The Toilers of the Sea (39 page)

Meanwhile, scholars who are also philosophers, and consequently are well disposed toward the created world, find, or think they have found, the explanation. Among those to whom the final end occurred was Bonnet of Geneva, that mysterious exact thinker, who was opposed to Buffon, as, later, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was opposed to Cuvier. The explanation put forward was that death, occurring everywhere, involves burial everywhere. The devourers are also gravediggers.

All beings enter into one another. Putrefaction is nutriment. A fearful cleansing of the globe. Man, being carnivorous, is also a burier. Our life is made up of death. Such is the terrifying law. We are all sepulchres.

In our crepuscular world this fatality in the ordering of life produces monsters. You say, What is the point? This is it.

Is that the explanation? Is that the answer to the question? But then, why is there not some different order of things? And the question remains unanswered.

Let us live, by all means. But let us try to ensure that death is a progress. Let us aspire to worlds that are less dark. Let us follow the conscience that leads us there. For, let us never forget, the best is attained only by way of the better.

III

ANOTHER FORM OF COMBAT IN THE ABYSS

Such was the creature to which Gilliatt had for some moments belonged. This monster was the inhabitant of the cavern, the dreadful
genius loci;
a kind of somber water demon.

At the center of all these splendors was horror.

When Gilliatt had found his way into the cave for the first time a month ago the dark shape that he had glimpsed in the turbulence of the secret water had been the devilfish. This was its home.

When he entered the cave for the second time in pursuit of the crab and saw the crevice in which he thought the crab had taken refuge the devilfish was there, lying in wait for its prey.

Can we imagine such a lying in wait? Not a bird would dare to sit on her eggs, not an egg would dare to hatch, not a flower would dare to open, not a breast would dare to give suck, not a heart would dare to love, not a spirit would dare to take flight, if they thought of the sinister patience of the creatures lying in wait in the abyss.

Gilliatt had thrust his arm into the hole and the devilfish had seized it. It held him in its power. He was the fly caught by this spider.

Gilliatt was up to his waist in the water, his feet strained against round, slippery pebbles, his right arm embraced and held prisoner by the flat coils of the devilfish's tentacles and his chest almost hidden under the folds and interlacings of this horrible bandage. Of the devilfish's eight arms three were clamped on the rock and five on Gilliatt. Thus, clinging on one side to the granite and on the other to the man, it chained Gilliatt to the rock. He was held by 250 suckers, in a mingling of anguish and disgust. He was caught in the grasp of a huge fist with elastic fingers almost three feet long, the undersides of which were covered with living pustules digging into his flesh.

As we have said, you cannot break free from a devilfish. If you try to you are still more securely bound: it merely tightens its grip. As you increase your efforts it matches its effort to yours. Greater exertion leads to greater constriction.

Gilliatt had only one resource, his knife. He had free movement only of his left hand; but we have seen that he could make powerful use of it. It could be said of him that he had two right hands.

His clasp knife, open, was in that hand.

You cannot sever the antennae of a devilfish: they are of a leathery substance that is impossible to cut; the knife slips off them; and besides they have such a close hold that you cannot cut them without cutting your own flesh.

The octopus is a formidable opponent; but there is a way of tackling it. The fishermen of Sark know it, as does anyone who has seen them carrying out certain sharp movements at sea. Porpoises know it, too; they have a way of biting a cuttlefish that cuts off its head. That is why so many headless squids, cuttlefishes, and octopuses are to be seen floating at sea.

The octopus is vulnerable only in the head; and Gilliatt was well aware of this. He had never seen a devilfish of such a size before, and now that he had been caught by one it turned out to be one of the largest species. Anyone else would have been worried about this.

With a devilfish as with a bull you have to choose the right moment for the kill. It is when the bull lowers its head, it is when the devilfish thrusts its head forward—a moment that passes very quickly. If you miss your chance you are lost.

All that we have described had lasted only a few minutes; but Gilliatt felt the suction of the 250 suckers increasing.

The devilfish is a cunning creature. It tries first to stupefy its prey— seizing it and then waiting as long as possible.

Gilliatt held his knife ready. The suction continued to increase. He looked at the devilfish, which looked at him.

Suddenly it detached its sixth antenna from the rock and, lashing it out at Gilliatt, tried to seize his left arm.

At the same time it thrust its head quickly forward. A second more and its mouth/anus would have been fastened on his chest. Bleeding from his sides, with both arms caught in a stranglehold, Gilliatt would have been a dead man.

But he was alert. Closely watched by his opponent, he, too, was watching.

He evaded the antenna, and at the moment when the devilfish was about to bite his chest his left hand, armed with the knife, struck down on it. There were two convulsions in opposite directions, the devilfish's and Gilliatt's. It was like a conflict between two flashes of lightning.

Gilliatt plunged his knife into the flat viscous mass and, with a turning movement like the coiling of a whip, cut a circle around the two eyes and drew out the head as one draws a tooth.

It was all over in an instant. The creature fell in one mass, like a piece of cloth torn off. Now that the pump sucking out the air was destroyed, the vacuum was released. The four hundred suckers released their hold both on the rock and on the man, and the rag of cloth sank to the bottom.

Gilliatt, panting with his efforts, could see on the pebbles at his feet two gelatinous heaps, the head on one side, the rest of the creature on the other. We say the rest of the creature, for it could not be called a body.

Fearing some last convulsion in its death agony, however, Gilliatt withdrew out of reach of its tentacles.

But the beast was dead all right. Gilliatt closed his knife.

IV

NOTHING CAN BE HIDDEN AND NOTHING GETS LOST

Gilliatt had killed the devilfish just in time. He was almost suffocated; his right arm and his chest were purple; more than two hundred swellings were beginning to appear on his skin, and some of them were bleeding. The best cure for such wounds is salt water, and Gilliatt plunged into it. At the same time he rubbed himself with the palms of his hands, and under this treatment the swellings began to die down.

Drawing back, farther into the water, he had, without realizing it, come closer to the kind of vault that he had noticed before near the crevice where he had been harpooned by the devilfish. This vault continued obliquely, out of the water, under the high walls of the cavern. The pebbles that had accumulated in it had raised its floor above the level of normal tides. It had a low vaulted roof, and a man could enter it by stooping. The green light of the underwater cavern reached into it, giving weak illumination.

While rubbing his swollen skin Gilliatt raised his eyes mechanically and looked into the vault. He shuddered: he thought he saw, in the darkness at the far end of the cavity, what looked like a grinning face.

Gilliatt had never heard the word
hallucination,
but he had had experience of the thing itself. The mysterious encounters with the improbable that for want of a better name we call hallucinations occur in nature. Whether illusion or reality, visions do appear, and anyone who happens to be there may see them. As we have said, Gilliatt was a dreamer. He had the greatness of soul to be on occasion hallucinated like a prophet. This commonly happens to those accustomed to dream in solitary places.

He thought this was one of the mirages by which, as a man of nocturnal habits, he had sometimes been bewildered.

The cavity had all the appearance of a limekiln. It was a low recess with a rounded roof, whose steep sides grew steadily lower toward the far end, where the pebble-covered floor and the roof came together, closing off the passage.

Gilliatt entered the vault and, keeping his head down, walked toward what he had seen at the far end.

There was indeed something grinning there. It was a skull.

There was not only a skull, but a whole skeleton. The occupant of the vault was the skeleton of a man.

In such encounters as this a bold man seeks for an explanation. Gilliatt looked around him.

He was surrounded by a multitude of crabs. There was no movement in the multitude. It was like a dead anthill. All the crabs were inert. They were empty.

Groups of the crabs, scattered about on the pebbles that littered the floor of the vault, formed misshapen constellations. Gilliatt, his eyes fixed elsewhere, had walked over them without noticing.

At the end of the crypt, which Gilliatt had now reached, the crabs lay thicker on the ground, bristling in their immobility with antennae, feet, and mandibles. Open pincers stuck up, never to close again. Shells, under their crust of spines, did not move; some lay upside down, showing their livid interior. This accumulation of bodies resembled a host of enemies besieging a castle, with the appearance of a tangle of brushwood.

The skeleton lay under this pile. Under the confusion of tentacles and scales could be seen the skull with its striations, the vertebrae, the femurs, the tibias, the long knotted fingers with their nails. The rib cage was full of crabs. In there someone's heart had once beaten. The eye sockets were covered with marine molds. Limpets had left their slime in the nasal cavities. Within this recess in the rocks, however, there were no seaweeds, no vegetation of any kind, not a breath of air. No movement anywhere. The teeth were set in a grin.

What is disturbing about laughter is the imitation of it by a death's head.

This marvelous palace of the abyss, embroidered and encrusted with all the gemstones of the sea, was now at last revealing itself and giving up its secret. It was a den, the habitation of the devilfish; and it was a tomb, in which there lay a man.

The spectral immobility of the skeleton and the crabs quivered gently under the impact of the subterranean waters on this petrifaction. The horrible mass of crabs looked as if they were finishing their meal. Their carapaces seemed to be eating the carcass. It was a strange sight, the dead vermin on their dead prey. A somber sequence of death.

Gilliatt had under his eyes the devilfish's food store. A lugubrious vision, revealing the profound horror of what had happened, caught in the act. The crabs had eaten the man and the devilfish had eaten the crabs.

There were no remains of clothing around the skeleton. The man must have been naked when he was caught.

Gilliatt, examining the remains carefully, set about removing the crabs from the remains of the man. Who had he been? The corpse had been skillfully dissected, like a cadaver prepared for an anatomy lesson. All the flesh had been removed; not a muscle was left; not a bone was missing. Had Gilliatt been a doctor he would have been able to confirm this. The periostea, denuded of their covering, were white, polished, as if specially furbished. But for some green patches left by confervae, they might have been ivory. The cartilaginous septa were delicately thinned down and smoothed. The tomb can create such sinister pieces of jewelry.

The corpse had been, in effect, buried under the dead crabs. Gilliatt was unearthing it.

Suddenly he bent forward quickly. He had seen something encircling the spinal column. It was a leather belt that had evidently been buckled around the man's waist. The leather was mildewed and the buckle was rusty.

Gilliatt drew the belt toward him. The vertebrae resisted, and he had to break them in order to remove it. The belt was intact, though a crust of shells was beginning to form on it. He felt it: inside it was a hard, square object. There was no question of undoing the buckle, and he split the leather with his knife.

The belt contained a small iron box and a few gold coins. Gilliatt counted twenty guineas. The iron box was an old sailor's tobacco box, with a spring catch. It was much rusted and very firmly closed. The spring was completely oxidized and no longer worked. Once again Gilliatt's knife served him well. A little pressure with the point and the lid flew open.

There was nothing in the box but paper: a few very thin pieces of paper, folded in four. They were damp, but not damaged. The hermetically sealed box had preserved them. Gilliatt unfolded them.

They were three banknotes, each for a thousand pounds sterling, amounting in total to seventy-five thousand francs.

Gilliatt folded them up again and put them back in the box, taking advantage of the remaining space to add the twenty guineas, and closed the box as best he could.

Then he examined the belt. The outer surface had originally been varnished, but the other side was rough. On this yellow-brown background were some letters in thick black ink. Gilliatt deciphered them and read the name
Sieur Clubin.

V

IN THE GAP BETWEEN SIX INCHES AND TWO FEET THERE IS ROOM FOR DEATH

Gilliatt put the box back in the belt and the belt in his trouser pocket. He left the skeleton to the crabs, with the dead devilfish beside it.

While Gilliatt had been engaged with the devilfish and the skeleton the rising tide had engulfed the entrance passage, and he could get out only by diving under the arch. This gave him no trouble: he knew the way out, and he was a master of these sea gymnastics.

The drama that had taken place ten weeks before can now be pictured. One monster had seized the other. The devilfish had taken Clubin to his death. It had been, in the inexorable darkness, what might almost be called an encounter between two hypocrisies. There had been a meeting in the depths of the abyss between these two existences of watchfulness and darkness, and one, which was the animal, had executed the other, which was the soul. A sinister act of justice.

The crab feeds on carrion, the devilfish on crabs. The devilfish seizes any animal that swims by—an otter, a dog, a man if it is able to—drinks its blood, and leaves the dead body on the sea bottom. Crabs are the burying beetles of the sea. The putrefying flesh attracts them; they make for the corpse; they eat it, and the devilfish eats them. The dead things disappear into the crab, and the crab disappears into the devilfish. We have already noted this law.

Clubin had been the bait that attracted the devilfish. It had seized hold of him and drowned him, and the crabs had devoured him. Some wave had then swept him into the cavern and the crevice where Gilliatt had found him.

Gilliatt retraced his footsteps, hunting among the rocks for sea urchins and limpets. He no longer wanted crabs: it would have been like eating human flesh.

Now he was thinking only about getting the best supper he could before leaving. There was nothing to hold him back. Great storms are always followed by a calm that sometimes lasts several days. There was now no danger from the sea. Gilliatt was determined to leave the next morning. It would be necessary, because of the rising tide, to keep the barrier between the two Douvres during the night; but Gilliatt planned to remove it at daybreak, push the paunch out from between the Douvres, and set sail for St. Sampson. The gentle breeze that was blowing from the southeast was exactly the wind he needed. The May moon was just entering its first quarter, and the days were long.

By the time Gilliatt returned to the channel between the two Douvres where the paunch was moored, his hunt for shellfish among the rocks over and his stomach more or less satisfied, the sun had set and the twilight was accompanied by that dim moonlight that might be called crescent light; the tide had reached full and was beginning to ebb. The funnel of the Durande, rising erect out of the paunch, had been covered by the foam of the storm with a coating of salt that shone white in the moonlight. This reminded Gilliatt that a great deal of rainwater and seawater had been thrown into the paunch by the tempest and that if he wanted to leave the following morning, he would have to bale it out.

On leaving the paunch to hunt for crabs he had noticed that there was about six inches of water in the bottom of the boat, which he would have no difficulty in emptying out with his baling scoop.

Returning to the boat, he was struck with terror. There was almost two feet of water in her. This was an alarming discovery: the paunch was leaking. She had gradually been filling during his absence. Heavily laden as she was, twenty inches of water was a dangerous addition. It would take only a little more to sink her. If Gilliatt had come back an hour later he would probably have found only the funnel and the mast above water.

He could not take even a minute to think what to do. He must find the leak, stop it, and then empty the boat, or at least lighten it. The Durande's pumps had been lost in the shipwreck: all he had was the paunch's baling scoop.

The most urgent thing was to find the leak. Without giving himself time to get dressed, Gilliatt set to work at once, quivering with anxiety. He no longer felt hunger or cold. The paunch was still taking in water. Fortunately there was no wind. The least wave would have sunk the boat.

The moon now set. Gilliatt, feeling his way, crouching down, more than half under water, searched for a long time before finally discovering where the mischief lay. During the storm, at the critical moment when the paunch had been thrown up into the air, the sturdy vessel, falling back, had struck the rock with some violence, and a projection on the Little Douvre had ripped a hole in the hull on the starboard side.

Unfortunately—it almost seemed maliciously—the hole was at the meeting point of two riders. This, combined with the confusion caused by the squall, had prevented Gilliatt from seeing the damage in his very cursory inspection at the height of the storm.

The alarming thing about the break was that it was so wide; the reassuring thing was that, although the paunch was floating lower than usual because of the increasing weight of water in the hull, she was still above the normal waterline.

At the moment when the damage had been done the water in the channel was violently disturbed and there was no waterline; the sea had entered through the hole, and under this overload the paunch had sunk several inches. Even after the waves had calmed down the weight of liquid that had found its way in, by raising the waterline, had kept the hole under water. Hence the imminence of the danger. The height of water in the boat had risen from six inches to twenty. But if the leak could be stopped it would be possible to empty the paunch; and once she had been made watertight she would rise to her normal waterline, the hole would be out of the water, and the necessary repair would be easy, or at least possible. As we have seen, Gilliatt still had his carpenter's tools in reasonably good condition.

But how many uncertainties there were before that stage could be reached! how many dangers! how many unlucky chances! Gilliatt heard the water inexorably trickling in. The slightest shock, and the paunch would founder. It was a wretched situation. Perhaps, indeed, it was already too late.

Gilliatt bitterly reproached himself. He should have seen the damage at once. The six inches of water in the hull should have warned him. He had been foolish to attribute these six inches to the rain and the foam. He blamed himself for having slept, for having eaten; he blamed himself for his tiredness; he almost blamed himself for the storm and the darkness. It was all his fault.

While he was heaping these reproaches on himself he still went about his work, which did not prevent him from considering what had to be done.

The leak had been located: that was the first step. The second was to stop it. That was all that could be done for the moment. You cannot do carpentry under water.

One favorable circumstance was that the damage to the hull was in the space between the two chains that made the Durande's funnel fast on the starboard side. The oakum used to stop the hole could be fixed to these chains.

Meanwhile the water was gaining. It was now over two feet deep, reaching above Gilliatt's knees.