The Toilers of the Sea (27 page)

III

SOUND, BUT NOT SAFE

Gilliatt had not expected to find only half of the vessel. Nothing in the account by the skipper of the
Shealtiel,
which had been so exact and detailed, had given any indication that the Durande had split in two. The break had probably taken place when the skipper heard a “devil of a crash.” No doubt he had been some distance away when the final blast of wind struck, and what he had thought was merely a heavy sea had in fact been a waterspout. Later, when he had drawn closer to observe the wreck, he had been able to see only the forward part of the vessel, the rest—that is, the wide break that had separated the bow from the stern—having been concealed from him by the enclosing rocks.

In other respects the skipper of the
Shealtiel
had reported the position accurately. The hull of the Durande was lost, but the engines were intact.

Such chances are common in shipwrecks, as they are in fires. The logic of disaster escapes us.

The masts had snapped off and fallen, but the funnel was not even bent; the heavy iron plating on which the engines were based had preserved them intact, in one piece. The planking of the paddle boxes had been torn apart like the slats of a venetian blind, but in the gaps thus left it could be seen that the two wheels were sound, with only one or two blades missing.

In addition to the engines, the main capstan in the stern had survived. It still had its chain, and, solidly mounted on heavy beams, could still be of service, provided that the strain on the voyal did not split the planking. The flooring of the deck was giving way almost everywhere; all this part of the structure was decidedly shaky.

The section of the hull caught between the two Douvres, however, was firmly fixed, as we have seen, and appeared to be holding together.

There was something derisory in the preservation of the engines that added to the irony of the catastrophe. The somber malice of the unknown sometimes finds expression in such bitter mockeries. The engines were saved, but at the same time they were lost. The ocean was preserving them only to destroy them at leisure, as a cat plays with a mouse. They were going to suffer a long death agony, gradually falling to pieces. They were to be a toy for the savage play of the foam. They would shrink day by day and, as it were, melt away. But what could be done to prevent this? It seemed madness even to imagine that this heavy piece of machinery, massive but also delicate, condemned to immobility by its weight, exposed in this solitude to the forces of demolition, delivered up by the reef to the discretion of the winds and the waves, could, in this implacable setting, escape gradual destruction.

The Durande was held prisoner by the Douvres. How could she be extricated? How could she be liberated? For a man to escape is difficult enough; how much more of a problem it is for a piece of machinery!

IV

A PRELIMINARY SURVEY

Gilliatt was surrounded by urgent tasks. The most immediately pressing was to find a place to moor the paunch and some kind of lodging for himself.

The Durande having settled down more to port than to starboard, the right-hand paddle box was higher than the left-hand one.

Gilliatt climbed onto the right-hand paddle box. From there he could look down on the rocks below; and, although the channel through them changed direction several times beyond the Douvres, he was able to study the plan of the reef. This was his first concern.

As we have already noted, the Douvres were like two tall gable-ends marking the narrow entrance to a lane flanked by low granite cliffs with sheer vertical faces. It is not uncommon to find singular corridors such as this, seeming as if hewn by an ax, in ancient submarine rock formations.

This very tortuous defile was never without water, even at low tide. There was always a turbulent current flowing through it from end to end. The sharpness of its turnings was good or bad, depending on the direction of the wind: sometimes it disconcerted the waves and reduced their violence; sometimes it exasperated them. The latter effect was more frequent. An obstacle infuriates the sea and drives it into excesses; the foam thus produced is an exaggerated form of the waves. In such narrow passages a storm wind is similarly compressed and feels the same malignant fury. It is a case of the tempest suffering from strangury.
¹⁵⁹
The violent wind is still violent but is more narrowly concentrated. It is both a club and a spear. It pierces at the same time as it crushes. It is a hurricane compressed into a draft.

The two lines of rock bordering this street in the sea gradually decreased in height and disappeared together under the waves at some distance beyond the Douvres. At the far end was another gorge, lower than the one at the Douvres but still narrower, which was the eastern entrance to the defile. The two ridges of rock evidently continued under the water to the rock called the Homme, which stood like a square citadel at the far end of the reef. At low tide, as it was when Gilliatt was surveying the scene, they could be seen continuing all the way, sometimes just under the water, sometimes just emerging from it.

The whole reef was bounded and buttressed in the east by the Homme and in the west by the two Douvres. In a bird's-eye view it would be seen as a long chaplet of jagged rocks winding its way between the Douvres and the Homme.

The Douvres reef, taken as a whole, was constituted by the emergence of two gigantic sheets of granite, almost touching each other, rising vertically to form the crests of peaks in the depths of the ocean—immense offshoots of the abyss. Winds and waves had fretted out this crest and patterned it like the teeth of a saw. All that was visible on the surface was the top of the formation, the reef. What was concealed by the sea must have been enormous. The narrow passage into which the Durande had been cast by the storm was the gap between these two colossal sheets of rock.

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 Toluca
¹⁶¹
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 earthquake
¹⁶³
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 this 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.