The Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

  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. 196

  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 ra
ttle. 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.

  But some of the waves--those great waves that during a storm return with imperturbable periodicity--were surging over the ruin of the breakwater. They fell back into the defile and, in spite of its turns and angles, raised a swell. The water within the channel was beginning to become dangerously agitated. The obscure kiss of the waves on the rocks was growing more vigorous.

  How could this agitation be prevented from reaching the paunch? It would not take long for these squalls to whip up all the water within the reef, and with a few buffets from the sea the paunch would be ripped apart and the engines would sink to the bottom.

  Gilliatt pondered, shuddering. But he was unabashed. His was a soul that had no thought of defeat.

  The hurricane had now found the way forward and was surging frantically between the two walls of the defile.

  Suddenly there sounded and reverberated in the defile, some distance to Gilliatt's rear, a crash more terrifying than any he had yet heard.

  It came from the direction of the paunch. Some dire event was taking place in that quarter. Gilliatt hurried to the spot.

  From the eastern end of the channel, where he was, he could not see the paunch because of the zigzags of the defile. Coming to the last turning in its course, he paused and waited for a flash of lightning.

  A flash came and illuminated the scene.

  The inrush of the sea from the eastern end of the defile had been met by a squall of wind at the western end. A disaster was on the way.

  There was no sign of damage on the paunch: securely anchored as she was, she afforded little hold to the tempest; but the carcass of the Durande was in distress. The ruin of the vessel offered a considerable surface to the storm. Suspended in the air, entirely out of the water, it was offered up to its violence. The hole that Gilliatt had made in the hull to extract the engines had weakened it still further. The main beam of the keel had been cut. The Durande was a skeleton whose spinal column had been broken.

  The hurricane had merely blown on it; but that was enough. The deck planking had folded like an opening book, and the vessel had been dismembered. This was the crash that Gilliatt had heard over the noise of the storm.

  What he saw when he came closer seemed almost irremediable. The square incision he had made in the hull had become a gaping wound. The wind had enlarged the cut into a fracture, and this transverse break had divided the wreck into two. The after part, nearer the paunch, was still solidly fixed in the rock, but the forward part, facing Gilliatt, was hanging loose. A fracture, so long as it holds together, is like a hinge. The broken mass was swinging on its fractures, as if on hinges, and was being blown about by the wind, with a fearful noise.

  Fortunately, the paunch was no longer under the wreck.

  But this swaying to and fro was shaking the other half of the hull, still caught tight and immobile between the two Douvres. From shaking to falling is a short step. Exposed as it was to the determined onslaught of the wind, the dislocated part might suddenly drag with it the other part, which was almost touching the paunch, and everything--the paunch containing the engines--would be swallowed up in this collapse.

  Gilliatt saw it all. A catastrophe was imminent. How could it be averted?

  Gilliatt was the type of man who can draw aid from the very danger with which he is faced. He thought for a moment. Then he ran to his storeroom and took his ax. The hammer had done its work well; now it was the turn of the felling ax.

  Gilliatt climbed up onto the wreck. Standing on the part of the deck that still held firm, he bent over the precipice between the two Douvres and began to cut away the broken beams, severing the remaining links with the hanging section of the hull.

  The object of the operation was to complete the separation of the two parts of the wreck, to save the half that was still solid and consign to the waves the section that had fallen prey to the wind--conceding partial victory to the storm. The task was not particularly difficult, but it was dangerous. The portion of the wreck that was hanging down, pulled downward by the wind and by its own weight, was held only at a few points. The wreck was like a diptych with one panel half detached and liable to beat against the other. Only five or six pieces of the structure, bent and twisted but not broken off, were still holding. The breaks creaked and widened at every gust of the north wind, and the ax had to do no more than help the wind. The few remaining joins between the two parts eased Gilliatt's work but added to its danger. The whole thing could give way at any moment under his feet.

  The storm was now reaching its paroxysm. Hitherto terrible, it had become terrifying. The convulsion of the sea now reached up into the sky. Up till now the clouds had been dominant; they seemed to do whatever they wanted; they gave the main impulsion; they conveyed their fury to the waves, while preserving a strange sinister lucidity. Below was madness; above was wrath. The sky had the wind; the ocean had only foam. Hence came the authority of the wind. The hurricane was a powerful spirit. The intoxication of its own horror, however, had disturbed it. It was now only a whirlwind. It was blindness giving birth to night. In whirlwinds there is a moment of madness; for the sky it is like something going to its head. The abyss no longer knows what it is doing. It fumbles with its thunderbolts. It is a fearful situation, a moment of horror.

  The tumult on the reef was now at its peak. Every storm has a mysterious orientation of its own, and at a certain moment it loses its sense of direction. This is the worst phase of the tempest. At that moment "the wind," said Thomas Fuller,197 "is a raving madman." It is at that moment in a storm that there is the continuous discharge of electricity that Piddington198 calls a cascade of lightning. It is at that moment, too, that there appears, for no apparent reason, amid the blackest clouds, as if to spy on the universal terror, the circle of blue light known to the old Spanish navigators as the eye of the storm, el ojo de la tempestad. This lugubrious eye was on Gilliatt.

  Gilliatt for his part was looking at the clouds. Now he was keeping his head up. After every stroke of his ax he stood proudly erect. He was, or seemed to be, too near destruction not to feel some pride. Did he despair? No. Faced with the ocean's supreme access of fury, he was prudent as well as bold. He stood only on the parts of the wreck that were still solid. He was risking his life, but was also careful of it. He, too, was in a state of paroxysm. His vigor had multiplied tenfold. He was all intrepidity. His ax strokes rang like challenges. He seemed to have gained in lucidity what the tempest had lost. It was a dramatic conflict: on one side the inexhaustible, on the other the indefatigable. It was a contest to see which side would compel the other to give in. In the immensity of the sky the lowering clouds had the form of gorgon faces; the air was full of menace. The rain was coming from the waves, the foam from the clouds. The phantoms of the wind bent low; meteor faces flushed crimson and then disappeared, and after their disappearance there was a monstrous darkness. Everything was pouring down, coming from every side at the same tim
e; it was all boiling up; the massed darkness was overflowing; the cumulus clouds, laden with hail, ragged and torn, ash-gray in color, seemed to be possessed by a kind of gyratory frenzy; the air was filled with a noise like dried peas being shaken in a riddle; the inverse movements of electricity observed by Volta were flashing from cloud to cloud; the continuing rolls of thunder were terrifying; the flashes of lightning came close to Gilliatt. It looked as if he had astonished the abyss. He went to and fro on the shaky wreck of the Durande, with the deck quivering under his feet-- striking, hacking, cutting, slicing with his ax, a pale figure lit by the lightning, disheveled, barefoot, clad in rags, his face spattered by the sea, standing tall amid this cesspool of thunder.

  Against the delirium of natural forces man's only weapon is skill. And skill brought about Gilliatt's triumph. He wanted the whole shattered mass of debris to fall in one piece. With that in mind, he was weakening the fractures that acted as hinges without cutting them right through, leaving a few fibers to sustain the rest. Suddenly he stopped, his ax held high. The operation was complete. The whole section broke away together.

  The loose half of the Durande's carcass sank between the two Douvres, below Gilliatt, who, standing on the other half, bent down and watched. It fell perpendicularly into the water, splashing the rocks, and was caught in the narrow channel before reaching the bottom, standing more than twelve feet above the waves. The deck planking, now vertical, formed a wall between the two Douvres. Like the rock that had fallen across the channel higher up, it allowed only a bare trickle of foam to slip past its two ends; and so it formed the fifth barricade improvised by Gilliatt against the tempest in this street of the sea. The hurricane, blind to what it was doing, had worked on the creation of this final barricade.

  It was fortunate that the narrow gap between the two walls of the defile had prevented this barrier from sinking to the bottom. This made it stand higher out of the water; and in addition it allowed the water to pass under the obstacle, which reduced the force of the waves. What passes underneath does not surge over the top. This is part of the secret of a floating breakwater.