chemical force; it is not only a chemical force, it is also a magnetic force. There is something inexplicable in this force. Wind consists of electricity as well as air. Some winds coincide with the aurora borealis. On the Eel Bank the wind whips up waves a hundred feet high, as Dumont-d'Urville 160 noted with astonishment. The corvette, he says, "did not know whose orders to take." In a storm in southern latitudes the waves swell up in malignant tumors and the sea becomes so terrifying that savages flee to escape the sight of it. Storms in northern seas are different; they carry needles of ice, and the wind takes men's breath away and blows the Eskimos' sledges backward on the snow. Other winds are burning hot, like the African simoon, which is the Chinese typhoon and the samiel of India. Simoon, Typhoon, Samiel: they sound like the names of demons. They melt the summits of mountains; the volcano of Toluca161 was vitrified by a storm. This hot wind, a whirl of inky black hurling itself against scarlet clouds, is referred to in the Vedas: "Behold the black god who has come to steal the red sheep." In all these facts we feel the pressure of the mystery of electricity.

  Wind is full of this mystery. So, too, is the sea. Like wind, it is composite in nature; under the waves of water, which we can see, are waves of force, which we cannot see. Its constituents are--everything. Of all the jumbles of matter in the world the sea is the most indivisible and the most profound.

  Try, if you can, to imagine this chaos, so enormous that it reduces everything to the same level. It is the universal container, a reservoir in which fertilizations can take place, a crucible in which transformations are achieved. It amasses and then disperses; it accumulates and then inseminates; it devours and then creates. It receives all the waste waters of the earth and stores them up. It is solid in the ice floe, liquid in the waves, fluid in the cloud, invisible in the wind, impalpable in its emanations. As matter it is a mass, and as a force it is an abstraction. It equalizes and unites all phenomena. It simplifies itself by its infinite capacity for combination. By mingling and churning up its many elements it achieves transparency. It dissolves all differences and absorbs them into its own unity. Its elements are so numerous that it attains identity. One drop is equivalent to the whole. Because it is full of tempests it reaches equilibrium. Plato saw the dancing of the spheres. Strange to say, but true: in the vast orbit of the earth around the sun the ocean, with its ebb and flow, becomes the pendulum of the globe.

  In any phenomenon in the sea all phenomena are present. The sea is sucked up by a whirlwind as if by a siphon; a storm operates like a pump; lightning issues from the sea no less than from the air. In a ship at sea a dull shock is sometimes felt, and there is a smell of sulfur from the chain locker. The sea is boiling. "The Devil has put the sea in his cauldron," said de Ruyter.162 In certain tempests at the turn of the seasons, when the generative forces of nature come into balance, ships battered by the waves seem to emit a kind of light and sparks of phosphorus run up and down the rigging, coming so close to the crew that the sailors reach out and try to capture these fire birds in flight. After the Lisbon earthquake163 a blast of hot air, as from a furnace, drove a sixty-foot-high wave toward the city. The oscillations of the ocean are connected with the convulsions of the earth.

  These incommensurable energies make possible all kinds of cataclysms. At the end of the year 1864, a hundred leagues from the coasts of Malabar, one of the Maldive Islands sank beneath the waves. It went to the bottom like a ship. The fishermen who had left the island in the morning found nothing there when they returned in the evening; they were barely able to get an uncertain glimpse of their villages under the sea. On this occasion it was boats that saw the shipwreck of houses.

  In Europe, where nature seems to feel constrained by civilization, such events are rare--so rare as to be presumed impossible. Yet Jersey and Guernsey were once part of Gaul; and as we write these lines an equinoctial gale has just blown down a cliff in the Firth of Forth, on the frontier between England and Scotland.164 Nowhere do these terrifying forces appear so formidably combined as in that extraordinary northern strait known as the Lysefjord, the most redoubtable of the rocky intestines of the ocean. Here the demonstration is complete.

  The Lysefjord is Norway's sea, near the inhospitable Gulf of Stavanger, in the fifty-ninth degree of latitude. The water is heavy and black, with a fever of intermittent storms. In these waters, in the midst of th
is solitude, is a great somber street. It is a street for no human feet. No one passes that way; no ship ventures there. It is a corridor ten leagues long between two rock walls three thousand feet high. This is the passage that gives admission to the sea.

  The passage has corners and angles like all the streets in the sea, shaped as they are by the torsion of the waves. In the Lysefjord the sea is almost always calm and the sky serene: it is a place of ill omen. Where is the wind? It is not up above us. Where is the thunder? It is not in the sky. The wind is under the sea; the thunder is in the rocks. From time to time the water quakes. At certain moments, when there is not a cloud in the sky, about halfway up the sheer cliff, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the sea, more usually on the south than on the north side, the rock suddenly thunders and emits a flash of lightning, which shoots out and then withdraws again, like those toys that children can cause to reach out and then spring back again. It too has contractions and enlargements; it strikes the opposing cliff, returns into the rock, then reemerges and continues flashing, shooting out numerous heads and tongues; it bristles with points of flame, strikes at will and then begins flashing again, before finally dying down into sinister blackness. Flocks of birds fly off in terror. Nothing is more mysterious than this artillery emerging from the invisible. It is a case of one rock attacking another, of two reefs thundering at each other. This is not a war that concerns men: it is the hostility of two walls of rock in the abyss.

  In the Lysefjord the wind turns into an emanation, the rock performs the function of a cloud, and the thunder emerges as if from a volcano. This extraordinary defile is a voltaic pile whose plates are the two cliffs facing each other.

  VI

  A STABLE FOR THE HORSE

  Gilliatt was sufficiently familiar with reefs to take the Douvres very seriously indeed. His first necessity, as we have said, was to find a safe place for the paunch.

  The double ridge of rocks that extended beyond the Douvres like a winding trench linked up at various points with other rocks, within which there were no doubt dead ends and cellars opening off the main defile and attached to it like the branches on the trunk of a tree. The lower parts of the rocks were covered with seaweed, the upper parts with lichens. The uniform level of the seaweed on all the rocks marked the height of high tide and slack tide. Projections on the rock that the water did not reach had the silver and gilt coating that marine granites acquire from the mingling of white and yellow lichens.

  At certain points on the rock there was a leprous growth of cone-shaped shells, like the granite's rotting teeth. Elsewhere, in crevices in the rock in which layers of fine sand had accumulated, with ripple marks caused by the wind rather than the waves, were clumps of blue thistles.

  In sheltered spots less battered by the waves could be seen the lairs drilled from the rock by sea urchins. These porcupines of the sea, living balls that move around by rolling on their spines, whose protective armor is made up of more than ten thousand pieces, intricately adjusted and welded together, and whose mouth is known, for some unknown reason, as Aristotle's lantern, carve out holes in the granite with their five teeth, which eat away the rock, and then install themselves in the holes. Here the gatherers of seafood find them, cut them in four, and eat them raw, like oysters. Some of them dip their bread in the sea urchins' soft flesh. Hence their name of "sea eggs."

  The summits of the peaks rising from the depths of the ocean, now exposed by the ebbing tide, led to just under the sheer crag of the Homme, where there was a kind of creek, almost completely enclosed by the reef, which seemed to offer a possible mooring. Gilliatt observed it carefully. It was in the shape of a horseshoe open on only one side, which was exposed to the east wind, the least bad of the winds in these parts. There the sea was enclosed and almost without motion. It would be a tolerably safe place for the paunch. In any case Gilliatt had little choice. If he wanted to take advantage of the low tide he had to act quickly.

  The weather was still fine and mild. The insolent sea was now in a good humor.

  Gilliatt climbed down, put on his shoes, untied his boat, got into it, pushed off, and rowed around the outside of the reef. Reaching the Homme, he examined the entrance to the creek.

  The channel was marked by a fixed undulating line amid the movement of the waves, a wrinkle imperceptible to anyone but a seaman.

  Gilliatt studied this almost invisible line for a moment, then held off a little in order to have room to turn and enter the channel cleanly, and quickly, with one stroke of the oars, he took his boat into the creek.

  Once inside, he took a sounding. It would be an excellent place to anchor. Here the paunch would be protected from almost all the chances of the season.

  The most redoubtable reefs have quiet little corners of this kind. The harborages to be found in a reef are like the hospitality of the Bedouin--straightforward and reliable.

  Gilliatt brought the paunch as close as he could to the Homme, but far enough out to avoid grazing the rock, and dropped her two anchors. Then he folded his arms and reflected on his position.

  The paunch was now safely housed. That was one problem solved. But the next one immediately presented itself. Where was he himself to find a lodging?

  There were two possibilities: the paunch itself, with its tiny cabin, which was more or less habitable, and the level top of the Homme, which could easily be climbed.

  From either of these lodgings it would be possible to reach the gap between the two Douvres where the Durande was suspended, almost dryshod, by jumping from rock to rock at low water.

  But low water did not last long, and for most of the time he would be separated either from his lodging or from the wreck by more than two hundred fathoms. Swimming in the waters of a reef is difficult; if there is any sea going it is impossible.

  He would have to give up the idea of finding shelter either in the paunch or on the Homme. There was no other suitable place in the neighboring rocks; the lower points were covered twice a day by the high tide, and the higher points were constantly swept by the foam, promising an unwelcome drenching.

  There remained the wreck itself. Would it be possible to lodge there? Gilliatt hoped that it might.

  VII

  A LODGING FOR THE TRAVELER

  Half an hour afterward Gilliatt, returning to the wreck, climbed onto the deck and went down to the between decks and from there to the hold, examining more carefully what he had only briefly surveyed on his first visit.

  With the aid of the capstan he had hoisted onto the deck of the Durande the bundle of stores and equipment he had unloaded from the paunch. The capstan had behaved well. There was no lack of handspikes to turn it: Gilliatt had plenty of choice among the wreckage.

  Among the debris he found a cold chisel that had evidently fallen from the carpenter's tool kit, and added it to his little stock of tools. In addition--for in such poverty of resources everything is of value--he had his own knife in his pocket.

  Gilliatt spent the whole day working on the wreck, clearing up, repairing, simplifying.

  At the end of the day he took stock of the position. The entire wreck was quivering in the wind. It shook at his every step. The only part of it that was stable and firm was the section of the hull caught between the two Douvres, which contained the engines. There the crosspieces were strongly braced against the granite.

  It would not be wise to make his lodging on the Durande. It would have overloaded the wreck; and it was essential to lighten it rather than add to the weight on board. To burden it further was the very opposite of what was required. This ruin required the most tender care. It was like a sick man on his deathbed. It would get quite enough maltreatment from the wind.

  It was bad enough that he was going to have to work on board the Durande. The amount of work that the wreck would necessarily have to endure would undoubtedly distress it, perhaps beyond its strength.

  Besides, if any accident should happen at night with Gilliatt asleep on board, he would perish along
with the ship. There was no possibility of rescue; and all would then be lost. If he was to save the wreck he must find a lodging outside it.

  He had to be outside the wreck and yet close to it: that was the problem. His difficulties were increasing. Where, in these circumstances, could he find a lodging?

  Gilliatt reflected. There remained only the two Douvres, and they did not seem to offer much prospect of shelter.

  From below a kind of protuberance, a bulging mass of rock, could be seen on the summit of the Great Douvre.

  Tall rocks with flat tops, like the Great Douvre and the Homme, are peaks that have been decapitated. There are many such rocks in the mountains and in the ocean. Some rocks, particularly in the open sea, have gashes down the side, like trees that have been attacked: they look as if they have been slashed by a felling ax. And indeed they are exposed to the violent comings and goings of the hurricane, that axman of the sea.

  There are other, deeper rooted, causes of cataclysms. Hence the many wounds suffered by these old granite rocks. Some of the giants have had their head cut off.

  Sometimes, for no apparent reason, the head does not fall off but remains, mutilated, on the truncated summit. This singularity is not particularly rare. Two examples of this bizarre geological enigma, in highly unusual circumstances, are the Roque au Diable on Guernsey and the Table in the Annweiler valley. 165

  Something similar had probably happened to the Great Douvre. If the protuberance that could be seen on the top was not a natural irregularity in the rock, it must be a surviving fragment of the shattered summit. Perhaps there might be some cavity in this piece of rock--a hole into which a man could creep for shelter? That was all that Gilliatt asked for.