by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER V.
SAND, LIKE WOMAN, AS A FINENESS THAT IS PERFIDIOUS.
He felt that he was entering water, and that he had under his feet nolonger stone but mud. It often happens on certain coasts of Brittanyor Scotland that a man, whether traveller or fisherman, walking at lowtide on the sand, some distance from the shore, suddenly perceives thatduring the last few minutes he has found some difficulty in walking.The shore beneath his feet is like pitch, his heels are attached toit, it is no longer sand but bird-lime; the sand is perfectly dry,but at every step taken, so soon as the foot is raised the imprint itleaves fills with water. The eye, however, has perceived no change,the immense expanse is smooth and calm, all the sand seems alike,nothing distinguishes the soil which is solid from that which is nolonger so, and the little merry swarm of water-fleas continue to leaptumultuously round the feet of the wayfarer. The man follows his road,turns toward the land, and tries to approach the coast, not that he isalarmed; alarmed at what? Still, he feels as if the heaviness of hisfeet increased at every step that he takes; all at once he sinks in,sinks in two or three inches. He is decidedly not on the right road,and stops to look about him. Suddenly he looks at his feet, but theyhave disappeared, the sand covers them. He draws his feet out of thesand and tries to turn back, but he sinks in deeper still. The sandcomes up to his ankle; he pulls it out and turns to his left, when thesand comes to his knee; he turns to the right, and the sand comes upto his thigh; then he recognizes with indescribable terror that he iscaught in a quicksand, and has under him the frightful medium in whicha man can no more walk than a fish can swim. He throws away his load,if he have one, and lightens himself like a ship in distress; but itis too late, for the sand is already above his knees. He calls out,waves his hat or handkerchief, but the sand gains on him more and more.If the shore is deserted, if land is too distant, if the sand-bank istoo ill-famed, if there is no hero in the vicinity, it is all overwith him, and he is condemned to be swallowed by the quicksands. He isdoomed to that long, awful, implacable interment, impossible to delayor hasten, which lasts hours; which never ends; which seizes you whenerect, free, and in perfect health; which drags you by the feet; which,at every effort you attempt, every cry you utter, drags you a littledeeper; which seems to punish you for your resistance by a redoubledclutch; which makes a man slowly enter the ground while allowing himample time to regard the houses, the trees, the green fields, thesmoke from the villages on the plain, the sails of the vessels on thesea, the birds that fly and sing, the sun, and the sky. A quicksandis a sepulchre that converts itself into a tide, and ascends fromthe bottom of the earth toward a living man. Each moment inexorablywraps grave-clothes about him. The wretch tries to sit, to lie down,to walk, to crawl; all the movements that he makes bury him; he drawshimself up, and only sinks deeper; he feels himself being swallowed up;he yells, implores, cries to the clouds, writhes his arms, and growsdesperate. Then he is in the sand up to his waist; the sand reaches hischest, he is but a bust. He raises his hands, utters furious groans,digs his nails into the sand, tries to hold by this dust, raiseshimself on his elbows to tear himself from this soft sheath, and sobsfrenziedly. The sand mounts, the sand reaches his shoulders, the sandreaches his neck, the face alone is visible now. The mouth cries, thesand fills it; silence. The eyes still look, the sand closes them;night. Then the forehead sinks, and a little hair waves above thesand; a hand emerges, digs up the sand, is waved, and disappears,--asinister effacement of a man.
At times the rider is swallowed up with his horse, at times the carterwith his cart. It is a shipwreck otherwhere than in the water; it isthe land drowning man. The land penetrated by the ocean becomes asnare; it offers itself as a plain, and opens like a wave. The abysshas its acts of treachery.
Such a mournful adventure, always possible on some seashore, was alsopossible some thirty years ago in the sewer of Paris. Before theimportant works began in 1833 the subway of Paris was subject to suddenbreakings-in. The water filtered through a subjacent and peculiarlyfriable soil; and the roadway, if made of paving-stones, as in the olddrains, or of concrete upon béton, as in the new galleries, having nosupport, bent. A bend in a planking of this nature is a crevice, and acrevice is a bursting-in. The roadway broke away for a certain length,and such a gap, a gulf of mud, was called in professional language_fontis._ What is a fontis? It is the quicksand of the seashoresuddenly met with underground; it is the strand of Mont St. Michel ina sewer. The moistened soil is in a state of fusion, all its particlesare held in suspense in a shifting medium; it is not land and it is notwater. The depth is at times very great. Nothing can be more formidablethan meeting with such a thing; if water predominate death is quick,for a man is drowned; if earth predominate death is slow, for he issucked down.
Can our readers imagine such a death? If it be frightful to sink in thesea-strand, what is it in a cloaca? Instead of fresh air, daylight,a clear horizon, vast sounds, the free clouds from which life rains,the barque perceived in the distance, that hope under every form, ofpossible passers-by, of possible help up to the last minute,--insteadof all this, deafness, blindness, a black archway, the interior of atomb already made, death in the mud under a tombstone! Slow asphyxiaby uncleanliness, a sarcophagus where asphyxia opens its claws inthe filth and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with thedeath-rattle, mud instead of the sand, sulphuretted hydrogen in lieuof the hurricane, ordure instead of the ocean! And to call and gnashthe teeth, and writhe and struggle and expire, with this enormous citywhich knows nothing of it above one's head.
Inexpressible the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes expiates itsatrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the pyre, in shipwreck, aman may be great; in the flames, as in the foam, a superb attitudeis possible, and a man transfigures himself. But in this case it isnot so, for the death is unclean. It is humiliating to expire in sucha way, and the last floating visions are abject. Mud is the synonymof shame, and is little, ugly, and infamous. To die in a butt ofMalmsey like Clarence,--very well; but in a sewer like d'Escoubleau ishorrible. To struggle in it is hideous, for at the same time as a manis dying, he is dabbling. There is enough darkness for it to be Hell,and enough mud for it to be merely a slough, and the dying man does notknow whether he is about to become a spectre or a frog. Everywhere elsethe sepulchre is sinister, but here it is deformed.
The depth of the fontis varied, as did the length and density,according to the nature of the subsoil. At times a fontis was three orfour feet deep, at times eight or ten, and sometimes it was bottomless.In one the mud was almost solid, in another nearly liquid. In theLunière fontis, a man would have taken a day in disappearing, while hewould have been devoured in five minutes by the Phélippeaux slough. Themud bears more or less well according to its degree of density, and alad escapes where a man is lost. The first law of safety is to throwaway every sort of loading, and every sewer-man who felt the groundgiving way under him began by getting rid of his basket of tools. Thefontis had various causes,--friability of soil, some convulsion at adepth beyond a man's reach, violent summer showers, the incessantwinter rain, and long drizzling rains. At times the weight of thesurrounding houses upon a marshy or sandy soil broke the roofs of thesubterranean galleries and made them shrink, or else it happened thatthe roadway broke and slit up under the terrific pressure. The pile ofthe Panthéon destroyed in this way about a century ago a portion ofthe cellars in Mont Sainte Geneviève. When a sewer gave way under theweight of the houses, the disorder was expressed above in the street bya sort of saw-toothed parting between the paving-stones. This rent wasdeveloped in a serpentine line, along the whole length of the crackedvault, and in such a case, the evil being visible, the remedy mightbe prompt. It often happened also that the internal ravage was notrevealed by any scar outside, and in that case, woe to the sewer-men.Entering the injured drain incautiously, they might be lost in it Theold registers mention several night-men buried in this manner in thefontis. They mention several names, among others that of the sewer-manswallowed up in
a slough under the opening on the Rue Carême Prenant,of the name of Blaise Poutrain; this Blaise was brother of NicholasPoutrain, who was the last sexton of the cemetery called the Charnierdes Innocents in 1785, when that cemetery expired. There was also theyoung and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, to whom we have alluded, oneof the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where the assault was made insilk stockings and with violins at their head. D'Escoubleau, surprisedone night with his cousin, the Duchesse de Sourdis, drowned himselfin a cesspool of the Beautreillis sewer, where he had taken refuge toescape the Duc. Madame de Sourdis, when told the story of this death,asked for her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep through inhalingher salts. In such a case there is no love that holds out; the cloacaextinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash the corpse of Leander. Thisbeholds her nose in the presence of Pyramus, and says, Pah!