The Toilers of the Sea (37 page)

The flecks of foam flying on all sides were like wool. The vast angry ocean poured over the rocks, mounting onto them, entering into them, penetrating into the network of fissures within them, and emerged from the granite masses through narrow crevices—inexhaustible mouths that formed small tranquil fountains amid the deluge. Here and there threads of silver fell gracefully from these holes into the sea.

The additional frame reinforcing the barrier at the east end of the channel was now almost complete, requiring only a few knots in the ropes and chains, and the moment was approaching when this barrier would be able to play its part in the struggle.

Suddenly the sky brightened, the rain ceased, the clouds broke up. The wind had changed; a kind of tall crepuscular window opened at the zenith, and the lightning stopped. It looked like the end. It was the beginning.

The wind had veered from southwest to northeast.

The tempest was about to begin again, with a new troop of hurricanes. The north was moving to the attack, and it would be a violent assault. The south wind has more water, the north wind more thunder.

Now the attack, coming from the east, was going to be directed against the weak spot in Gilliatt's defenses. This time he interrupted his work and looked around him.

He took up his position on a projecting rock to the rear of the second openwork frame, now almost completed. If the first part of the breakwater were to be carried away it would destroy the second part, which was not yet consolidated, and would crush Gilliatt along with it. In the position that he had chosen he would be destroyed before seeing the paunch and the Durande's engines and the whole of his work engulfed and lost. This was the eventuality that had to be faced. Gilliatt accepted it and, defiantly, willed it.

In this shipwreck of his hopes all that he wanted was to die first—to be the first to die, for to him the engines were like a person. Brushing off with his left hand the hair that had been plastered over his eyes by the rain, he seized hold of his stout hammer with his right, leaned back, as if threatening the storm as the storm was threatening him, and waited.

He had not long to wait.

The signal was given by a peal of thunder; then the pallid opening in the zenith closed, there was a deluge of rain, the whole sky darkened, and the only illumination left was the lightning. The dread attack had begun in earnest.

A massive swell, visible in the repeated flashes of lightning, mounted in the east, beyond the Homme rock. It was like a great rolling cylinder of glass. Glaucous, without a fleck of foam, it stretched across the whole of the sea. It was advancing on the breakwater, and as it approached it grew in size; it was like a huge cylinder of darkness rolling over the ocean. The thunder rumbled dully on.

The great wave reached the Homme rock, broke in two, and swept on beyond it. The two portions joined up again to form a single mountain of water, which was no longer parallel to the breakwater but at right angles to it. It was a wave in the form of a massive timber beam. This battering ram hurled itself against the breakwater in a thunderous shock. Nothing could be seen for the shower of foam.

Only those who have seen them can imagine these avalanches in which the sea shrouds itself and with which it engulfs rocks more than a hundred feet in height, like the Grand Anderlo on Guernsey and the Pinnacle on Jersey. At Sainte-Marie in Madagascar it leaps over Tintingue Point.

For some moments everything was obscured by the mountainous sea. Nothing could be seen but a furious accumulation, an immense blanket of froth, the whiteness of a winding-sheet whirling in the wind of a tomb, a piled-up mass of noise and storm under which extermination was at work.

The foam cleared. Gilliatt was still standing erect.

The barrier had held firm. Not a chain was broken, not a nail dislodged. Under the onslaught of the sea it had shown the two qualities of a breakwater: it had been as flexible as a wicker hurdle and as solid as a wall. The swell had been dissolved into rain. A rivulet of foam, coursing along the zigzags of the channel, died away under the paunch at the far end.

The man who had put this muzzle on the ocean allowed himself no rest. Fortunately, for a short space, the storm turned aside. The fury of the waves turned back against the rock walls of the reef, offering a respite. Gilliatt took advantage of it to complete the rear openwork panel of the breakwater.

This labor occupied the rest of the day. The storm continued its violent assault on the flanks of the reef with lugubrious solemnity. The urn of water and the urn of fire contained within the clouds continued to pour out their contents without ever running dry. The undulations of the wind, upward and downward, were like the movements of a dragon.

When night fell, it was already there; no difference was perceptible.

The darkness, however, was not total. Tempests, which are both illuminated and blinded by lightning, are intermittently visible and invisible. Everything is white, and then everything is black. Visions depart and darkness returns.

A swathe of phosphorus, red with the redness of the northern lights, floated like a rag of spectral flame behind the dense layers of cloud, creating a vast area of pallor. The great sheets of rain were luminous.

This light helped Gilliatt and directed his work. At one point he turned around and addressed the lightning: “Just hold the candle for me.” He was able, with its aid, to build the rear openwork panel even higher than the outer one. The breakwater was now almost complete.

Just as Gilliatt was making fast the topmost beam with a cable the gale blew straight into his face, making him raise his head. The wind had suddenly veered to the northeast. The assault on the eastern end of the channel was now beginning again. Gilliatt looked out to sea. The breakwater was facing a further attack. Another heavy sea was on the way.

The oncoming wave broke with a great shock against the barrier, and it was followed by another, then another and another—five or six in turmoil, almost at the same time; then a final tremendous wave.

This last wave was like a summing-up of the hostile forces, with a strange resemblance to a living creature. It would not have been difficult to imagine, in this tumescence and this transparency, the likeness of gills and fins. The wave flattened and broke up against the breakwater, its almost animal-like form torn to pieces in a splash and surge of water. It was like the crushing to death of a hydra on this rock and timber barrier. As the swell died it wrought devastation; it seemed to cling on and bite its victim. The reef was shaken by a profound tremor, in which were mingled the growlings of a wild beast. The foam was like the spittle of a leviathan.

As the foam subsided the damage inflicted by the wave could be seen. This last assault had had its effect. This time the breakwater had suffered. A long, heavy beam had been torn from the forward barrier and tossed over the one to the rear onto the overhanging rock on which Gilliatt had earlier taken up position. Fortunately he had not returned to the spot: had he done so he would have been killed out of hand.

The remarkable thing about the fall of the beam was that it did not bounce and thus saved Gilliatt from being hit on the rebound. Indeed, as we shall see, it served his purposes in another way.

Between the overhanging rock and the inner surface of the defile there was a large gap, rather like the cut made by an ax or the cleft opened up by a wedge. One end of the beam thrown into the air by the wave had lodged in this gap, widening it still further.

Gilliatt had an idea—to apply pressure to the other end.

The beam, with one end held in the gap in the rock, emerged from it in a straight line, like an outstretched arm. It ran parallel to the inner walls of the defile, its free end reaching out from the rock for some eighteen or twenty inches: a good distance for what Gilliatt had in mind.

He braced himself with his feet, knees, and fists against the surface of the rock and backed his shoulders against what was now in effect an enormous lever. The great length of the beam increased the force he was able to exert. The rock was already loosened, but Gilliatt had still to strain against the beam four times, until there was as much sweat as rain streaming from his hair. The fourth try involved a fearful effort. There was a hoarse crack, the gap, now extended into a fissure, opened up like a gaping jaw, and the heavy mass fell into the narrow defile with a tremendous crash that echoed the peals of thunder.

The rock fell straight down without breaking. It was like a standing stone thrown down in one piece. The beam that had served as a lever followed the rock, and Gilliatt, with his foothold giving way under him, narrowly escaped falling after it.

At this point there was an accumulation of stones and shingle on the seabed, and there was little depth of water. The monolith, in a great swirl of foam that splashed Gilliatt, settled down between the two parallel rock faces of the defile, making a transverse wall, a kind of hyphen between the two sides. Its two ends touched the rock face on both sides; it was a little too long, and the tip, which was of friable rock, broke off as it fell into place. The result was to form a curious kind of blind alley, which can still be seen today. Behind this stone barrier the water is almost always calm.

This was a still more impregnable rampart than the forward section of the Durande between the two Douvres. It had been created just in time.

The buffeting by the sea had been continuing. The obstinacy of the waves is always increased by an obstacle. The first openwork frame, which had been damaged, was now beginning to break up. Damage to one section of a breakwater is serious. The hole will inevitably become wider, and it cannot be repaired on the spot: the workman would be carried away by the waves.

An electric discharge that illuminated the reef revealed the damage that was being done to the breakwater. The beams were twisted out of shape, the ends of the ropes and chains were dangling in the wind, and there was a great rent in the center of the structure. The second openwork panel was intact.

The lump of rock that Gilliatt had hurled into the gap behind the breakwater with such force was the most substantial of the barriers, but it had one defect: it was too low. The sea could not break it up, but it could surge over it.

There was no question of increasing its height. It would have been necessary to add further masses of rock; but how could they be broken off, how could they be dragged to the right place, how could they be lifted and piled on top of one another and fixed in position? Timber structures can be added to easily enough, but not piles of rock. Gilliatt was no Enceladus.
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Gilliatt was worried by the lack of height of this little granite isthmus, and it was not long before the effects of this fault made themselves felt. The assault on the breakwater by the squalls was continuing. They were not merely crashing ferociously against it: it looked as if they were doing it deliberately. There was a sound like the tramping of feet on the much buffeted structure.

Suddenly part of a binding strake broke off, sailed over the second openwork frame and the transverse mass of rock, and landed in the defile, where the water seized hold of it and carried it off along the windings of the channel. Gilliatt could no longer see it. Probably it would end up by striking the paunch. Fortunately the water in the interior of the reef, being enclosed on all sides, was barely affected by the tumult going on outside. There was little wave movement, and the impact was unlikely to be severe. In any case Gilliatt had no time to concern himself with damage to the paunch, if there was damage. He was surrounded by dangers on all sides: the tempest was concentrating on the most vulnerable point, and he was faced with imminent peril.

There was a moment of profound darkness. In sinister connivance, the lightning ceased; the clouds and the waves became one; there was a dull clap of thunder.

The thunder was followed by a crash. Gilliatt peered out. The openwork frame that was the forward part of the barrier had been stove in. The ends of the beams could be seen whirling about in the waves. The sea was using the first breakwater to batter down the second one.

Gilliatt felt as a general would feel seeing his advance guard pulled back.

The second breakwater withstood the shock. The rear section of the defenses was firmly bound together and buttressed. But the shattered frame was heavy; it was in the hands of the waves, which hurled it forward and then drew it back; the remaining ropes and chains prevented it from falling apart and preserved its full bulk; and the very qualities that Gilliatt had given it as a defensive structure made it a terrible engine of destruction. No longer a buckler, it had become a bludgeon. Moreover it bristled with the ends of the broken timbers that emerged from it on all sides, covering it, as it were, with teeth and spurs. No blunt weapon could have been more redoubtable or more suitable for wielding by the tempest. It was a projectile, and the sea was a catapult.

Blow followed blow with a kind of tragic regularity. Gilliatt, standing anxiously behind the gateway that he had barricaded, listened to this knocking at the door by the death that was seeking to enter.

He thought bitterly that had not the Durande's funnel been fatally trapped in the wreck he would have been back in Guernsey and in harbor that morning, with the paunch in safety and the engines saved.

But the thing he had feared had come to pass. The sea had broken in. It was like a death rattle. The whole structure of the breakwater, both parts of it mingled and crushed together, now hurled itself in a tremendous surge of foam against the stone barrier, like a landslide on a mountain, and stopped there. It all formed a great tangle, a shapeless mass of beams, which could be penetrated by the waves but still dashed them to pieces. The protective rampart had been vanquished but was dying a heroic death. The sea had wrecked it, but it was breaking up the sea. Although it had been overthrown, it was still to some extent effective. The rock barrier—an obstacle that could not be driven back—was still holding off the waves. At this point, as we have seen, the defile was at its narrowest; the victorious storm had thrown back, broken, and heaped up in this bottleneck the whole structure of the breakwater; but its very violence, by crushing the whole mass together and driving the broken fragments into one another, had formed by its demolition work a solid mass of debris. Though destroyed, it was still unshakeable. A few pieces of timber broke free and were dispersed by the waves. One of them flew through the air quite close to Gilliatt. He felt the wind of its passing on his forehead.