The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (37 page)

However, as we have said, it was at least a league from the Château d’If to Tiboulen.

Often, in their prison, Faria had told the young man, when he saw him depressed and languid: ‘Dantès, you must not give way to this debility. If you do manage to escape and you have failed to keep up your strength, you will drown.’

Beneath the heavy, bitter swell, Dantès once more heard these words in his ears, and he hurried back to the surface to plough through the waves and test whether he had indeed lost his power. He was overjoyed to find that his enforced idleness had deprived him of none of his strength and agility, and to find that he was still master of this element in which he had gambolled as a child.

In any event, fear, that swift tormentor, doubled his vigour. Rising on the crest of the waves, he listened to find out if he could hear any noise. Each time that he reached the highest point of a wave, he quickly surveyed the visible horizon and tried to penetrate the blackness. Every wave that climbed a little higher than the rest
looked to him like a boat pursuing him, so he strove all the harder, which certainly took him further onward but also threatened to exhaust him more quickly.

Yet he did swim; and the fearful fortress had faded somewhat into the mists of night: he could no longer see it, but he felt it still.

An hour passed, during which Dantès, buoyed up by the sense of freedom that had spread through his whole body, continued to drive on through the waves on the course he had set himself.

‘Now, let’s see,’ he thought. ‘I have been swimming for almost an hour, but with a contrary wind I must have lost a quarter of my speed. However, unless I have mistaken the direction, I must now be close to the island of Tiboulen… But what if I am mistaken?’

The swimmer felt a shudder pass through him. He tried to float for a moment to give himself a rest, but the sea was getting heavier all the time, and he soon realized that such respite, which he had counted on having, was impossible.

‘Well, so be it,’ he said. ‘I shall go on until the end… until my arms fail, until cramp seizes my whole body… and then I shall sink!’ And he began to swim with the energy and urgency of despair.

Suddenly it seemed that the sky, already so dark, grew still darker and that a thick, heavy, impenetrable cloud was coming down over him. At the same time he felt a sharp pain in his knee. His imagination immediately told him that this must be the shock of a bullet and that he would instantly hear the report of a rifle; but there was no explosion. Dantès put out his hand and felt something. He brought up his other leg, and touched solid ground. It was then that he saw what it was he had taken for a cloud.

Twenty yards ahead of him rose a mass of oddly shaped rocks that looked like a vast fire, solidified just at the moment when it was burning most fiercely. This was the island of Tiboulen.

Dantès stood up and took a few steps forward, then he lay down, thanking God, on these points of granite that seemed softer to him at that moment than the softest bed. Then, despite the wind, despite the storm, despite the rain that was starting to fall, exhausted as he was, he fell asleep with that delicious sleep of the man whose body is numbed but whose mind is awake to the knowledge of unhoped-for good fortune.

After an hour, Edmond woke to the sound of an immense clap
of thunder. The storm had broken in the heavens and was beating the air with its flashing flight. From time to time a shaft of lightning shot from the sky like a fiery snake, illuminating the waves and the clouds that plunged headlong after each other like the breakers of a vast abyss.

Dantès, with his sailor’s eye, had judged rightly. He had landed on the first of the two islands, which is Tiboulen. He knew that it was a naked rock, open to the elements and shelterless. When the storm was over, he would plunge back into the sea and make for the island of Lemaire, no less deserted but wider and consequently more welcoming.

An overhanging rock did offer him some temporary shelter and he took refuge under it. At almost the same moment the storm broke in all its fury.

Edmond felt the rock beneath which he was hiding tremble and the waves, breaking against the base of the huge pyramid, reached his hiding-place. Safe as he was, in the midst of this shattering noise and these blinding flashes of light, he was seized with a sort of dizziness. He felt as though the very island were shaking beneath him and, from one moment to the next, would break its moorings like a vessel at anchor and drag him down with it into the midst of the huge maelstrom.

At this, he remembered that he had not eaten for twenty-four hours: he was hungry and thirsty. He stretched out his hands and his neck, and drank some rainwater from a hollow in the rock.

As he was lifting his head, a shaft of lightning, which seemed to crack open the heavens as far as the foot of God’s radiant throne, lit up the scene. By its light Dantès saw a little fishing boat appear, like a phantom slipping from the crest of a wave into the abyss, driven forward both by the waves and by the storm, between the Ile Lemaire and the Cap Croisille, a quarter of a league away from him. A second later the phantom reappeared on the crest of another wave, coming towards him at fearful speed. Dantès wanted to shout; he looked for a scrap of cloth that he could wave in the air, to show them that they were heading for destruction, but they could see it perfectly well for themselves. In the light of another shaft of lightning the young man saw four men hanging on to the masts and the rigging, while a fifth held the bar of a broken helm. No doubt these men whom he saw could also see him, for desperate
cries were carried across to him on the whistling gusts. Above the mast, twisted like a reed, a tattered sail was flapping rapidly over and over against the air. Suddenly, the ropes that still held it broke and it vanished, carried away into the dark depths of the sky, like a great white bird silhouetted against a black cloud.

At the same time he heard a fearful crack and cries of agony. Grasping his rock like a sphinx above the abyss, Dantès glimpsed the little boat in the light of another flash, broken; amid its wreckage, heads with terrified faces and hands reached for the sky. Then darkness returned; the awful scene had lasted the lifetime of a lightning bolt.

Dantès hastened down the slippery rocks, at the risk of himself falling into the sea. He looked, listened, but could hear and see nothing: no more cries, no more human struggle. Only the storm, that great act of God, continued to roar with the wind and to foam with the waves.

Little by little, the wind subsided. Westwards across the sky rolled huge grey clouds which seemed to have been discoloured by the storm. Patches of blue sky reappeared with stars that shone brighter than ever. Soon, in the east, a long reddish band lit up the undulating blue-black line of the horizon. The waves danced and instantly a light sped across their crests; transforming each one into a mane of gold. Day was breaking.

Dantès remained motionless and silent before this great spectacle, as if seeing it for the first time. Indeed, in all the years that he had been at the Château d’If he had forgotten it. He turned back to look at the fortress, sweeping his eyes across the whole arc of the land and the sea. The dark pile rose out of the midst of the waves with the imposing majesty common to all motionless objects which seem at once to watch and to command. It must have been about five o’clock. The sea was growing calmer all the time.

‘In two or three hours,’ Edmond thought, ‘the turnkey will go into my room, find the body of my poor friend, recognize it, look in vain for me and give the alarm. Then they will find the hole and the tunnel. They will question the men who threw me into the sea, who must have heard me cry out. Immediately, ships full of soldiers will set out in pursuit of the unfortunate fugitive, who cannot have gone far. The cannon will be fired to warn everyone on the coast not to give shelter to any man who appears, naked and starving. The spies and alguazils
¹
of Marseille will be informed: they will
search the coast while the governor of the Château d’If will be searching the sea. So, hunted down at sea, hemmed in on land, what will become of me? I am hungry and thirsty, I have even lost my life-saving knife, because it hampered me while I was swimming. I am at the mercy of the first peasant who wants to earn twenty francs by handing me in. I have no strength, no ideas, no resolve left. Oh, my God, my God! Haven’t I suffered enough? Now, can you do more for me than I can do for myself?’

Just as Edmond was uttering this ardent prayer, in a sort of delirium due to his exhaustion and the lightness of his head, and anxiously turning towards the Château d’If, he saw off the point of the Ile de Pomègue, its lateen sail against the horizon like a seagull skimming the waves, a little ship which only the eye of a sailor would have recognized as a Genoese tartan
²
which appeared on the still indistinct line of the sea. It was coming from the port of Marseille and heading out to sea, driving the shining spray in front of a sharp prow that cut the sea ahead of its swelling sides.

‘Just think!’ Edmond exclaimed. ‘In half an hour I could have reached that ship, if I were not afraid of being questioned, recognized as an escaped prisoner and taken back to Marseille! What can I do, what can I say? What story can I invent to deceive them? These people are all smugglers, nearly pirates. Pretending to ply the coast, they scour it for booty; they would rather sell me than do a good deed for nothing.

‘Let’s wait…

‘But it is impossible to wait. I am dying of hunger. In a few hours I shall have exhausted the little strength that remains to me. In any case, the time of the warder’s rounds is approaching; the alarm has not yet been sounded, so perhaps they will suspect nothing. I can pretend to be one of the sailors from that little boat which sank last night. This is a plausible enough story. No one will be able to contradict me, since the whole crew is drowned. Let’s go.’

As he said these words, Dantès looked towards the place where the little ship had foundered, and shuddered. The Phrygian cap
³
of one of the drowned sailors was hanging from the jagged edge of a rock and near it some wreckage from the ship’s hull was floating, dead beams that the sea drove against the base of the island which they hammered like powerless battering-rams.

In an instant, Dantès had made up his mind. He plunged back into the sea, swam towards the cap, put it on his head, grasped hold
of one of the beams and set a course that would take him to meet up with the boat.

‘Now I am saved,’ he muttered; and the certainty gave him strength.

He soon saw the tartan which, as it was sailing almost directly into the wind, was tacking between the Château d’If and the Tour de Planier. For a moment, Dantès was afraid that, instead of hugging the coast, the little ship would head out to sea, as it would have done, for example, had it been bound for Corsica or Sardinia. But from the way it was manoeuvring, the swimmer soon realized that it intended to pass between the islands of Jarre and Calseraigne.

However, the ship and the swimmer were gradually converging. As it tacked in one direction, the little ship even came to about a quarter of a league from Dantès. He rose up in the sea and waved his cap as a distress signal, but no one on the ship saw him and it went about to begin tacking in the other direction. Dantès thought of calling out, but he assessed the distance and realized that his voice would not reach the ship, but would be carried away on the sea breeze and covered by the noise of the waves.

Now he congratulated himself for having had the foresight to lie on a beam. Weak as he was, he might not have been able to keep afloat until he reached the tartan; and, certainly, if – as was quite possible – the tartan passed without seeing him, he would not have been able to reach the shore.

Though he was almost certain of the course that the boat had set, Dantès looked anxiously after it until the moment when he saw it tack again and return towards him. Then he swam to meet it. But before their paths had crossed, the boat began to turn.

Immediately, summoning all his strength, Dantès rose almost out of the water, waved his cap and gave one of those pitiful cries of a sailor in distress which sound like the wailing of some genie of the sea.

This time he was seen and heard. The tartan changed course and turned towards him. At the same time he saw that they were preparing to put a boat into the sea. A moment later, the boat, rowed by two men, their oars striking the sea, was coming towards him. Dantès let go of the beam, thinking he would no longer need it, and swam vigorously to halve the distance between himself and his saviours.

However, he had counted on strength that had almost deserted him. Now he realized how much that piece of wood, already floating inertly a hundred yards away, had helped him. His arms began to stiffen, his legs had lost their suppleness, his movements became forced and jerky, and his chest heaved. He let out a great cry; the two rowers increased their efforts and one called out in Italian:
‘Coraggio!’

The word reached him just as a wave, which he no longer had the strength to ride above, broke over his head and drenched him in spray. He reappeared, thrashing the sea with the uneven, desperate movements of a drowning man, cried out a third time and felt himself sinking into the sea, as if he still had the fatal cannonball attached to his legs. The water closed over his head and, above the water, he saw a livid sky, speckled with black.

One last, superhuman effort brought him back to the surface of the sea. Then it seemed to him that someone had grasped him by the hair, and he saw and heard nothing more. He had lost consciousness.