 Section 17 of The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. On their part it was with wild jubilee and delight that those on board the hooker saw the hostile lamb recede and lessen behind them. By degrees the dark ring of ocean rose higher, dwarfing in twilight Portland, Purebeck, Tynum, Kimmeridge, the Metrivers, the long streaks of dim cliffs, and the coast dotted with lighthouses. The sun disappeared. The fugitives had now nothing round them but the sea. All at once night grew awful. There was no longer extent nor space. The sky became blackness and closed in round the vessel. The snow began to fall slowly. A few flakes appeared. They might have been ghosts. Nothing else was visible in the course of the wind. They felt as if yielded up. A snare lurked in every possibility. It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the polar water spout makes its appearance. A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over ocean, and in places its levidity adhered to the waves. Some of these adherences resembled pouches with holes. In the sea, disgorging vapor and refilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew up cones of foam on the sea. The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meet it. The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other. In the first mad shock not a sail was clued up, not a jib lowered, not a reef taken in. So much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked, and bent back as if in fear. Cyclones in our northern hemisphere circle from left to right, in the same direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which is sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely at the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved, as if she were out in a moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her head on to the rollers with the wind brought on the bow, so as to avoid being pooped or caught broadside on. This semi-prudence would have availed her nothing in case of the winds shifting and taking her aback. A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance. The roar of the abyss, nothing can be compared to it. It is the great brutish howl of the universe, what we call matter, that unsearchable organism. The amalgamation of incommensurable energies, in which can occasionally be detected an almost imperceptible degree of intention, which makes us shudder, that blind, benighted cosmos, that enigmatico pan, has a cry, a strange cry, prolonged, obstinate, and continuous, which is less than speech and more than thunder. That cry is the hurricane. Other voices, songs, melodies, clamors, tones, proceed from nests, from broods, from pairings, from nuptials, from homes. This one, a trumpet, comes out of the knot, which is all. Other voices express the soul of the universe. This one expresses the monster. It is the howl of the formless. It is the inarticulate, finding utterance in the indefinite. The thing, it is full of pathos and terror. Those clamors, converse above and beyond man. They rise, fall, undulate, determine waves of sound, form all sorts of wild surprises for the mind, now burst close to the ear, with the importunity of appeal of trumpets, now assail us with the rumbling hoarseness of distance. Giddy uproar, which resembles a language, and which in fact is a language. It is the effort with which the world makes to speak. It is the lisping of the wonderful. When this wail is manifested, vaguely all that the vast dark palpitation endures, suffers, accepts, rejects. For the most part it talks nonsense. It is like an excess of chronic sickness, and rather an epilepsy diffused than a force employed. We fancy that we are witnessing the descent of supreme evil into the infinite. At moments we seem to discern a reclamation of the elements, some vain effort of chaos, to reassert itself over creation. At times it is a complaint. The void bewails and justifies itself. It is as the pleading of the world's cause. We can fancy the universe is engaged in a lawsuit. We listen. We try to grasp the reasons given, the redoubtable for and against. Such a moaning of the shadows has the tenacity of a syllogism. Here is a vast trouble for thought. Here is the raison d'etre of mythologies and polytheisms. To the terror of those great murmurs are added superhuman outlines, melting away as they appear, humanities, which are almost distinct, throats of furies shaped in the clouds, plutonium, chimeras almost defined. No horrors equal those sobs, those laughs, those tricks of tummelt, those inscrutable questions and answers, those appeals to unknown aid. Man knows not what to become in the presence of that awful incantation. He bows under the enigma of those draconian intonations. What latent meaning have they? What do they signify? What do they threaten? What do they implore? It would seem as though all bonds were loosened. Positurations from precipice to precipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from rain to the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from stars to the foam, the abyss unmuzzled. Such is that tummelt complicated by some mysterious strife with evil consciences. The locosity of night is not less lugubrious than its silence. One feels it in the anger of the unknown. Night is a presence, presence of what? For that matter we must distinguish between night and the shadows. In the night there is the absolute, in the darkness the multiple. Grammar, logic as it is, admits of no singular for the shadows. The night is one, the shadows are many. This mist of nocturnal mystery is the scattered, the fugitive, the crumbling, the fatal. One feels earth no longer, one feels the other reality. When the shadow, infinite and indefinite, lives something or someone, that which lives there forms a part of our death. After our earthly passage, when the shadow shall be light for us, the life which is beyond our life shall seize us. Meanwhile it appears to touch and try us. Obscurity is a pressure. Night is, as it were, a hand placed on our soul. As certain hideous and solemn hours we feel that which is beyond the wall of the tomb encroaching on us. Never does this proximity of the unknown seem more eminent than in storms at sea. The horrible combines with the fantastic, the possible interrupter of human actions, the old cloud-compeller, has in his power to mould, in whatsoever shape he chooses, the inconsistent element, the limitless incoherence, the force diffused and undecided of aim. That mystery, the tempest every instant accepts and executes some unknown changes of will, apparent or real. Poets have in all ages called this the caprice of the waves. But there is no such thing as caprice. The disconcerting enigmas, which in nature we call caprice, and in human life chants, are splinters of a law revealed to us in glimpses. In 18 of The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. The characteristic of the snowstorm is its blackness. Nature's habitual aspect during a storm. The earth or sea black and the sky paled, is reversed. The sky is black, the ocean white, foam below darkness above, a horizon walled in with smoke, a zenith roofed with crepe. The tempest resembles a cathedral, hung with mourning, but no light in that cathedral, no phantom lights on the crests of the waves, no spark, no phosphorescence, not but a huge shadow. The polar cyclone differs from the tropical cyclone in as much as the one sets fire to every light, and the other extinguishes them all. The world is suddenly converted into the arched vault of a cave. Out of the night falls a dust of pale spots, which hesitate between sky and sea. These spots, which are flakes of snow, slip, wander and flow. It is like the tears of a winding sheet, putting themselves into lifelike motion. A mad wind mingles with this dissemination. Blackness crumbling in the whiteness, the furies into the obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind under a cataflok. Such is the snowstorm. Underneath trembles the ocean, forming and reforming over portentous unknown depths. In the polar wind, which is electrical, the flakes turn suddenly into hailstones, and the air becomes filled with projectiles. The water crackles, shot with grape. No thunder strokes, the lightning of the boreal storm is silent. What is sometimes said of the cat, it swears, may be applied to this lightning. It is a menace, proceeding from a mouth half open, and strangely inexorable. The snowstorm is a storm blind and dumb. When it has passed the ships are often blind, and the sailors dumb. To escape from such an abyss is difficult. It would be wrong, however, to believe shipwreck to be absolutely inevitable. The Danish fisherman of Disco, Anne, the Balsine, the seekers of Black Whales, hern steering towards Bering Strait, to discover the mouth of the Coppermine River, Hudson, Mackenzie, Vancouver, Ross, Dumont, De Urville, all underwent at the pole itself the wildest hurricanes, and escaped out of them. It was into this description of Tempest that the Hooker had entered, triumphant, and in full sail, frenzy against frenzy. When Montgomery, escaping from Rouen, through his galley, with all the force of its oars against the chain barring the Sain at Laboulay, he showed similar affrontery. The Matutina sailed on fast. She bent so much under her sails that at moments she made a fierceful angle with a seize of fifteen degrees, but her good-bellied keel adhered to the water as if glued to it. The keel resisted the grasp of the hurricane. The lantern at the prowl cast its light ahead. The cloud, full of winds, dragging its tumor over the deep, cramped and beat more and more into the sea round the Hooker. Not a gull, not a sea-moo, nothing but snow. The expanse of the field of waves was becoming contracted and terrible. Only three or four gigantic ones were visible. Now and then a tremendous flash of lightning of red copper color broke out behind the obscure superposition of the horizon and the zenith that sudden release of a million flame revealed the horror of the clouds. That abrupt conflagration of the depths to which for an instant the first tears of clouds and the distant boundaries of the celestial chaos seemed to adhere placed the abyss in perspective. On this ground of fire the snowflakes showed black. They might have been compared to dark butterflies flying about in a furnace. Then all was extinguished. The first explosion over, the squall, still pursuing the Hooker, began the roar in thorough base. This phase of grumbling is the perilous diminution of uproar. Everything is so terrifying as this monologue of the storm. This gloomy recitative appears to serve as a moment of rest to the mysterious combating forces and indicates a species of patrol kept in the unknown. The Hooker held wildly on her course her two main sails especially were doing fearful work. The sky and sea were as of ink, with jets of foam running higher than the mast. Every instant masses of water swept the deck like a deluge, and at each roll of the vessel the haws holes, now to the starboard, now to the larboard, became as so many open mouths, vomiting back the foam into the sea. The women had taken refuge in the cabin, but the men remained on deck. The blinding snow eddyed round, the spitting surge mingled with it. All was fury. At that moment the chief of the band, standing abaffed on the stern frames, holding on with one hand to the shrouds, and with the other, taking off the kerchief he wore round his head, and waving it in the light of the lantern. Gay and arrogant with pride in his face, and his hair in wild disorder, intoxicated by all the darkness cried out, We are free. Free, free, free, echoed the fugitives, and the band, seizing hold of the rigging, rose up on deck. Hurrah shouted the chief, and the band shouted in the storm, Hurrah! Just as this clamor was dying away in the tempest, a loud, solemn voice rose from the other end of the vessel, saying, Silence! All turned their heads. The darkness was thick, and the doctor was leaning against the mast, so that he seemed a part of it, and they could not see him. The voice spoke again, Listen! All were silent. Then did they distinctly hear, through the darkness, the toll of a bell? Chapter 9 The charge confided to a raging sea. The skipper at the helm burst out, laughing, A bell that's good. We are on the larbored tack. What does that bell prove? Why, that we have land to the starboard. The firm and measured voice of the doctor replied, You have not land to the starboard. But we have, shouted the skipper, No. But that bell tolls from the land. That bell said to the doctor, Tolls from the sea. The shudder passed over these daring men. The haggard faces of the two women appeared above the companion, like two hobgoblins conjured up. The doctor took a step forward, separating his tall form from the mast. From the depth of the night's darkness came the toll of the bell. The doctor resumed. There is, in the midst of the sea, Halfway between Portland and the Channel Islands, a buoy, placed there, has a caution, that buoy is moored by chains to the shoal, and floats on the top of the water. On the buoy is fixed an iron trestle. Across the trestle a bell is hung. In bad weather heavy seas toss the buoy and the bell rings. That is the bell you hear. The doctor paused to allow an extra violent gust of wind to pass over, wait it until the sound of the bell reasserted itself, and then went on. To hear that bell in a storm, when the Norwester is blowing, is to be lost. Wherefore, for this reason, if you hear the bell, it is because the wind brings it to you. But the wind is Norwesterly, and the breakers of RNG lie east. You hear the bell only because you are between the buoy and the breakers. It is on those breakers the wind is driving you. You are on the wrong side of the buoy. If you were on the right side you would be out at sea on a safe course, and you would not hear the bell. The wind would not convey the sound to you. You would pass close to the buoy without knowing it. We are out of our course. The bell is shipwreck sounding the toxin. Now look out. As the doctor spoke, the bell, soothed by the lull of the storm, rang slowly stroke by stroke, and its intermittent toll seemed to testify to the truth of the old man's words. It was as the knell of the abyss. All listened breathless, now to the voice, now to the bell. Section 20 of The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo Part 1 Book II Chapter X The Colossal Savage, The Storm In the meantime the skipper had caught up his speaking trumpet. Strike every sail, my lads. Let go the sheets. Man the downhalls. Lower ties and brails. Let us steer to the west. Let us regain the high sea. Head for the buoy. Steer for the bell. There's an offing down there. We've yet a chance. Try said the doctor. Let us remark here, by the way, that this ringing buoy, a kind of bell-tower on the deep, was removed in 1802. There are yet alive very old mariners who remember hearing it. It forewarned, but rather too late. The orders of the skipper were obeyed. The langadosian made a third sailor, all bore a hand. Not satisfied with bralling up, they furled the sails, lashed the earrings, secured the clue lines, bunt lines, and leech lines, and clapped preventer shrouds on the block straps which thus might serve as backstays. They fished the mast. They batten down the ports and bullseyes, which is a method of walling up a ship. These evolutions, though executed in a luberly fashion, were nevertheless thoroughly effective. The hooker was stripped to bare poles. But in proportion, as the vessel, stowing every stitch of canvas, became more helpless, the havoc of both winds and waves increased. The seas ran mountains high. The hurricane, like an executioner, hastening to his victim, began to dismember the craft. There came, in the twinkling of an eye, a dreadful crash. The top sails were blown from the bolt-ropes. The chest-trees were hewn asunder. The deck was swept clear. The shrouds were carried away. The mast went by the board. All the lumber of the wreck was flying in shivers. The main shrouds gave out, although they were turned in, and stopped to four phantoms. The magnetic currents common to snowstorms hastened the destruction of the rigging. It broke as much from the effect of effluvium as the violence of the wind. Most of the chain gear, fouled in the blocks, ceased to work. Forward the boughs after the quarters quivered under the terrific shocks. One wave washed overboard the compass and its pinnacle. A second carried away the boat, which, like a box slung under a carriage, had been in accordance with the quaint Austerian custom, last to the bowsprit. The third breaker wrenched off the spritzale yard. A fourth swept away the figurehead and signal light. The rudder only was left. To replace the ship's bow lantern they set fire to and suspended at the stem a large block of wood covered with oakum and tar. The mast, broken in two, all bristling with quivering splinters, ropes, blocks, and yards, cumbered the deck. In falling it had stove in a plank of the starboard gunnel. The skipper, still firm at the helm, shouted, While we can steer we yet have a chance. The lower planks hold good, axes, axes, overboard with the mast, clear the decks. Both crew and passengers worked with the excitement of despair. A few strokes of the hatchets and it was done. They pushed the mast over the side. The deck was cleared. Now continued the skipper, take a rope's end and lash me to the helm. To the tiller they bound him. While they were fastening him he laughed and shouted, Blow, old hurdy-gurdy, bellow, I have seen your equal off a cape matche-chacho. And when secured he clutched the helm with that strange hilarity which danger awakens. All goes well, my lads. Long live the lady of Bublos. Let us steer west. An enormous wave came down a beam and fell on the vessel's quarter. There is always in storms a tiger-like wave, a billow fierce and decisive, which attaining a certain height creeps horizontally over the surface of the waters for a time, then rises, roars, rages, and falling on the distressed vessel tears it limb from limb. A cloud of foam covered the entire poop of the Matutina. There was heard above the confusion of darkness and waters a crash. When the spray cleared off, when the stern rose again in view, the skipper and the helm had disappeared. Both had been swept away. The helm and the man they had just secured to it had passed with a wave into the hissing turmoil of the hurricane. The chief of the band, gazing intently into the darkness, shouted, To this defiant exclamation there followed another cry. Let go the anchor, save the skipper. They rushed to the capstan and let go the anchor. Hookers carry but one, in this case the anchor reached the bottom, but only to be lost. The bottom was of the hardest rock. The billows were raging with resistless force. The cable snapped like a thread. The anchor lay at the bottom of the sea. At the cut water there remained but the cable end protruding from the haw's hole. From this moment the hooker became a wreck. The Matutina was irrevocably disabled. The vessel, just before in full sail, and almost formidable in her speed was now helpless. All her evolutions were uncertain and executed at random. She yielded passively and like a log to the greprecious fury of the waves. That in a few minutes there should be in place of an eagle, a useless cripple. Such a transformation is to be witnessed only at sea. The howling of the wind became more and more frightful. A hurricane has terrible lungs. It makes unceasingly mournful additions to the darkness which cannot be intensified. The bell on the sea rang despairingly, as if told by a weird hand. The Matutina drifted like a cork at the mercy of the waves. She sailed no longer. She merely floated. Every moment she seemed about to turn over on her back like a dead fish. The good condition and perfectly watertight state of the hull alone saved her from this disaster. Below the water line not a plank had started. There was not a cranny chink nor crack, and she had not made a single drop of water in the hold. This was lucky, as the pump, being out of water, was useless. The hooker pitched and roared frightfully in the seething billows. The vessel had throes, as of sickness, and seemed to be trying to belch forth the unhappy crew. Helpless they clung to the standing rigging, to the transoms, to the shank painters, to the gaskets, to the broken planks, the protruding nails of which tore their hands, to the warped riders, and to all the rugged projections of the stumps of the masts. From time to time they listened. The toll of the bell came over the water's fainter and fainter. One would have thought that it was also in distress. Its ringing was no more than an intermittent rattle. Then this rattle died away. Where were they, at what distance from the buoy? The sound of the bell had frightened them, its silence terrified them. The northwester drove them forward in perhaps a fatal course. They felt themselves waft on by maddening and ever-recurring gusts of wind. The wreck sped forward in the darkness. There is nothing more fearful than being hurried forward, blindfold. They felt the abyss before them, over them, under them. It was no longer a run, it was a rush. Suddenly, through the appalling density of the snowstorm, there loomed a red light. A lighthouse cried the crew. End of Section 20. Recording by Richard Kilmer, Rio Medina, Texas. Chapter 11 The Cascades It was indeed the casket's light. A lighthouse of the nineteenth century is a high cylinder of masonry, surmounted by scientifically constructed machinery for throwing light. The casket's lighthouse, in particular, is a triple-white tower, bearing three light-rooms. These three chambers revolve on clockwork wheels, with such precision that the man on watch, who sees them from sea, can invariably take ten steps during their irradiation, and twenty-five during their eclipse. Everything is based on the focal plan, and on the rotation of the octagon drum, formed of eight wide, simple lenses in range, having above and below it two series of diopteric rings, an algebraic gear secured from the effects of the beating of winds and waves by glass a millimeter thick, yet sometimes broken by the sea eagles, which dash themselves like great moths against these gigantic lanterns. The building which encloses and sustains this mechanism, and in which it is set, is also mathematically constructed. Everything about it is plain, exact, bare, precise, correct. A lighthouse is a mathematical figure. In the seventeenth century, a lighthouse was a sort of plume of the land on the seashore. The architecture of a lighthouse tower was magnificent and extravagant. It was covered with balconies, balusters, lodges, alcoves, weathercocks. Nothing but masks, statues, foliage, volutes, reliefs, figures large and small, medallions with inscriptions. Pax and Bello, said the Eddystone lighthouse. We may as well observe, by the way, that this declaration of peace did not always disarm the ocean. Winstonley repeated it on a lighthouse which he constructed at his own expense, on a wild spot near Plymouth. The tower being finished he shut himself up in it to have it tried by the tempest. The storm came and carried off the lighthouse and Winstonley in it. Such excessive adornment gave too great a hold to the hurricane, as generals too brilliantly equipped in battle draw the enemy's fire. Besides whimsical designs in stone, they were loaded with whimsical designs in iron, copper, and wood. The ironwork was in relief, the woodwork stood out. On the sides of the lighthouse they are jetted out, clinging to the walls among the arabesques, engines of every description, useful and useless, windlasses, tackles, pulleys, counterpoises, ladders, cranes, grappinals. On the pinnacle around the light delicately wrought ironwork held great iron chandeliers, in which were placed pieces of rope steeped in resin, wicks which burned doggedly, and which no wind extinguished. And from top to bottom the tower was covered by a complication of sea standards, bandaroles, banners, flags, penins, colors which rose from stage to stage, from story to story, a medley of all hues, all shapes, all heraldic devices, all signals, all confusion, up to the light chamber making in the storm a gay riot of tatters about the blaze. That insolent light on the brink of the abyss showed like a defiance, an inspired shipwrecked man with the spirit of daring, but the casket's light was not after this fashion. It was at that period merely an old barbarous lighthouse, such as Henry I had built it after the loss of the white ship, a flaming pile of wood under an iron trellis, a brazier behind a railing, a head of hair flaming in the wind. The only improvement made in this lighthouse since the twelfth century was a pair of forged bellows worked by an indented pendulum and a stone weight, which had been added to the light chamber in sixteen ten. The fate of the sea-birds who chanced to fly against these old lighthouses was more tragic than those of our days. The birds dashed against them, attracted by the light, and fell into the brazier, where they could be seen struggling like black spirits in a hell, and at times they would fall back again between the railings upon the rock, red-hot, smoking, lame, blind, like half-burnt flies out of a lamp. To a full-rigged ship in good trim, answering readily to the pilot's handling, the casket's light is useful. It cries, look out! It warns her of the shoal. To a disabled ship it is simply terrible. The hull paralyzed and inert, without resistance, without defense against the impulse of the storm, or the mad heaving of the waves, a fish without fins, a bird without wings, can but go where the wind wills. The lighthouse shows the end, points out the spot where it is doomed to disappear, throws light upon the burial. It is the torch of the sepulcher. To light up the inexorable chasm. To warn against the inevitable. What more tragic mockery! CHAPTER XII. The wretched people in distress, on board the Matutina, understood at once the mysterious derision which mocked their shipwreck. The appearance of the lighthouse raised their spirits at first, then overwhelmed them. Nothing could be done, nothing attempted. What has been said of kings we may say of the waves. We are their people, we are their prey. All that they rave must be borne. The Norwester was driving the hooker on the caskets. They were nearing them. No evasion was possible. They drifted rapidly towards the reef. They felt that they were getting into shallow waters. The lead, if they could have thrown it to any purpose, would not have shown more than three or four fathoms. The shipwrecked people heard the dull sound of the waves being sucked within the submarine caves of the steep rock. They made out, under the lighthouse, like a dark cutting between two plates of granite, the narrow passage of the ugly, wild-looking little harbor, supposed to be full of the skeletons of men and carcasses of ships. It looked like the mouth of a cavern, rather than the entrance of a port. They could hear the crackling of the pile on high within the iron grating. A ghastly purple illuminated the storm. The collision of the rain and hail disturbed the mist. The black cloud and the red-flamed thought, serpent against serpent, live ashes, reft by the wind, flew from the fire and the sudden assaults of the sparks seemed to drive the snowflakes before them. The breakers, blurred at first in outline, now stood out in bold relief, a medley of rocks with peaks, crests, and vertebrae. The angles were formed by strongly marked red lines, and the inclined planes in blood-like streams of light. As they neared it, the outline of the reefs increased and rose, sinister. One of the women, the Irish woman, told her beads wildly. In place of the skipper who was the pilot remained the chief, who was the captain. The Basques all know the mountain and the sea. They are bold on the precipice and inventive in catastrophes. They neared the cliff. They were about to strike. Suddenly they were so close to the great north rock of the caskets that it shut out the lighthouse from them. They saw nothing but the rock and the red light behind it. The huge rock looming in the mist was like the gigantic black woman with a hood of fire. That ill-famed rock is called the Byblit. It faces the north side of the reef, which on the south is faced by another ridge. Le'etak a gilmé. The chief looked at the Byblit and shouted, A man with the will to take a rope to the rock. Who can swim? No answer. No one on board knew how to swim, not even the sailors. An ignorance not uncommon among seafaring people. A beam nearly free of its lashings was swinging loose. The chief clasped it with both hands, crying, Help me! They unleashed the beam. They had now at their disposal the very thing they wanted. From the defensive they assumed the offensive. It was a longish beam of heart of oak, sound and strong. People either as a support or as an engine of attack. A lever for a burden, a ram against a tower. Ready! shouted the chief. All six getting foothold on the stump of the mast, through their weight on the spar projecting over the side, straight as a lance towards a projection of the cliff. It was a dangerous maneuver. To strike at a mountain is audacity indeed. The six men might have wealth been thrown into the water by the shock. There is variety in struggles with storms. After the hurricane, the shoal. After the wind, the rock. First the intangible, then the immovable, to be encountered. Some minutes passed, such minutes as whiten men's hair. The rock and the vessel were about to come in collision. The rock, like a culprit, awaited the blow. A resistless wave rushed in. It ended the respite. It caught the vessel underneath, raised it, and swayed it for an instant as the sling swings its projectile. Steady! cried the chief. It is only a rock, and we are men. The beam was couched. The six men were one with it. Its sharp bolts tore their armpits, but they did not feel them. The wave dashed the hooker against the rock. Then came the shock. It came under the shapeless cloud of foam which always hides such catastrophes. And this cloud fell back into the sea. When the waves rolled back from the rock, the six men were tossing about the deck. But the matutina was floating alongside the rock. Clear of it. The beam had stood and turned the vessel. The sea was running so fast that in a few seconds she had left the caskets behind. Such things sometimes occur. It was a straight stroke of the bow sprit that saved wood of Largo with the mouth of the Tay. In the wild neighborhood of Cape Winerton, and under the command of Captain Hamilton, it was the appliance of such a lever against the dangerous rock, Brannodoum, that saved the Royal Mary from shipwreck, although she was but a scotch-built frigate. The force of the waves can be so abruptly discomposed that changes of direction can be easily managed, or at least are possible even in the most violent collisions. There is a brute in the tempest. The hurricane is a bull and can be turned. The whole secret of avoiding shipwreck is to try and pass from the secant to the tangent. Such was the service rendered by the beam to the vessel. It had done the work of an oar, had taken the place of a rudder, but the maneuver once performed could not be repeated. The beam was overboard, the shock of the collision had wrenched it out of the men's hands, and it was lost in the waves. To loosen another beam would have been to dislocate the hull. The hurricane carried off the Matutina. Presently, the caskets showed as a harmless encumbrance on the horizon. Nothing looks more out of the countenance than a reef of rocks under such circumstances. There are a nature in its obscure aspects, in which the visible blends with the invisible, certain motionless, surly profiles which seem to express that a prey has escaped. Thus glowered the caskets while the Matutina fled. The lighthouse, paled in distance, faded and disappeared. There was something mournful in its extinction. Layers of mist sank down upon the now uncertain light. Its rays died in the waste of waters. The flame floated, struggled, sank, and lost its form. It might have been a drowning creature. The brazier dwindled to the snuff of a candle. Then nothing, more but a weak, uncertain flutter. Around it spread a circle of extravasated glimmer. It was like the quenching of light in the pit of night. The bell which had threatened was dumb. The lighthouse which had threatened had melted away. And yet it was more awful now that they had ceased to threaten. One was a voice, the other a torch. There was something human about them. They were gone. And not remained but the abyss. End of Section 22 Section 23 of The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Irma Martin. The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo Part 1 Book II Chapter 13 Face to Face with Night Again was the hooker running with the shadow into immeasurable darkness. The Matudina escaped from the caskets, sank in rows from billow to billow. A respite, but in chaos. Spun round by the wind, tossed by all the thousand motions of the wave, she reflected every mad oscillation of the sea. She scarcely pitched it all. A terrible symptom of a ship's distress. The wrecks merely roll. Pitching is a convulsion of the strife. The helm alone can turn a vessel to the wind. In storms and more especially in the meteors of snow, sea and night end by melting into amalgamation, resolving into nothing but a smoke. Mists, whirlwinds, gales, motion in all directions, no basis, no shelter, no stop. Ended recommendation, one gulf succeeding another, no horizon visible, intense blackness for background, through all these the hooker drifted. To have got free of the caskets, to have eluded the rock, was a victory for the shipwrecked men, but it was a victory which left them in stupor. They had raised no cheer, at sea such an imprudence is not repeated twice. To throw down a challenge where they could not cast the lead would have been too serious a jest. The repulse of the rock was an impossibility achieved. They were petrified by it. By degrees, however, they began to hope again. Such are the insubmergible mirages of the soul. There is no distress so complete, but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths. These poor wretches were ready to acknowledge to themselves that they were saved. It was on their lips. But suddenly something terrible appeared to them in the darkness. On the port bow arose, standing stark, cut out on the background of mist, a tall opaque mass, vertical, right-angled, a tower of the abyss. They watched it open-mouthed. The storm was driving them towards it. They knew not what it was. It was the Ortec Rock. The Reef reappeared. After the caskets comes Ortec. The storm is no artist. Brutal and all-powerful, it never varies its appliances. The darkness is inexhaustible. Its snares and perfidies never come to an end. As for man, he soon comes to the bottom of his resources. Even expense his strength, the abyss never. The shipwrecked men turned towards the chief their hope. He could only shrug his shoulders. Dismal contempt of helplessness. A pavement in the midst of the ocean, such is the Ortec Rock. The Ortec, all of a piece, rises up in a straight line to eighty feet above the angry beating of the waves. Waves and ships break against it. An immovable cube. It plunges its rectilinear planes a peek into the numberless serpentine curves of the sea. At night it stands an enormous block resting on the foals of a huge black sheet. In time of storm it awaits the stroke of the axe, which is the thunderclap. But there is never a thunderclap during the snowstorm. True, the ship has the bandage round her eyes. Darkness is knotted about her. She is like one prepared to be led to the scaffold. As for the thunderbolt, which makes quick ending, it is not to be hoped for. The matutina, nothing better than a log upon the waters, drifted towards this rock as she had drifted towards the other. The poor wretches on board, who had for a moment believed themselves saved, relapsed into their agony. The destruction they had left behind faced them again. The reef reappeared from the bottom of the sea. Everything had been gained. The caskets are a-figuring iron with a thousand compartments. The ortec is a wall. To be wrecked on the caskets is to be cut into ribbons. To strike on the ortec is to be crushed into powder. Nevertheless there was one chance. On a straight frontage, such as that of the ortec, neither the wave nor the cannonball can ricochet. The operation is simple. First the flux, then the reflux. A wave advances, a billow returns. In such cases the question of life and death is balanced thus. If the wave carries the vessel on the rock, she breaks on it and is lost. If the billow retires before the ship is touched, she is carried back. She is saved. It was a moment of great anxiety. Those on board saw through the gloom the great, decisive wave bearing down on them. How far was it going to drag them? If the wave broke upon the ship, they were carried on the rock and dashed to pieces. If it passed under the ship, the wave did pass under. They breathed again. But what of the recoil? What would the surf do with them? The surf carried them back. A few minutes later the matutina was free of the breakers. The ortec faded from their view as the caskets had done. It was their second victory. For the second time the hooker had verged on destruction and had drawn back in time. The man who laughs by Victor Hugo. Part one. Book the second. Chapter 15. Portentosum Marais. Meanwhile a thickening mist had descended on the drifting wretches. They were ignorant of their whereabouts. They could scarcely see a cable's length around. Despite a furious storm of hail which forced them to bend down their heads, the women and obstinately refused to go below again. No one, however hopeless, but wishes if shipwreck be inevitable to meet it in the open air. When so near death, a ceiling above one's head seems like the first outline of a coffin. They were now in a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates its constraint. When in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the boiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they were unconsciously coasting Origny. Between the west of Ortec and the caskets and the east of Origny, the sea is hemmed in and cramped, and the uneasy position determines locally the condition of storms. The sea suffers like others, and when it suffers it is irritable. That channel is a thing to fear. The Natetina was in it. Imagine under the sea a tortoise shell as big as Hyde Park or the Champs Elysees, of which every striature is a shallow, and every embossment a reef. Such is the western approach of Origny. The sea covers and conceals this shipwrecking apparatus. On this conglomeration of submarine breakers, the cloven waves leap and foam in calm weather a chopping sea, in storms a chaos. The shipwrecked men observed this new complication without endeavoring to explain it to themselves. Suddenly they understood it. A pale vista broadened in the zenith, a waned tinge overspread the sun. The livid light revealed on the port side along Shoal stretching eastward, towards which the power of the rushing wind was driving the vessel. The Shoal was Origny. What was that Shoal? They shuddered. They would have shuddered even more had a voice answered them, Origny. No isle so well defended against man's approach as Origny. Below and above water it is protected by a savage guard, of which Oatak is the outpost. To the west Boru, Sotirio, Unfroch, Niangle, Fond du Roch, Les Jumeaux, La Grosse, La Bainc, Les Aiguille, Lavrach, La Fosse-Marrière, To the east Souquette, Omofrallor, La Brabente, La Quesligne, Croquelieu, La Foche, La Sorte, Noir Put, Coupie, Obu. These are hydra monsters of the species reef. One of these reefs is called Laboux, the Goal, as if to imply that every voyage ends there. This obstruction of rocks, simplified by night and sea, appeared to the shipwrecked men in the shape of a single dark band, a sort of black blot on the horizon. Shipwreck is the ideal of helplessness, to be near land and unable to reach it, to float, yet not to be able to do so in any desired direction, to rest the foot on what seems firm in his fragile, to be full of life when overshadowed by death, to be the prisoner of space, to be walled in between sky and ocean, to have the infinite overhead like a dungeon, to be encompassed by the eluding elements of wind and waves, and to be seized bound, paralysed, such a load of misfortune stupefies and crushes us. We imagine that in it we catch a glimpse of the sneer of the opponent who is beyond our reach. That which holds you fast is that which releases the birds and sets the fishes free. It appears nothing and is everything. We are dependent on the air which is ruffled by our mouths. We are dependent on the water which we catch and the hollow of our hands. Our glass fall from the storm and it is but a cup of bitterness. A mouthful is nausea, a wave full is extermination. The grain of sand in the desert, the foam flake on the sea, are fearful symptoms. Omnipotence takes no care to hide its atom. It changes weakness into strength, fills nought with awe. And it is with the infinitely little that the infinitely great crushes you. It is with its drops the ocean dissolves you. You feel you are a plaything. A plaything, ghastly epithet. The matutina was a little above Orenyi, which was not an unfavorable position, but she was drifting towards its northern point which was fatal. As a bent bow discharges its arrow, the northwester was shooting the vessel towards the northern cape. Off that point, a little behind the arbor of Corbele, is that which the seamen of the Norman Archipelago call a scene. The scene, or race, is a furious kind of current. A wreath of funnels in the shallows produces in the waves a wreath of whirlpools. You escape one to fall into another. A ship caught hold of by the race winds round and round until some sharp rock cleaves her hull. Then the shattered vessel stops, her stern rises from the waves. The stem completes the revolution in the abyss, the stern sinks in, and all is sucked down. A circle of foam broadens and floats, and nothing more is seen on the surface of the waves but a few bubbles here and there, rising from the smothered breathings below. The three most dangerous races in the whole channel are one close to the well-known Gerdler Sands, one at Jersey between the Pignogne and the point of Normand, and the race of Origny. Had a local pilot been on board the Matatina, he could have worn them of their fresh peril. In place of a pilot they had their instinct. In situations of extreme danger men are endowed with second sight. High contortions of foam were flying along the coast in the frenzied raid of the wind. It was the spitting of the race. Many a bark had been swamped in that snare. Without knowing what awaited them they approached the spot with horror. How to double that cape? There were no means of doing it. As to their had seen, first the caskets, then Ortak, rise before them. They now saw the point of Origny, all of steep rock. It was like a number of giants rising up one after another, a series of frightful jewels. Caribdis and Skillar are but two. The caskets Ortak and Origny are three. The phenomenon of the horizon being invaded by the rocks was thus repeated with the grand monotony of the Abyss. The battles of the ocean have the same sublime tautology as the combats of Homer. Every wave as they reached it added twenty cubits to the cape, awfully magnified by the mist. The fast decreasing distance seemed more inevitable. They were touching the skirts of the race. The first fold which seized them would drag them in. Another wave surmounted and all would be over. Suddenly the hooker was driven back, as by the blow of a titan's fist, the wave reared up under the vessel and fell back, throwing the wave back in its main of foam. The Matatina, thus impelled, drifted away from Origny. It was again on the open sea. Wents had come the sucker, from the wind. The breath of the storm had changed its direction. The wave had played with them. Now it was the wind's turn. They had saved themselves from the caskets. Of Ortak it was the wave which had been their friend. Now it was the wind. The wind had suddenly veered from north to south. The south wester had succeeded the north wester. The current is the wind in the waters. The wind is the current in the air. These two forces had just counteracted each other, and it had been the wind's will to snatch its prey from the current. The sudden fantasies of ocean are uncertain. They are perhaps an embodiment of the perpetual. At their mercy man must neither hope nor despair. They do when they undo. The ocean amuses itself. Every shade of wide untamed ferocity is phased in the vastness of that cunning sea, which Jean Barthe used to call the great brute. To its claws and their gashing succeed soft intervals of velvet pores. Once the storm hurries on a wreck, at others it works out the problem with care. It might almost be said that it caresses it. The sea can afford to take its time, as men in their agonies find out. We must oan that occasionally these lulls of the torture announce deliverance. Such cases are rare. However this may be, men in extreme peril are quick to believe in rescue. The slightest pause in the storm's threats is sufficient. They tell themselves that they are out of danger. After believing themselves varied they declare their resurrection. They feverishly embrace what they do not yet possess. It is clear that the bad luck has turned. They declare themselves satisfied. They are saved. Their cry quits with God. They should not be in so great a hurry to give up receipts to the unknown. The south-west are set in with a whirlwind. Shipwrecked men have never any but rough helpers. The matatina was dragged rapidly out to sea by the remnant of her rigging, like a dead woman trailed by the hair. It was like the enfranchisement granted by Tiberius at the price of violation. The wind treated with brutality those whom it saved. It rendered service with fury. It was help without pity. The wreck was breaking up under the severity of its deliverers. Hailstones big and hard enough to charge a blunderbuss smote the vessel. At every rotation of the waves these hailstones rolled about the deck like marbles. The hooker, whose deck was almost flush with the water, was being beaten out of shape by the rolling masses of water and its sheets of spray. Unbored it, each man was for himself. They clung on as best they could. As each seized who upped over them it was with a sense of surprise they saw that all were still there. Several had their faces torn by splinters. Everybody despair has stout hands. In terror a child's hand has the grasp of a giant. Agony makes a vice of a woman's fingers. A girl in her fright can almost bury her rose-colored fingers in a piece of iron. With hooked fingers they hung on somehow as the waves dashed on and passed off them. But every wave brought them the fear of being swept away. They were relieved. Part 1 Book II Chapter 16 The problem suddenly works in silence. The hurricane had just stopped short. There was no longer in the air south-west or north-west. The fierce clarions of space were mute. The whole of the water-spout had poured from the sky without any warning of diminution, as if it had slid it perpendicularly into a gulf below. None knew what had become of it. Flakes repaced the hailstones. The snow began to fall slowly. No more swell the sea flattened down. Such sudden sensations are peculiar to snowstorms. The electric effluvium exhausted all become still, even the wave, which in ordinary storms often remains agitated for a long time. In snowstorms it is not so. No prolonged anger in the deep. Like a tired-out worker it becomes drowsy directly, thus almost giving the lie to the laws of statics, but not astonishing old seamen, who know that the sea is full of unforeseen surprises. The same phenomenon takes place, although very rarely, in ordinary storms. Thus in our time, on the occasion of the memorable hurricane of July 27, 1867 at Jersey, the wind, after fourteen hours' fury, suddenly relapsed into a dead calm. In a few minutes the hookah was floating in sleeping waters. At the same time, for the last phase of these storms resembles the first. They could distinguish nothing. All that had been made visible in the convulsions of the meteoric cloud was again dark. Pale outlines were fused in vague mist, and the gloom of infinite space closed about the vessel. The wall of night, that circular occlusion, that interior of a cylinder, the diameter of which was lessening minute by minute, enveloped the matatina, and with a sinister deliberation of an encroaching iceberg, was drawing in dangerously. In the zenith nothing, a lid of fog closing down. It was as if the hookah were at the bottom of the well of the abyss. In that well the sea was a puddle of liquid lead. No stir in the waters, ominous immobility. The ocean is nevertheless tamed than when it is still as a pool. All was silence, stillness, blindness. Perchance, the silence of inanimate objects, is taciturnity. The last ripples glided against the hull. The deck was horizontal, with an insensible slope to the sides. Some broken planks were shifting about irresolutely. The block on which they had lighted the toe steeped in tar, in place of the signal light which had been swept away, swung no longer at the prowl, and no longer let fall, burning drops into the sea. What little breeze remained in the clouds was noiseless. The snow fell thickly, softly, with a scarcer slant. No foam of breakers could be heard. The piece of shadows was over all. This repose, succeeding all the past exasperations and paroxysms, was, for the poor creatures so long tossed about, an unspeakable comfort. It was as though the punishment of the rack had ceased. They caught a glimpse about them and above them of something which seemed like a consent that they should be saved. They regained confidence. All that had been fury was now tranquility. It appeared to them a pledge of peace. Their wretched hearts dilated. They were able to let go, the end of rope, or beam to which they had clung, to rise, hold themselves up, stand, walk, move about. They felt inexpressibly calmed. There are in the depths of darkness such phases of paradise, preparations for other things. It was clear that they were delivered out of the storm, out of the foam, out of the wind, out of the opera. Henceforth all the chances were in their favour. In three or four hours it would be sunrise. They would be seen by some passing ship, they would be rescued. The worst was over, they were re-entering life. The important feat was to have been able to keep afloat until the cessation of the tempest. They said to themselves, it is all over this time. Only they found that all was indeed over. One of the sailors, the northern Basque, Galdizun by name, went down into the hole to look for a rope. Then came above again and said, The hole is full. Of what asked the chief? Of water answered the sailor. The chief cried out, What does that mean? It means, replied Galdizun, That in half an hour we shall find her. End of section 26, Recording by David Cole, Medway, Massachusetts. Section 27 of The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Cole. The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. Part 1 Book II Chapter 17 The Last Resource There was a hole in the keel, a leak had been sprung. When it happened no one could have said. Was it when they touched the caskets? Was it off-ortak? Was it when they were whirled about the shallows west of Origny? It was most probable that they had touched some rock there. They had struck against some hidden buttress, which they had not felt in the midst of the convulsive fury of the wind which was tossing them, in tetanus who would feel a prick. The other sailor, the southern basque, whose name was Ave Maria, went down into the hole too, came on deck again and said, There are two varus of water in the hole, about six feet. Ave Maria added, In less than forty minutes we shall sink. Where was the leak? They couldn't find it. It was hidden by the water which was filling up the hole. The vessel had a hole in a hole somewhere under the water-line, quite forward in the keel. Impossible to find it, impossible to check it. They had a wound which they could not staunch. The water-hover was not rising very fast. The chief called out we must work the pump. Galdizun replied, We have no pump left. Then said the chief, We must make for land. Where is the land? I don't know, nor I. But it must be somewhere, true enough. Let someone steer for it. We have no pilot. Stand by the tiller yourself. We have lost the tiller. Let's rig one out of the first beam we can lay hands on. Nails are hammer-quick, some tools. The carpenter's box is overboard, we have no tools. We'll steer all the same, no matter where. The rudder is lost. Where is the boat we'll get in and row? The boat is lost. We'll row the wreck. We have lost the oars. We'll sail. We have lost the sails and the mast. We'll rig one up with a pole and a tarpaulin for sail. Let's get clear of this and trust in the wind. There is no wind. The wind indeed had left them, the storm had fled, and its departure, which they had believed to mean safety, meant in fact destruction. Had the sowester continued, it might have driven them wildly on some shore, might have beaten the leak in speed, might perhaps have carried them to some propitious sandbank, and cast them on it before the hooker found it. The swiftness of the storm bearing them away might have enabled them to reach land, but no more wind, no more hope. They were going to die because the hurricane was over. The end was near. Wind, hail, the hurricane, the whirlwind. These are wild combatants that may be overcome. The storm can be taken in the weak point of its armor. That our resources against the violence which continually lays itself open is off its guard and often hits wide. But nothing is to be done against the calm. It offers nothing to the grasp of which you can lay hold. The winds are a charge of Cossacks. Stand your ground and they disperse. Calms are the pincers of the executioner. The water deliberate in shore, irrepressible and heavy, rose in the hold, and as it rose the vessel sank it was happening slowly. Those on board the wreck of the Matutina felt that most hopeless of catastrophes, and in earth catastrophe undermining them. The still and sinister certainty of their fate petrified them. No stair in the air, no movement in the sea. The motionless is the inexorable. Absorption was sucking them down silently. Through the depths of the dumb waters, without anger, without passion, not willing, not knowing, not caring. The fatal centre of the globe was attracting them downwards. Horror and repose amalgamating them with itself. It was no longer the wide open mouth of the sea, the double jaw of the wind and wave. Just in its threat the grin of the water spout, the foaming appetite of the breakers. It was as if the wretched beings had under them the black yawn of the infinite. They felt themselves sinking into depths, peaceful depths. The height between the vessel and the water was lessening. That was all. They could calculate her disappearance to the moment. It was the exact reverse of submersion by the rising tide. The water was not rising towards them, they were sinking towards it. They were digging in their own grave, their own weight was their sexton. They were being executed not by the law of men, but by the law of things. The snow was falling and as the wreck was now motionless, this white lint made a cloth over the deck and covered the vessel as with a winding sheet. The hold was becoming fuller and deeper, no means of getting at the leak. They struck a light and fixed three or four torches in holes as best they could. Galdizun brought some old leathered buckets and they tried to bail the hold out, standing in a row to pass them from hand to hand. But the buckets were past use, the leather of some was unstitched, there were holes on the bottom of the others, and the buckets emptied themselves on the way. The difference in quantity between the water which was making its way in and that which they returned to the sea was ludicrous. For a ton that entered a glass full was bailed out. They did not improve their condition. It was like the expenditure of a miser, trying to exhaust a million, half-benny by half-benny. The chief said, let us lighten the rick. During the storm they had lashed together the few chests which were on deck. These remained tied to the stump of the mast. They undid the lashings and rolled the chests overboard through a breach in the gunnel. One of these trunks belonged to a Basque woman who could not repress a sign. Oh, my new cloak lined with scarlet! Oh, my pure stockings of birch and bark lace! Oh, my silver earrings to wear at mass on May Day! The deck cleared they remained the cabin to be seen to. It was greatly encumbered, in it were, as may be remembered, the luggage belonging to the passengers and the bails belonging to the sailors. They took the luggage and threw it over the gunnel. They carried up the bails and cast them into the sea. Thus they emptied the cabin, the lantern, the cap, the barrels, the sacks, the bails and the water-butts. The pot of soup all went over into the waves. They unscrewed the nuts of the iron stove long since extinguished. They pulled it out, hoisted it on deck, dragged it to the side, and threw it out of the vessel. They cast overboard everything they could pull out of the deck—chains, shrouds and torn rigging. From time to time the chief took a torch, and, throwing its light on the figures painted on the prowl to show the draft of water, looked to see how deep the wreck had settled down. End of Section 27, recording by David Cole, Midway, Massachusetts. Chapter 18 The Highest Resource The wreck, being lightened, was sinking more slowly, but nonetheless surely. The hopelessness of their situation was without resource. They had exhausted their last expedient. Is there anything else we can throw overboard? The doctor, whom everyone had forgotten, rose from the companion and said, Yes, what? asked the chief. The doctor answered, Our crime. They shuddered, and all cried out, Our men. The doctor, standing up, pale, raised his hand to heaven, saying, Kneel down. They wavered. To waver is the preface to kneeling down. The doctor went on, Let us throw our crimes in the sea. They weigh us down. It is they that are sinking the ship. Let us think no more of safety. Let us think of salvation. Our last crime above all, the crime which we committed, or rather completed just now, are wretched beings who are listening to me. It is that which is overwhelming us. For those who leave intended murder behind them. It is an impious insolence to tempt the abyss. He who sins against a child, sins against God. True, we were obliged to put to sea, but it was certain, per addition. The storm, worn by the shadow of our crime, came on. It is well. Regret nothing, however. There, not far off in the darkness, are the sands of Vorville and Cape Le Hogue. It is France. There was but one possible shelter for us, which was Spain. France is no less dangerous to us than England. Our deliverance from the sea would have been led, but to the gibbet. Hanged or drowned, we had no alternative. Whatever has chosen for us, let us give him thanks. His vouchsafed us the grave which cleanses. Brethren, the inevitable hand is in it. Remember that it was we who just now did our best to send on high, that child. And that at this very moment, now as I speak, there is perhaps, above our heads, a soul accusing us before a judge whose eye is on us. Let us make the best use of this last respite. Let us make an effort, if we may still, to repair, as far as we are able, the evil that we have wrought. If the child survives us, let us come to his aid. If he is dead, let us seek his forgiveness. Let us cast our crime from us. Let us ease our consciences of its weight. Let us strive that our souls be not swallowed up before God, for that is the awful shipwreck. Let us go to the fishes, souls to the devils. Have pity on yourselves, kneel down I tell you, repentance is the bark which never sinks. You have lost your compass, you are wrong, you still have prayer. The wolves became lambs, such transformations occur in last agonies, tigers lick the crucifix, when the dark portal opens ajar, belief is difficult, unbelief impossible. Even imperfect may be the different sketches of religion essayed by man, even when his belief is shapeless, even when the outline of the dogma is not in harmony with the linements of eternity he foresees. There comes in his last hour a trembling of the soul. There is something which will begin when life is over. This thought impresses the last pang. A man's dying agony is the expiration of a term. In that fatal second he feels weighing on him a diffused responsibility. That which has been complicates that which is to be. The past returns and enters into the future. What is known becomes as much an abyss as the unknown, and the two chasms, the one which is filled by his faults, the other of his anticipations, mingle their reverberations. It is this confusion of the two gulfs which terrifies the dying man. They had spent their last grain of hope on the direction of life, hence they turned in the other. Their only remaining chance was in its dark shadow. They understood it. It came on them as a legubrious flash, followed by the relapse of horror. That which is intelligible to the dying man is as what is perceived in the lightning. Then nothing, you see, then all is blindness. After death the eye will reopen, and that which was a flash will become a sun. They cried out to the doctor, Thou, thou, there is no one but thee, we will obey thee, what must we do, speak? The doctor answered. The question is how to pass over the unknown precipice, and reach the other bank of life, which is beyond the tomb. Being the one who knows the most, my danger is greater than yours. You do well to leave the choice of the bridge to him who is burdened as the heaviest." He added, Knowledge is a weight added to conscience. He continued, How much time do we have still? Galdiusen looked at the watermark and answered, A little more than a quarter of an hour. Good, said the doctor, The low hood of the companion on which he lent his elbows made a sort of table. The doctor took from his pocket his ink-horn and pen, and his pocket-book, at a which he drew a parchment, the same one on the back of which he had written a few hours before, some twenty cramped and crooked lines. A light, he said. The snow, falling like the spray of a cataract, had extinguished the torches one after another. There was but one left. Kevin Maria took it out of the place where it had been stuck, and holding it in his hand came and stood by the doctor's side. The doctor replaced his pocket-book in his pocket, put down the pen and ink-horn on the hood of the companion, unfolded the parchment, and said, Listen. Then in the midst of the sea, on the failing bridge, a sort of shuddering flooring of the tomb, the doctor began a solemn reading, to which all the shadows seemed to listen. The doomed men bowed their heads around him, the flaming of the torch intensified to their pallor. What the doctor read was written in English. Now and then, when one of those woe-be-gone looks seemed to ask an explanation, the doctor would stop, to repeat, whether in French or Spanish, Basque or Italian, the passage he had just read. Stifled sobs and hollow beatings of the breast were heard. The wreck was sinking more and more. The reading over, the doctor placed the parchment flat on the companion, seized his pen, and on a clear margin where he had carefully left at the bottom of what he had written, he signed himself, Guernardus Guistamunde, doctor. Then, turning towards the others, he said, Come and sign. The Basque woman approached, took the pen, and signed herself, Asuncion. She handed the pen to the Irish woman, who, not knowing how to write, made a cross. The doctor, by the side of this cross, wrote, Barbara Fermoy, of Tyreth Island, in the Hebrides. Then he handed the pen to the chief of the band, the chief's sign, Guizdora, capital. The Genoese signed himself under the chief's name, Giant Jiret. The Langdotian signed, Jacques Catoce, Elias the Nabonet. The Provencal signed, Luc Pierre Capgaroub, of the Galles of Mahon. Under these signatures, the doctor added a note, of the crew of three men, the skipper having been washed overboard by a sea, but two remain, and they have signed. The two sailors affixed their names underneath the note. The northern Basque signed himself, Galdiazun. The southern Basque signed, Ave Maria, Robert. Then the doctor said, Capgaroub, here, said the Provencal. Have you the hard canons flask? Yes, give it to me. Capgaroub drank off the last mouthful of brandy, and handed the flask to the doctor. The water was rising in the hold, the wreck was sinking deeper and deeper into the sea. The sloping edges of the ship were covered by a thin, gnawing wave, which was rising. All were crowded on the centre of the deck. The doctor dragged the ink on the signatures by the heat of the torch, and folding the parchment into a narrow compass than the diameter of the neck, put it into the flask. He called for the cork. I don't know where it is, said Capgaroub. Here's a piece of rope, said Jacques Catoce. The doctor corked the flask with a bit of rope, and asked for some tar. Galdiazun went forward, extinguished the signal light with a piece of towel, took the vessel in which it was contained from the stand, and brought it, half full of burning tar, to the doctor. The flask holding the parchment, which they had all signed, was corked and tarred over. It is done, said the doctor. And from out all their mouths, vaguely stammered in every language, came the dismal utterances of the catacombs. Ensiswail, mea culpa, asicea, arorai, amen. It was as though the somber voices of Babel, who scattered through the shadows as heaven uttered its awful refusal to hear them. The doctor turned away from his companions in crime and distress, and took a few steps towards the gun-wool. Reaching the side, he looked into space, and said, in a deep voice, Bistu bemir, perchance he was addressing some phantom. The wreck was sinking. Behind the doctor all the others were in a dream. Prayer mastered them by main force. They did not bow, they were bent. There was something involuntary in their condition. They wavered as a sail flaps and the breeze fails, and the haggard group took by degrees with clasping of hands and prostration of foreheads. Attitudes various, yet of humiliation. Some strange reflection of the deep seemed to soften their villainous features. The doctor returned towards them. Whatever had been his past, the old man was in the great presence of the catastrophe. The deep reserve of nature which enveloped him preoccupied with that disconcerting him. He was not one to be taken unawares. Over him was the calm of a silent horror. On his countenance the majesty of God's will comprehended. This old and thoughtful outlaw unconsciously assumed the air of a pontiff. He said, Attend to me. He contemplated for a moment the waste of water, and added, Now we are going to die. Then he took the torch from the hands of Arvo Maria, and waved it. A spark broke from it, and flew into the night. Then the doctor cast the torch into the sea. The torch was extinguished, all light disappeared. Nothing left but the huge unfathomable shadow. It was like the filling up of a grave. In the darkness the doctor was heard saying, Let us pray. All melt down. It was no longer on the snow, but in the water that they knelt. They had but a few minutes more. The doctor alone remained standing. The flakes of snow falling on him had sprinkled him with white tears, and made him visible on the background of darkness. He might have been the speaking statue of the shadow. The doctor made the sign of the cross, and raised his voice. Where beneath his feet he felt that almost imperceptible oscillation which prefaces the moment in which a wreck is about to found her. He said, Part a nostre qui est in Coelis. The Provençal repeated in French. Notre-Père qui aide aux cieux. The Irish woman repeated in Gaelic, understood by the Basque woman. Ar nathair atar ar niamth. The doctor continued. Sanctificateur nomen thum. Que votre nom soit sanctifié, said the Provençal. Nam thar han, said the Irish woman. Adveniat regnum thum, continued the doctor. Que votre règne arrive, said the Provençal. Tiggered do riogras, said the Irish woman. As they knelt, the waters had risen to their shoulders. The doctor went on. Fire voluntas tua. Que votre volonté soit faite, stammered the Provençal. And the Irish woman and Basque woman cried. Don't add doth while ar an halam. Siket in Coelis, siket in terror, said the doctor. No voice answered him. He looked down. All their heads were under water. They had let themselves be drowned on their knees. The doctor took in his right hand the flask which had placed on the companion, and raised it above his head. The wreck was going down. As he sank, the doctor murmured the rest of the prayer. For an instant his shoulders were above water, then his head. There nothing remained but his arm holding up the flask, as if he were showing it to the infinite. His arm disappeared. There was no greater fold on the deep sea than there would have been on a ton of oil. The snow continued falling. One thing floated, and was carried by the waves into darkness. There was the tarred flask, kept afloat by its ocea cover. Book III. CHESSEL The storm was no less severe on land than on sea. The same wild enfranchisement of the elements had taken place around the abandoned child. The weak and innocent became their sport in the expenditure of the un-reasoning rage of their blind forces. Shadows discern not, and things inanimate have not the clemency they are supposed to possess. On the land there was but little wind. There was an inexplicable dumbness in the cold. There was no hail. The thickness of the falling snow was fearful. Hailstone strike, harass, bruise, stun, crush. Snowflakes do worse, soft and inexorable. The snowflake does its work in silence. Touch it and it melts. It is pure, even as the hypocrite is candid. It is by white particles slowly heaped upon each other that the flake becomes an avalanche and the nave a criminal. The child continued to advance into the mist. The fog presents but a soft obstacle, hence its danger. It yields and yet persists. Mist like snow is full of treachery. The child, strange wrestler at war with all these risks, had succeeded in reaching the bottom of the descent and had gained Chessel. Without knowing it he was on an isthmus, with the ocean on each side, so that he could not lose his way in the fog, in the snow, or in the darkness, without falling into the deep waters of the gulf on the right hand or into the raging billows of the high sea on the left. He was travelling on in ignorance between these two abysses. The isthmus of Portland was at this period singularly sharp and rugged. Nothing remains at this date of its past configuration. Once the idea of manufacturing Portland stone into Roman cement was first seized, the whole rock had been subjected to an alteration which has completely changed its original appearance. Cakarius lyus, slate, and trap are still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth from a gum. But the pickaxe has broken up and leveled those bristling, rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ocefridge. The summits exist no longer were the labes and the squiggles used to flock together, soaring, like the envious, to solely high places. In vain might you see the tall monolith called Godolphan, an old British word signifying white eagle. In summer you may still gather on those surfaces pierced and perforated like a sponge, rosemary, pinneroil, wild hyssop, and sea fennel, which when infused makes a good cordial, and that herb full of knots, which grows in the sand and from which they make matting. But you no longer find gray amber, or black tin, or that triple species of slate, one sort green, one blue, and the third the color of sage leaves. The foxes, the badgers, the otters, and the martins have taken themselves off on the cliffs of Portland, as well as at the extremity of Cornwall, where there were at one time chemies none remain. They still fish in some inlets for place and pilchards, but the sacred salmon no longer ascend the way, between Michael Moss and Christmas, to spawn. No more are seen there as during the reign of Elizabeth, those old unknown birds as large as hawks, who could cut an apple into, but ate only the pips. You never meet those crows of yellow beaks, called Cornish Clothes in England, Pyrocorax in Latin, who in their mischief would drop burning twigs on the satched roofs. Nor that magic bird, the fulmar, a wanderer from the Scottish archipelago, dropping from his bill and oil, which the islanders used to burn in their lamps. Nor do you ever find in the evening, in the plash of the ebbing tide, that ancient legendary netice, with the feet of a hog and the bleat of a calf. The tide no longer throws up the whiskered seal, with its curled ears and sharp jaws, dragging itself along on its nailless paws. On that portland, nowadays so changed as scarcely to be recognized, the absence of forests precluded nightingales, but now the falcon, the swan, and the wild goose have fled. The sheep of Portland nowadays are fat and have a fine wool. The few scattered yews, which nibbled the saltgrass there two centuries ago, were small and tough and coarse in the fleece, as became Celtic flocks brought there by garlic-eating shepherds, who lived to a hundred, and who, at the distance of half a mile, could pierce a curious with their yard-long arrows. Uncultivated land makes coarse wool. The chessel of today resembles in no particular the chessel of the past, so much as it been disturbed by man and by those furious winds which gnaw the very stones. At present this tongue of land bears a railway, terminating in a pretty square of houses, called Chesselton, and there is a Portland station, railway carriage's roll where seals used to crawl. The isthmus of Portland two hundred years ago was a back of sand, with a vertebral spine of rock. The child's danger changed its form. What he had had to fear in the descent was falling to the bottom of the precipice, and the isthmus it was falling into the holes. After dealing with the precipice, he must deal with the pitfalls. Everything on the seashore is a trap, the rocket slippery, the strand is quicksand, resting places are but snares. It is walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with the fissure through which you disappear. The ocean has false stages below like a well-arranged theater. The long backbone of granite, from which fall away both slopes of the isthmus is awkward of access. It is difficult to find there what in scene-shifters language are termed practibles. Man has no hospitality to hope for from the ocean, from the rock no more than from the wave. The sea is provident for the bird and the fish alone. Ismuses are especially naked and rugged. The wave which wears and mines them on either side reduces them to the simplest form. Everywhere there were sharp relief ridges, cuttings, frightful fragments of torn stone, yawning with many points, like the jaws of a shark, break-nicks of wet moss, rapid slopes of rock ending in the sea. Whosoever undertakes to pass over an isthmus meets at every step misshapen blocks, as large as houses, and the forms of shin bones, shoulder blades, and thigh bones, the hideous anatomy of dismembered rocks. It is not without reason that these striae of the seashore are called coats. The wafer must get out as he best can from the confusion of these ruins. It is like journeying over the bones of an enormous skeleton. Put a child to this labor of Hercules. Broad daylight might have aided him. It was night. A guide was necessary. He was all alone. All the vigor of manhood would not have been too much. He had but the feeble strength of a child. In default of a guide a footpath might have aided him. There was none. By instinct he avoided the sharp bridge of the rocks, and kept to the strand as much as possible. It was there that he met with the pitfalls. They were multiplied before him under three forms. The pitfall of water, the pitfall of snow, and the pitfall of sand. This last is the most dangerous of all because the most illusory. To know the peril we face is alarming. To be ignorant of it is terrible. The child was fighting against unknown dangers. He was groping his way through something which might perhaps be the grave. He did not hesitate. He went round the rocks, avoided the crevices, guessed at the pitfalls, obeyed the twistings and turnings caused by such obstacles, yet he went on. Though unable to advance in a straight line, he walked with a firm step. Unnecessary he drew back with energy. He knew how to tear himself in time from the horrid bird lime of the quicksands. He shook the snow from about him. He entered the water more than once up to the knees. Directly that he left it. His wet knees were frozen by the intense cold of the night. He walked rapidly in his stiffened garments. Yet he took care to keep his sailors coat dry and warm on his chest. He was still tormented by hunger. The chances of the abyss are illimitable. Everything is possible in it, even salvation. The issue may be found, though it be invisible. How the child wrapped in a smothering, winding sheet of snow, lost on a narrow elevation between two jaws of an abyss, managed to cross the isthmus, is what he could not himself have explained. He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered. That is all. Which is the secret of all triumphs. At the end of somewhat less than half an hour, he felt that the ground was rising. He had reached the other shore. Leaving Chessel, he had gained terra firma. The bridge which now unites Sanford Castle with small mouth sands did not then exist. It is probable that in his intelligent groping he had re-ascended as far as White Regis, where there was then a tongue of sand, a natural road crossing East Fleet. He was saved from the isthmus, but he found himself again face to face with the tempest, with the cold, with the night. Before him once more lay the plain, shapeless in the density of impenetrable shadow. He examined the ground, seeking a footpath. Suddenly he bent down. He had discovered in the snow something which seemed to him a track. It was indeed a track, the print of a foot. The print was cut out clearly in the whiteness of the snow which rendered it distinctly visible. He examined it. It was a naked foot, too small for that of a man, too large for that of a child. It was probably the foot of a woman. Beyond that mark was another, then another, then another. The footprints followed each other at the distance of a step, and struck across the plain to the right. They were still fresh, and slightly covered with a little snow. The woman had just passed that way. This woman was walking in the direction in which the child had seen the smoke. It's his eyes fixed on the footprints he set himself to follow them. End of Section 29. Section 30. OF THE MAN WHO LASTS, by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ted Garvin. THE MAN WHO LASTS, by Victor Hugo. Part 1. Chapter 2. THE EFFECT OF SNOW. He journeyed some time along this course. Unfortunately, the footprints were becoming less and less distinct. Dense and fearful was the falling of the snow. It was the time when the hooker was so distressed by the snowstorm at sea. The child, indistressed like the vessel, but after another fashion, had, in the extruable intersection of shadows which rose up before him, no recourse but the footsteps in the snow, and he held to it as the thread of a labyrinth. Suddenly, whether the snow had filled them up, or for some other reason, the footsteps ceased. All became even, level, smooth, without a stain, without a detail. There was now nothing but a white cloth drawn over the earth and a black one over the sea. It seemed as if the foot passenger had flown away. The child, in despair, bent down and searched, but in vain. As he arose, he added a sensation of hearing some indistinct sound, but he could not be sure of it. It resembled a voice, a breath, a shadow. It was more human than animal, more supple than living. It was a sound but the sound of a dream. He looked but saw nothing. Solitude, wide, naked, and livid, was before him. He listened. That which he had thought he had heard had faded away. Perhaps it had been but fancy. He still listened. All was silent. There was illusion in the mist. He went on his way again. He walked forward at random, with nothing henceforth to guide him. As he moved away, the noise began again. This time he could doubt it no longer. It was a groan, almost a sob. He turned. He searched the darkness of space with his eyes. He saw nothing. The sound arose once more. If limbo could cry out, it would cry in such a tone. Nothing so penetrating, so piercing, so feeble as the voice, for it was a voice. It arose from a soul. There was palpitation in the murmur. Nevertheless, it seemed uttered almost unconsciously. It was an appeal of suffering, not knowing that it suffered or that it appealed. The cry, perhaps a first breath, perhaps a last sigh, was equally distant from the rattle which closes life and the wail with which it commences. It breathed, it was stifled, it wept, a gloomy supplication from the depths of night. The child fixed his attention everywhere, far, near, on high, below. There was no one. There was nothing. He listened. The voice arose again. He perceived it distinctly. The sound somewhat resembled the bleeding of a lamb. Then he was frightened and thought of flight. The groan again. This was the fourth time. It was strangely miserable and plaintive. One felt that after that last effort, more mechanical than voluntary, the cry would probably be extinguished. It was an expiry exclamation, instinctively appealing to the amount of aid held in suspense and space. It was some muttering of agony addressed to a possible providence. The child approached in the direction from whence the sound came. Still he saw nothing. He advanced again, watchfully. The complaint continued. Inarticulate and confused as it was, it had become clear, almost vibrating. The child was near the voice, but where was it? He was close to a complaint, the trembling of a cry passed by his side into space. A human moan floated away into the darkness. This was what he had met. Such at least was his impression, dim as the dense mist in which he was lost. Whilst he hesitated between an instinct which urged him to fly and an instinct which commanded him to remain, he perceived in the snow at his feet, a few steps before him, a sort of undulation of the dimensions of a human body, a little eminence, low, long and narrow, like the mold over a grave, a sepulchre in a white churchyard. At the same time the voice cried out. It was from beneath the undulation that it proceeded. The child bit down, crouching before the undulation, and with both his hands began to clear it away. Beneath the snow which he removed, a form grew under his hands, and suddenly in the hollow he had made their appeared pale face. The cry had not proceeded from that face. Its eyes were shut, and the mouth open but full of snow. It remained motionless. It stirred not under the hands of the child. The child, whose fingers were numb with frost, shuddered when he touched its coldness, was that of a woman. Her disheveled hair was mingled with the snow. The woman was dead. Again the child set himself to sweep away the snow. The neck of the dead woman appeared, then her shoulders, clothed in rags. Suddenly he felt something move feebly under his touch. It was something small that was buried, and which stirred. The child swiftly cleared away the snow, discovering a wretched little body, thin, one with cold, still alive, lying naked on the dead woman's naked breast. It was a little girl. It had been swallowed up, but in rags so scanty that in its struggles it had freed itself from its tatters. Under it its attenuated limbs, and above it its breath, had somewhat melted the snow. A nurse would have said that it was five or six months old, but perhaps it might be a year. For growth and poverty suffers heartbreaking reductions which sometimes even produce rachitis. When its face was exposed to the air, it gave a cry, the continuation of its sobs of distress. For the mother, not to have heard that sob, proved her irrevocably dead. The child took the infant in his arms. The stiffened body of the mother was a fearful sight, a spectral light proceeded from her face. The mouth, apart and without breath, seemed to form in the indistinct language of shadows her answers to the questions put to the dead by the invisible. The ghastly reflection of the icy plains was on that countenance. There was a youthful forehead under the brown hair, the almost indignant nodding at the eyebrows, the pinched nostrils, the closed eyelids, the lashes glued together by the rhyme, and from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth, a deep channel of tears. The snow lighted up the corpse. Winter and the tomb are not averse. The corpse is the icicle of man. The nakedness of her breast was pathetic. They had fulfilled their purpose. On them was a sublime blight of the life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and the eternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity. At the point of one of the nipples was a white pearl. It was a drop of milk frozen. Thus explained at once, on the plains over which the deserted boy was passing in his turn, a beggar woman, noticing her infant in searching for refuge, had lost her way a few hours before. Being numb with cold, she had sunk under the tempest and could not rise again. The falling snow had covered her. As long as she was able, she had clasped her little girl to her bosom and thus died. The infant had tried to suck the marble breast, blind trust, inspired by nature, for it seems that it is possible for a woman to suckle her child even after her last sigh. But the lips of the infant had been unable to find the breast, where the drop of milk, stolen by death, had frozen, while under the snow the child, more accustomed to the cradle than the tomb, had wailed. The deserted child had heard the cry of the dying child. He disinterred it. He took it in his arms. When he felt herself in his arms, she ceased crying. The faces of the two children touched each other, and the purple lips of the infant sought the cheek of the boy as it had been abreast. The little girl had nearly reached the moment when the congealed blood stops the action of the heart. Her mother had touched her with the chill of her own death. A corpse communicates death. Its numbness is infectious. Her feet, hands, arms, knees seemed paralyzed by cold. The boy felt the terrible chill. He had on him a garment dry and warm, his pilot jacket. He placed the infant on the breast of the corpse, took off his jacket, wrapped the infant in it, took it up again in his arms, and now almost naked, under the last of the north wind which covered him with eddies of snowflakes, carrying the infant, he pursued his journey. The little one, having succeeded in finding the boy's cheek, again applied her lips to it, and soothed by the warmth she slept. First kiss of those two souls in the darkness. The mother lay there, her back to the snow, her face to the night, but perhaps at the moment when the little boy stripped himself to clothe the little girl, the mother saw him from the depths of infinity.