The Toilers of the Sea (30 page)

XI

A DISCOVERY

Men sometimes visit a reef near the coast, but never one in the open sea. Why should anyone go there? It is not an island; there is no food to be found there, no fruit trees, no pastureland, no livestock, no springs of fresh water. It is a place of nakedness set in a solitude. It is an expanse of rock, with steep scarps rising out on the sea and sharp-edged ridges under the water. There is nothing to be found here but shipwreck.

Reefs of this kind are strange places. There the sea is alone, and can do whatever she wants. There is no terrestrial life to trouble her. The sea is terrified of man; she mistrusts him; she conceals from him what she is and what she is doing. In a reef she feels safe; man will not come there. The monologue of the waves will not be disturbed. She works away on the reef, repairs any damage it suffers, sharpens its edges; she equips it with jagged points, renovates it, keeps it in good condition. She pierces holes in the rock, breaks up the soft rock and exposes the hard rock, strips off the flesh and leaves the bones, excavates, dissects, drills, cuts holes and channels, links up its guts, fills the reef with cells, imitates a sponge on a larger scale, hollows out the interior and sculpts the exterior. In this secret mountain that belongs to her, she constructs her caves and shrines and palaces. She has her own hideous and splendid vegetation, composed of floating grasses that bite and monsters that take root; and she hides this terrible magnificence in the darkness of the water. On an isolated reef there is no one watching her, spying on her, disturbing her; she can develop at her ease the mysterious side of her being that is inaccessible to man. There she deposits her horrible, living secretions. All the unknowns of the sea are to be found there.

Promontories, capes, land's ends, nazes, shoal rocks, and reefs are constructed features. Their formation by geology counts for little compared with their formation by the ocean. Reefs—those habitations of the waves, those pyramids and syrinxes
¹⁷¹
—are examples of a mysterious form of art that the author of this book has elsewhere called the art of nature, and have a kind of enormous style of their own. What is in fact the result of chance appears deliberate. These structures are of many forms. They have the intricate pattern of a colony of polyps, the sublimity of a cathedral, the extravagance of a pagoda, the vastness of a mountain, the delicacy of a jewel, the horror of a sepulchre. They have as many cells as a wasps' nest, as many dens as a menagerie, as many tunnels as a warren of moles, as many ambuscades as an army camp. They have gates, but the gates are barricaded; columns, but they are truncated; towers, but they are out of true; bridges, but they are broken. Their various compartments are strictly reserved: this one for birds, that one for fish, with no admission for outsiders. Their architectural forms are in constant transformation, they contradict each other, they affirm the laws of statics or repudiate them, they break off sharply, they stop short, they begin as an archivolt and end as an architrave; block is piled on block; the builder at work here is Enceladus.
¹⁷²
Here an extraordinary dynamic force displays its problems, all resolved. Terrifying pendentives threaten to fall, but do not fall. It is difficult to see how these vertiginous structures stand at all. Everywhere there are overhangs, imbalances, gaps, masses hanging crazily in the air. The laws governing this architectural Babelism cannot be discerned; the Unknown, that tremendous architect, calculates none of its effects, but succeeds in everything it does. The rocks, built up in confusion, form a monstrous monument; there is no logic in its structure, but it achieves a vast equilibrium. Here there is more than stability: there is eternity. But there is also disorder. The granite seems to have taken on the tumultuous movement of the waves. A reef is the tempest turned to stone. Nothing is more awe-inspiring than this wild architecture, forever on the point of collapse, forever holding firm. All these features support one another, and at the same time act against one another. It is a conflict between opposing lines that results in the construction of an edifice; a work created by collaboration between two hostile forces, the ocean and the hurricane.

This architecture sometimes produces masterpieces, of dread effect. One such was the Douvres reef. It had been constructed and perfected by the sea with formidable love, and was now being groomed by the jealous waves. It was hideous, treacherous, dark, and full of cavities. It had a whole venous system of underwater holes ramifying to unfathomable depths. Several of the entrances to this labyrinth of passages were exposed at low tide. They could be entered; but anyone who entered did so at his own risk.

For the purposes of his salvage operation Gilliatt found it necessary to explore these caverns. Each one he entered was terrifying. In all of them he found, reproduced on the exaggerated scale of the ocean, the atmosphere of a slaughterhouse and of butchery that was so strangely marked in the gap between the two Douvres. Only those who have seen these ghastly frescoes painted by nature on the eternal granite walls of such caverns can have any idea of what they are like. These cruel caverns, too, were deceitful; it was unsafe to linger in them. The high tide filled them up to their roofs.

There was an abundance of sea lice and other seafood in these caverns. They were obstructed by waterworn boulders, piled up to the vaulting of the roof. Many of them weighed over a ton. They were of all sizes and colors. Most of them appeared bloodred; some of them, covered with hairy, sticky confervae, were like large green moles burrowing into the rock.

Several of the caverns came to a dead end in a kind of apse. Others, arteries for some mysterious traffic, continued into the rock in black and tortuous fissures: these were the streets of the abyss. These fissures grew steadily narrower, at length leaving no room for a man to pass. A lighted torch revealed only dark rock walls dripping with moisture.

Once Gilliatt, ferreting about in the cavern, ventured into one of these fissures. The tide was at a level that made it safe to do so. It was a fine, calm, sunny day. No disturbance in the sea that might have made it more dangerous was to be feared.

As we have said, two necessities led Gilliatt to undertake these explorations: he wanted to look for any pieces of wreckage that might be useful in the work of salvage and to find crabs and crayfish to supplement his food supply. The shellfish on the Douvres were beginning to run out.

The fissure was very narrow, and it was almost impossible to make his way through it. But he saw light at the far end. He redoubled his efforts, made himself as small as possible, and, with much contortion, managed to inch his way forward.

Gilliatt was now, without knowing it, in the interior of the rock onto which Clubin had driven the Durande. He was under the point where the ship had struck. Though sheer and inaccessible on the outside, it was hollowed out within. It had passages, shafts, and chambers like the tomb of an Egyptian king. This system of caverns and tunnels was one of the most complicated of the labyrinths carved out by water, undermined by the tireless sea. The ramifications of this warren under the sea probably communicated with the immense expanse of water outside through a number of openings, some gaping open on the surface of the sea, others deep down and invisible. It was near here, though Gilliatt did not know this, that Clubin had dived into the sea.

Through this fissure, which seemed fit for a crocodile's lair— though there was no danger from crocodiles here—Gilliatt made his way painfully forward, twisting and turning, crawling, striking his head on the rock, crouching down and then straightening up, losing his footing and recovering himself. Gradually the passage opened out; he saw a dim light ahead, and suddenly he found himself in an extraordinary cavern.

XII

THE INTERIOR OF AN EDIFICE UNDER THE SEA

It was fortunate that Gilliatt had this glimmer of light, for if he had taken one step more he would have fallen into a pool of water, which might well be bottomless. The water in such sea caves is so cold and brings on paralysis so quickly that it is often fatal to even the strongest swimmers. And there was no way of getting out of the water or even getting a hold on the sheer rock faces by which he was surrounded.

Gilliatt stopped short. The crevice from which he had emerged ended on a narrow, slippery ledge, a kind of corbeled projection on the sheer rock face. With his back against the wall, he surveyed what was in front of him.

He was in a large cavern. Above his head was what looked like the underside of a huge skull, which had the appearance of having just been dissected. The veins in the rock on the roof of the cave, dripping with water, imitated the branching fibers and jagged sutures of a cranium. The chamber had rock for a ceiling and water for a floor; the waves created by the tide, caught between the four walls of the cave, were like large quivering paving stones. The cave was closed in on all sides; no roof lights, no windows; not a breach in the wall, not a crack in the roof. The cave was lit from below through the water: a strange dark radiance.

In this dim twilight Gilliatt, whose eyes had dilated during his passage through the dark corridor, could make out every detail.

He was familiar with the Plémont caves on Jersey, the Creux Maillé on Guernsey, and the Boutiques on Sark, so called because they were used by smugglers to store their goods; but none of these marvelous caves was comparable with the subterranean and submarine chamber that he had just entered.

On the far side of the pool, under the water, was a kind of drowned arch. This arch, a natural pointed arch fashioned by the waves, glowed with light between its two black uprights, which reached deep down into the water. It was through this submerged porch that the light of the open sea entered the cavern: a strange kind of daylight engulfed by the sea.

The light flared out under the waves like a wide fan and was reflected from the rock. Its rectilinear radiance, broken up into long straight shafts of light over the opacity of the depths, growing lighter or darker from one crevice in the rock to another, looked as if it were divided by sheets of glass. There was light in this cavern, but light of an unknown kind. It had nothing of the quality of our everyday light. It was as if one had found one's way onto another planet. This light was an enigma; it was like the glaucous gleam in the eye of a sphinx. The cavern resembled the interior of an enormous and magnificent skull; the vault was the cranium, the arch was the mouth; the sockets for the eyes were missing. The mouth, swallowing and disgorging the inflow and outflow of the sea, wide open to catch the full light of midday, drank in light and vomited forth bitterness. There are some beings, intelligent and evil, like that. The rays of the sun, passing through this porch obstructed by a vitreous mass of seawater, became green, like the glimmering light from Aldebaran. The water, filled with this moist light, appeared like molten emerald. The whole cavern had a soft aquamarine tinge of extraordinary delicacy. The vault of the cavern, with its lobes resembling those of a brain and its intricate ramifications like a network of nerves, was bathed in a tender shade of chrysoprase. The shimmering ripples on the water were reflected on the roof of the cavern, where they dissolved and re-formed endlessly, forming a golden mesh that was now wider and now narrower, in a mysterious dance movement. It had a spectral aspect; observing it, one might well wonder what prey secured or expectation to be realized gave rise to this joyously magnificent network of living fire. From the projections in the vault and the irregularities in the rock there hung long thin trails of vegetation, their roots probably bathed in some deposit of water higher up in the granite, with drops of water trickling like pearls, one after the other, from their tips. These pearls dropped into the gulf below with a gentle splash. The effect of the scene was indescribable. It was charming beyond all imagination and at the same time melancholy beyond all expression.

This was a palace of death in which Death was content.

XIII

WHAT CAN BE SEEN THERE AND WHAT CAN BE MERELY GLIMPSED

An extraordinary place: a darkness that dazzled the eye.

The palpitation of the sea could be felt within the cavern. The oscillation outside it swelled and reduced the level of the water inside with the regularity of breathing. It seemed that some mysterious soul dwelled within this great green diaphragm that rose and fell in silence.

The water had a magical limpidity, and Gilliatt saw at varying depths submerged levels, projecting rock surfaces of an increasingly darker green. There were, too, dark recesses, probably of unfathomable depth.

On either side of the submarine porch were rough-hewn flattened arches, areas of deep shadow, marking the entrance to small side caves, lateral aisles of the central cavern that could no doubt be entered at particularly low tides. These recesses had sloping roofs at angles of varying degree. Reaching back and disappearing into them were small beaches, only a few feet wide, laid bare by the scouring of the sea.

Here and there trails of vegetation more than a fathom in length waved to and fro under the water, like tresses of hair blowing in the wind. Lower down could be glimpsed forests of seaweed.

The walls of the cavern, both under water and above water, were covered from top to bottom, from the vault of the roof to their disappearance in invisible depths, with those prodigious florescences of the ocean, so rarely seen by the human eye, which were known to the old Spanish navigators as the
praderías del mar,
the meadows of the sea. A luxuriant growth of moss in every shade of olive concealed and enlarged the protuberances in the granite. From every projection hung slender goffered ribbons of varech, a seaweed used by fishermen as a form of barometer, their glistening strands swaying in the mysterious breathing of the cavern.

Under these various types of vegetation—partly concealed, partly revealed—were the rarest gems in the jewel casket of the ocean: ivory shells, strombs, miter shells, helmet shells, murexes, trumpet shells, struthiolarias, turreted cerites. Everywhere, clinging to the rocks, were limpets, like microscopic huts, forming villages along whose streets prowled chitons, those beetles of the sea. Since few pebbles found their way into the cavern, it offered a refuge for shellfish. Shellfish, in their embroidered and braided splendor, are the
grands seigneurs
of the ocean, avoiding rough and uncivil contact with the common sort of pebbles. The glittering accumulations of shells at certain spots under the water gave out ineffable irradiations through which could be glimpsed a medley of azures, mother-of-pearls, and golds in all the hues of the water.

On the wall of the cavern, just above the level of the water, a strange and magnificent plant formed a fringe on the hangings of varech, continuing and rounding them off. This plant—fibrous, close-growing, inextricably intertwined, and almost black—formed dark, confused masses, spangled with innumerable small flowers of the color of lapis lazuli. In the water these flowers seemed to light up, like glowing blue embers. Out of the water they were flowers, under the water they were sapphires; and as the rising tide engulfed the lower levels of the cavern where these plants grew, it covered the rock with fiery carbuncles.

When the tide swelled, like a lung filling with air, these flowers, bathed in water, were resplendent, and when it fell they were extinguished—offering a melancholy likeness to human destiny. It was a process of breathing in, which is life, and breathing out, which is death.

One of the marvels of the cavern was the rock itself. Forming here a wall, there an arch, there again a buttress or a pilaster, in some places it was rough and bare and then, close by, carved into the most delicate natural patterns. Some quality of intelligence and sensibility was mingled with the massive stupidity of the granite. What an artist is the abyss! One stretch of wall, cut into a square shape and carved into rounded forms suggesting the attitudes of figures, had something of the appearance of a bas-relief: contemplating it, one might think of a roughly sketched piece of sculpture prepared by Prometheus for the chisel of Michelangelo. It seemed as if human genius, with a few strokes of a hammer, might complete what the giant had begun. Elsewhere the rock was damascened like a Saracen breastplate or nielloed like a Florentine bowl. There were panels that looked like Corinthian bronze, arabesques such as are found on the doorway of a mosque, and obscure and improbable scratch marks like those on a runic stone. Plants with twisted ramuscules and tendrils, crisscrossing on the groundwork of golden lichens, covered the rock with filigree ornament. This cavern was more than a cavern: it was an Alhambra. It was a union of the wildness of nature and the delicacy of goldsmith's work in the awe-inspiring and misshapen architecture of chance.

The magnificent molds deposited by the sea covered the angles of the granite with velvet. The steep scarps were festooned with largeflowered lianas, adept at clinging to the rock, which ornamented the walls so effectively that they seemed the result of intelligent design. Pellitories with bizarre clusters of flowers presented their clumps of greenery, well and tastefully placed. All the grace and style that a cavern is capable of was on display. The astonishing Edenic light that came from under the water—the twilight of the submarine depths and at the same time a paradisiac radiance—softened the lineaments of the rock in a kind of visionary diffusion. Each wave was a prism. In these iridescent undulations the contours of things had the chromatism of overconvex optical lenses; under the water floated solar spectra. It looked as if broken pieces of drowned rainbows were turning and twisting in this auroral transparency. Elsewhere, in other corners of the cavern, there was a kind of moonlight in the water. All these splendors seemed to have been brought together here for some mysterious nocturnal purpose. The magnificence of the cavern had an extraordinarily disturbing and enigmatic effect. There was a predominant sense of enchantment. The extraordinary vegetation and the amorphous stratification were matched to one another and had a feeling of harmony. It was a happy marriage between two forms of wildness. The ramifications of the vegetation clung firmly to the rock, though appearing to be only grazing it, in an intimate caress between the savage rock and the untamed vegetation. Massive pillars had capitals and ligatures in the form of frail, perpetually quivering garlands, like fairies' fingers tickling the feet of behemoths; the rock supported the plants and the plants clasped the rock with a monstrous grace.

These deformities, mysteriously adapted to one another, combined to create a strange sovereign beauty. The works of nature, no less supreme than the works of genius, contain a quality of the absolute and have an overwhelming presence. Their unexpectedness impresses itself powerfully on the mind; they have a feeling of premeditation, and they are never more striking than when they suddenly produce something exquisite out of the terrible.

This unknown cave was, as it were—if the expression may be permitted—astralized. It aroused a feeling of astonishment, the stronger because it was totally unexpected. This crypt was filled with the light of apocalypse. One could not be sure that it actually existed. This appearance of reality had an element of the impossible. You saw it, you touched it, you were in it; but it was still difficult to believe in it.

Was it daylight coming in through that window under the sea? Was it really water quivering in this dark basin? Were not these arches and doorways merely shaped by celestial clouds in the likeness of a cavern? What kind of stone was it under one's feet? Was not this pillar about to disintegrate and dissolve into smoke? What was this jeweled ornament of shells glimpsed under the water? How far away was one from life, from the world, from men? What was the enchantment mingled with this darkness? It created a feeling of almost sacred awe, enhanced by the gentle restlessness of the weeds that grew in the depths of the water.

At the far end of the cavern, which was oblong in shape, there could be seen, under a cyclopean archivolt of remarkably exact design, in an almost indistinguishable recess, a kind of cave within the cave, a tabernacle within the shrine, behind a curtain of green light like the veil in a temple, a square slab of stone emerging from the waves, surrounded on all sides by water, with something of the appearance of an altar, from which it seemed that a goddess had just stepped down. It called up a vision, under this crypt and on this altar, of some naked celestial being, eternally sunk in contemplation, whom the approach of a man had caused to disappear. It was difficult to believe that this august cellar should not house a vision. The apparition summoned up in the abstraction of reverie began to take on form. A flood of chaste light on barely glimpsed shoulders, a forehead bathed in the brightness of dawn, the oval of an Olympian face, mysterious rounded breasts, modestly protective arms, hair falling loose in auroral light, ineffable loins showing palely in a sacred mist, the forms of a nymph, the glance of a virgin, a Venus rising from the sea, an Eve emerging from chaos: such was the vision that forced itself on the mind. It was surely impossible that there should not be such a phantom there. A naked woman, containing within her a star, must have been on this altar a moment ago. On this pedestal, with its sense of inexpressible ecstasy, one could not but imagine a white figure, standing erect and imbued with life. The mind called up an image, surrounded by the mute adoration of this cavern, of an Amphitrite, a Tethys, a Diana with the capacity for love, a statue of the ideal shaped by a glow of light, looking out mildly on the surrounding darkness. This dazzling phantom was no longer there; this figure, made to be seen only by the invisible, could not be seen, but its presence could be felt; one experienced the tremors of supreme delight. The goddess was no longer there, but the sense of divinity lingered.

The beauty of the cavern seemed designed to house this presence. It was on account of this deity, this fairy of mother-of-pearl, this queen of the breathing air, this grace born of the waves—it was on her account, or so one imagined, that the cave had been so religiously walled in, so that nothing might ever disturb, in the sanctuary of this divine phantom, the darkness that expresses respect and the silence that expresses majesty.

Gilliatt, who had a kind of visionary insight into nature, stood lost in thought, moved by confused emotions.

Suddenly, a few feet below him, in the delightful transparency of this water that seemed like a solution of gemstones, he saw an unidentifiable object. What looked like a long rag of cloth was moving amid the oscillation of the waves. It was not merely floating, it was swimming purposefully; it had an object, it was going somewhere, it forged swiftly ahead. It had the form of a fool's bauble, with points, and these flaccid points quivered in the water. The thing seemed to be covered with a kind of dust that was resistant to water. It was more than horrible; it was foul. It had something of the character of a chimera; it was a living creature—or was it merely the appearance of one? It seemed to be heading for the dark end of the cavern and disappearing into it. The water grew darker above this sinister shape as it glided away and disappeared.