The Toilers of the Sea (29 page)

Probably the Great Douvre was their usual lodging and they were coming back to it for the night. Gilliatt had taken a room in it, and they were alarmed by this unexpected fellow lodger. A man on the Great Douvre: they had never seen such a thing before.

This agitated flight lasted for some time. They seemed to be waiting for Gilliatt to go away. Gilliatt watched them with a thoughtful air.

Finally they appeared to make up their mind; the circle suddenly broke up and turned into a spiral, and the whole flock flew off and settled on the Homme, at the other end of the reef. There it sounded as if they were discussing and deliberating on the matter. For a long time, as Gilliatt lay down in his granite sheath, taking a stone for his pillow, he heard the birds chattering to one another, each in turn. Then they fell quiet, and everyone slept, the birds on their rock and Gilliatt on his.

VIII

IMPORTUNAEQUE VOLUCRES
¹⁶⁷

Gilliatt slept well. But he was cold, and this woke him from time to time. He had naturally put his feet at the far end of the recess and his head at the entrance; but he had not taken the trouble to remove from his bed a quantity of sharp-edged pebbles that did little to improve his sleep. Occasionally he half opened his eyes. Every now and then he heard a deep boom: it was the rising tide entering sea caves on the reef with a noise like the discharge of a cannon.

All the circumstances of his present position had the unnatural effect of a vision; he was surrounded by chimeras. In the state of bewilderment that comes with the night, he felt himself plunged into a world of impossibilities. He thought: “It is all a dream.”

Then he would fall asleep again and, now really dreaming, found himself at the Bû de la Rue, at Les Bravées, at St. Sampson; he heard Déruchette singing; he was back in the real world.

While he was asleep he thought that he was awake and living his life; when he woke up he thought he was asleep. And indeed he was now living in a dream.

In the middle of the night there was a great rumbling in the sky, of which Gilliatt was dimly conscious in his sleep. Probably it was the wind rising.

Once when he awoke, feeling cold, he opened his eyes rather wider than he had done so far. There were great clouds at the zenith; the moon was fleeing, and a large star was running after her.

Gilliatt's mind was full of the diffused perceptions of a dream, and this enlargement of his dreams was mingled in confusion with the eerie landscapes of the night.

At daybreak he was frozen, but he was sound asleep.

The suddenness of dawn roused him from this sleep, which was perhaps dangerous. The recess in which he was lying faced the rising sun.

Gilliatt yawned, stretched, and emerged quickly from his hole. He had been sleeping so soundly that he did not at first realize where he was. Gradually the feeling of reality returned, and he exclaimed: “Time for breakfast!”

The weather was calm, the sky cold and clear. There were no clouds; the winds of the night had swept the horizon clean, and the sun was rising. Another fine day was beginning. Gilliatt had a feeling of elation.

He took off his oilskins and leggings, rolled them up in the sheepskin, with the fleece inside, tied the bundle up with a length of rope, and pushed it to the back of his lair, out of reach of any rain that might fall.

He made his bed: that is to say, he removed the pebbles. Then he slid down the rope to the deck of the Durande and went to the recess in the rock where he had left his basket of provisions.

The basket was not there. It had been just at the edge of the recess, and the wind that had risen during the night had blown it off and cast it into the sea.

The elements had declared their intention of defending themselves. In seeking out the basket the wind had shown both deliberate purpose and ill will.

Hostilities had begun. Gilliatt realized this at once.

To those who live with the surly familiarity of the sea, it is difficult not to regard the wind as a person and the rocks as living creatures.

Now Gilliatt's only resource, in addition to his stock of biscuit and rye flour, was the shellfish that had been the only nourishment of the man who had died of hunger on the Homme. There was no prospect of catching fish, which dislike turbulence and avoid rocks. There is no profit for fishermen in fishing amid reefs, whose sharp-edged rocks merely tear holes in their nets.

Gilliatt ate a few sea lice, which he prized off the rock with great difficulty, almost breaking his knife in the process.

While he was eating this scanty meal he became aware of a curious commotion on the sea, and looked around. A flock of gulls had swooped down on one of the lower rocks, beating their wings, knocking each other over, screaming and shrieking. They were all swarming noisily at the same spot. This horde of beaks and talons was pillaging something.

That something was Gilliatt's basket. It had been cast by the wind on a sharp-edged rock and had burst open, and the birds had flocked to the scene. They were carrying off in their beaks all kinds of fragments of food. Gilliatt recognized in the distance his smoked beef and his salt fish.

The birds, too, were joining battle and were carrying out their own reprisals. Gilliatt had taken their lodging; they were taking his supper.

IX

THE REEF, AND HOW TO MAKE USE OF IT

A week passed.

Although it was a rainy time of year there was no rain, and for this Gilliatt was thankful. What he was undertaking was, in appearance at least, beyond human strength. Success was so unlikely that the attempt seemed madness.

It is only when you get down to a task that the obstacles and dangers become apparent. You have to begin in order to see how difficult it is going to be to finish. Every beginning is a battle against resistance. The first step you make in an enterprise inexorably reveals what it entails. The difficulty to which we set our hands pricks like a thorn.

Gilliatt was at once faced with obstacles. To raise the Durande's engines from the wreck, in which they were three parts buried—to attempt, with any prospect of success, such a task of salvage, in such a place and at such a season of the year—seemed to call for a whole team of men, and Gilliatt was alone; it called for a whole range of woodworking and engineering equipment, and Gilliatt had only a saw, an ax, a chisel, and a hammer; it called for a good workshop and shed to work in, and Gilliatt had not even a roof over his head; it called for a supply of provisions, and Gilliatt had not even a loaf of bread.

Anyone who had seen Gilliatt working on the reef during this first week would not have understood what he was about. It looked as if he was no longer thinking about the Durande or the two Douvres. He was concerned only with what was lying about on the rocks; he seemed to be absorbed in salvaging small items of wreckage. He took advantage of every low tide to scour the reef for anything that the shipwreck had left there. He went from rock to rock collecting whatever the sea had deposited—scraps of sailcloth, ends of rope, pieces of iron, fragments of paneling, shattered planking, broken yards; here a beam, there a chain, elsewhere a pulley.

At the same time he was studying every recess and crevice on the reef. None of them was habitable; to his great disappointment, for he had been cold in his hole among the rocks on the summit of the Great Douvre, and he would have been glad to find a better garret to lodge in.

Two of these recesses were of some size. Although the rock floors were almost all sloping and uneven, it was possible to stand upright and to walk about in them. The wind and the rain had unrestricted access, but they were out of reach of the highest tides. They were near the Little Douvre, and could be entered at any time of day. Gilliatt decided that one of them would be a storeroom and the other a forge.

With all the lacings and earings that he could collect he parceled up the smaller fragments of wreckage, tying the pieces of wood and iron into bundles, making parcels of canvas, and lashing everything carefully together. As the rising tide floated these bundles off the rocks, he dragged them to his storeroom. In a crevice in the rock he had found a mast rope with which he was able to haul even large pieces of timber. In the same fashion he recovered from the sea the many lengths of chain scattered about among the rocks.

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 surface, 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 Danaids
¹⁷⁰
the clouds, all this labor for nothing!

No, not for nothing. But only you, the Unknown, know why.