He worked at these tasks with astonishing tenacity. He was successful in all that he wanted to do. Nothing withstands the determination of an ant.
By the end of the week Gilliatt had brought together in his granite shed and arranged in order all the miscellaneous bric-a-brac of the storm. There was a corner for tacks and a corner for sheets; bowlines were kept separate from halyards; ribs were arranged according to the number of holes in them; puddings, carefully detached from the broken anchor rings, were tied in bunches; clump blocks, without sheaves, were separated from pulley blocks; belaying pins, bull's-eyes, preventer shrouds, downhauls, snatch blocks, pendants, kevels, trusses, stoppers, sail booms--those, at any rate, that had not been so damaged as to be useless--occupied different compartments; all the timber-- stretchers, posts, stanchions, caps, port lids, fish pieces, binding strakes--was piled up separately; so far as he could he had fitted the fragments of planks from the ship's bottom into one another; reef points were not confused with robands, crowfeet with stern lines, backstay pulleys with hawser pulleys, fragments from the waist with fragments from the stern; in one corner was a section of the Durande's cat harpings, which serve to brace the top shrouds and futtock shrouds. Every bit of debris had its place. The whole of the wreck was here, classified and labeled. It was like chaos deposited in a storehouse.
A staysail, held in place by large stones, covered--though with many holes--anything that might be damaged by rain.
Badly damaged as the fore part of the Durande had been, Gilliatt was able to salvage the two catheads with their three pulley wheels.
He had recovered the bowsprit, though he had great difficulty in unrolling its gammoning. It held closely together, since, as usual, it had been put on, using the windlass, in dry weather. He managed, however, to detach it. This thick rope might come in very useful.
He also found the smaller anchor, lodged in a rock crevice that was uncovered at low tide.
In the remains of Tangrouille's cabin he found a piece of chalk, which he preserved carefully. It might be useful for marking things.
A leather fire bucket and a number of other buckets in reasonably good condition completed his stock of equipment.
All that remained of the Durande's supply of coal was also deposited in the storeroom.
Within a week the work of salvaging the remains of the wreck had been completed; the reef was swept clean, and the Durande was lightened. All that was left on the wreck was the engines.
The fragment of the fore part that remained attached to the after part did not put any strain on the hull. It hung without dragging, supported by a projection in the rock. It was large and thick, and would have been very heavy to haul away; and it would have taken up too much room in the storeroom. This section of the ship's side had the look of a raft. Gilliatt left it where it was.
During all this labor Gilliatt had been much preoccupied. He had looked in vain for the "doll," the figurehead of the Durande. He would have given his two arms to find it, if he had not had such great need of them.
At the entrance to the storeroom and just outside it were two piles of useless fragments: a heap of iron for forging and a heap of wood for burning.
Gilliatt was at work from the first crack of dawn. Apart from his hours of sleep he did not take a moment's rest.
The cormorants flying to and fro watched him as he went about his work.
X
THE FORGE
His storeroom completed, Gilliatt set to work on constructing his forge. The second cavity in the rock that he had selected was a kind of long passage of some depth. He had at first thought of making his lodging here; but the wind blew so incessantly and so strongly through it that he had had to give up the idea. This constant stream of air gave him the notion of making it his forge. Since this cavern could not be his bedroom, it would be his workshop. To bend obstacles to your will is a great step toward success. The wind was Gilliatt's enemy: he would make it his servant.
What is said of certain men--fit for anything, good for nothing-- can be said also of cavities in rocks. They show promise, but do not fulfill their promise. One hollow in the rock looks like a bath, but the water leaks away through a crevice; another is a bedroom, but a bedroom without a ceiling; another again is a bed of moss, but the moss is wet; still another is an armchair, but an armchair of stone.
The forge that Gilliatt planned had been rough-hewn by nature; but to make himself master of nature's work and turn it to use, to transform this cavern into a laboratory, was a difficult and daunting task. With three or four large rocks shaped in the form of a funnel and ending in a narrow fissure chance had created a kind of ventilation shaft of infinitely greater power than those old bellows used in forges, fourteen feet long, that produced ninety-eight thousand inches of air with every puff. This was a very different kind of thing. The dimensions of a hurricane are beyond calculation.
This excess of power was a problem; it was difficult to regulate the strength of the blast.
The cavern had two disadvantages: it was traversed from end to end by air, and also by water. The water did not come in waves but in a continual trickle that oozed rather than flowed like a stream. The foam that was continually cast over the rocks by the surf, sometimes to a height of over a hundred feet, had filled a natural basin in the high rocks above the cavern with seawater, and the overflow from this reservoir ran over the edge of the rock in a slender waterfall about an inch in breadth, with a drop of four or five fathoms. The supply was supplemented from time to time by rain, deposited by a passing shower into this inexhaustible reservoir that was always overflowing. The water was brackish and unfit to drink, but clear. It dripped gracefully down from the tips of the confervae as if from tresses of hair.
Gilliatt conceived the idea of using this water to discipline the wind. By means of a funnel and two or three pipes quickly knocked together from planks, one of them fitted with a tap, and a large tub to serve as a lower reservoir, without checks or counterweight, but with a narrow neck above and draft tubes below, Gilliatt--who, as we have said, was a bit of a blacksmith and a bit of an engineer--devised, in place of the forge bellows that he lacked, a blower, a piece of equipment that was less perfect than what is now known as a cagniardelle, but less rudimentary than the trompe 168 once used in the Pyrenees.
He had some rye flour, which he used to make paste, and he had some untarred rope, which he teased out to make tow. With the tow and the paste and odd bits of wood he stopped up all the crevices in the rock, leaving only a narrow passage for air made from a fragment of a powder flask, used for firing the signal gun, which he had found in the Durande. This directed the air horizontally onto a large flat stone that Gilliatt made the hearth of his forge. A stopper made from an end of rope could close the air passage when required. Then Gilliatt heaped wood and coal on the hearth, struck his steel against the rock, caught the spark on a handful of tow, and when the tow blazed up used it to ignite the wood and coal.
He tried out the blower. It worked perfectly.
Gilliatt felt the pride of a Cyclops, master of air, water, and fire. He was master of the air, for he had given the wind a kind of lung, created a breathing apparatus in the granite, and converted the blast of wind into a bellows. He was master of water, for he had used the trickle of water to make a trompe. He was master of fire, for from this damp rock he had produced a flame.
Since the cavern was almost completely open to the sky, the smoke escaped freely, blackening the overhanging rock face. The rocks that had seemed forever destined to be lashed by foam now became acquainted with soot.
Gilliatt selected as his anvil a large and densely grained waterworn boulder of roughly the shape and size he wanted. It was a very dangerous base for his work, since it was liable to shatter under the blows of his hammer. One end, which was rounded and ended in a point, could serve as the cone-shaped end of a regular anvil, but there was nothing corresponding to the pyramid-shaped end. It was the ancient stone anvil of the troglodytes. The su
rface, polished by the waves, was almost as hard as steel.
Gilliatt was sorry that he had not brought his own anvil with him. Not knowing that the Durande had been cut in two by the storm, he had hoped to find the carpenter's kit of tools and the equipment that was normally kept in the forward part of the hold, but by ill luck it was the forward part of the vessel that had been carried away.
The two rock chambers that Gilliatt had won from the reef were close together. His storeroom and his forge communicated with each other.
Each evening, when his day's work was done, Gilliatt made his supper of a piece of biscuit softened in water, a sea urchin, a crab, or a few sea chestnuts--the only type of game to be found on the rocks--and then, shivering like the knotted rope, climbed up to go to bed in his hole on the Great Douvre.
The kind of abstraction in which he lived was increased by the very materiality of his occupations. Reality is an alarming thing when taken in large doses. His physical labor, with its endless variety of detail, did nothing to reduce his stupor at finding himself where he was and doing what he was doing. As a rule physical tiredness is a line that draws a man down to earth; but the very singularity of the task that Gilliatt had undertaken kept him in a kind of ideal twilight zone. He felt at times as if he were hammering away at clouds. At other times it seemed to him that his tools were weapons. He had a strange feeling that he was the object of a hidden attack that he was repelling or anticipating. In twisting strands of rope together, in unraveling threads of yarn from a sail, in joining two beams, he saw himself as fashioning engines of war. The innumerable intricate tasks involved in this salvage operation were now beginning to seem like precautions against aggression by intelligent beings that were barely concealed and highly transparent. Gilliatt did not know the words required to express ideas, but he was aware of the ideas themselves. He felt less and less like a workman and more and more like a gladiator.169 He was indeed a tamer of the elements. He almost had a perception of this. It was a strange enlargement of his spirit.
Moreover he had all around him, as far as the eye could see, the whole vast sense of wasted labor. Seeing the operation of the forces of nature in the unfathomable and the limitless, man is bewildered. He tries to divine the objects of these forces. Space, forever in motion; the tireless sea; the clouds that seem to be hurrying about their business; the whole immense, obscure effort: all these convulsions present us with a problem. What are these perpetual tremors about? What are these squalls constructing? These blasts, these sobbings, these howlings of the storm: what are they creating? What is all this tumult trying to do? The flow and ebb of these questions is as eternal as the tide. Gilliatt knew what he was doing; but he was obsessed, without understanding why, by the enigma of this agitation in the great expanse surrounding him. Unknown to himself, mechanically, imperiously, by the mere pressure of external things, and with no other effect than an unconscious and almost sullen bewilderment, Gilliatt, in his dreamy mood, assimilated his own labors to the prodigious wasted labors of the sea. For how can a man, situated as Gilliatt was, help being exposed to and seeking to understand the mystery of the dread ocean, eternally laboring? How can he help meditating, in so far as meditation is possible, on the vacillation of the waves, the furious determination of the foam, the imperceptible wearing away of the rock, the raging of the four winds? What a terrifying thought it is to contemplate this perpetual recommencement, this bottomless well the ocean, these Danaids170 the clouds, all this labor for nothing!
No, not for nothing. But only you, the Unknown, know why.
XI
A DISCOVERY
Men sometimes visit a reef near the coast, but never one in the open sea. Why should anyone go there? It is not an island; there is no food to be found there, no fruit trees, no pastureland, no livestock, no springs of fresh water. It is a place of nakedness set in a solitude. It is an expanse of rock, with steep scarps rising out on the sea and sharp-edged ridges under the water. There is nothing to be found here but shipwreck.
Reefs of this kind are strange places. There the sea is alone, and can do whatever she wants. There is no terrestrial life to trouble her. The sea is terrified of man; she mistrusts him; she conceals from him what she is and what she is doing. In a reef she feels safe; man will not come there. The monologue of the waves will not be disturbed. She works away on the reef, repairs any damage it suffers, sharpens its edges; she equips it with jagged points, renovates it, keeps it in good condition. She pierces holes in the rock, breaks up the soft rock and exposes the hard rock, strips off the flesh and leaves the bones, excavates, dissects, drills, cuts holes and channels, links up its guts, fills the reef with cells, imitates a sponge on a larger scale, hollows out the interior and sculpts the exterior. In this secret mountain that belongs to her, she constructs her caves and shrines and palaces. She has her own hideous and splendid vegetation, composed of floating grasses that bite and monsters that take root; and she hides this terrible magnificence in the darkness of the water. On an isolated reef there is no one watching her, spying on her, disturbing her; she can develop at her ease the mysterious side of her being that is inaccessible to man. There she deposits her horrible, living secretions. All the unknowns of the sea are to be found there.
Promontories, capes, land's ends, nazes, shoal rocks, and reefs are constructed features. Their formation by geology counts for little compared with their formation by the ocean. Reefs--those habitations of the waves, those pyramids and syrinxes171--are examples of a mysterious form of art that the author of this book has elsewhere called the art of nature, and have a kind of enormous style of their own. What is in fact the result of chance appears deliberate. These structures are of many forms. They have the intricate pattern of a colony of polyps, the sublimity of a cathedral, the extravagance of a pagoda, the vastness of a mountain, the delicacy of a jewel, the horror of a sepulchre. They have as many cells as a wasps' nest, as many dens as a menagerie, as many tunnels as a warren of moles, as many ambuscades as an army camp. They have gates, but the gates are barricaded; columns, but they are truncated; towers, but they are out of true; bridges, but they are broken. Their various compartments are strictly reserved: this one for birds, that one for fish, with no admission for outsiders. Their architectural forms are in constant transformation, they contradict each other, they affirm the laws of statics or repudiate them, they break off sharply, they stop short, they begin as an archivolt and end as an architrave; block is piled on block; the builder at work here is Enceladus.172 Here an extraordinary dynamic force displays its problems, all resolved. Terrifying pendentives threaten to fall, but do not fall. It is difficult to see how these vertiginous structures stand at all. Everywhere there are overhangs, imbalances, gaps, masses hanging crazily in the air. The laws governing this architectural Babelism cannot be discerned; the Unknown, that tremendous architect, calculates none of its effects, but succeeds in everything it does. The rocks, built up in confusion, form a monstrous monument; there is no logic in its structure, but it achieves a vast equilibrium. Here there is more than stability: there is eternity. But there is also disorder. The granite seems to have taken on the tumultuous movement of the waves. A reef is the tempest turned to stone. Nothing is more awe-inspiring than this wild architecture, forever on the point of collapse, forever holding firm. All these features support one another, and at the same time act against one another. It is a conflict between opposing lines that results in the construction of an edifice; a work created by collaboration between two hostile forces, the ocean and the hurricane.
This architecture sometimes produces masterpieces, of dread effect. One such was the Douvres reef. It had been constructed and perfected by the sea with formidable love, and was now being groomed by the jealous waves. It was hideous, treacherous, dark, and full of cavities. It had a whole venous system of underwater holes ramifying to unfathomable depths. Several of the entrances to this labyrinth of passages were exposed at low tide. They could be entered; but anyone who entered did so at
his own risk.
For the purposes of his salvage operation Gilliatt found it necessary to explore these caverns. Each one he entered was terrifying. In all of them he found, reproduced on the exaggerated scale of the ocean, the atmosphere of a slaughterhouse and of butchery that was so strangely marked in the gap between the two Douvres. Only those who have seen these ghastly frescoes painted by nature on the eternal granite walls of such caverns can have any idea of what they are like. These cruel caverns, too, were deceitful; it was unsafe to linger in them. The high tide filled them up to their roofs.
There was an abundance of sea lice and other seafood in these caverns. They were obstructed by waterworn boulders, piled up to the vaulting of the roof. Many of them weighed over a ton. They were of all sizes and colors. Most of them appeared bloodred; some of them, covered with hairy, sticky confervae, were like large green moles burrowing into the rock.
Several of the caverns came to a dead end in a kind of apse. Others, arteries for some mysterious traffic, continued into the rock in black and tortuous fissures: these were the streets of the abyss. These fissures grew steadily narrower, at length leaving no room for a man to pass. A lighted torch revealed only dark rock walls dripping with moisture.
Once Gilliatt, ferreting about in the cavern, ventured into one of these fissures. The tide was at a level that made it safe to do so. It was a fine, calm, sunny day. No disturbance in the sea that might have made it more dangerous was to be feared.
As we have said, two necessities led Gilliatt to undertake these explorations: he wanted to look for any pieces of wreckage that might be useful in the work of salvage and to find crabs and crayfish to supplement his food supply. The shellfish on the Douvres were beginning to run out.