by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WAVE AND THE DARKNESS.
Man overboard!
What of it? The ship does not stop. The wind is blowing, and this darkship has a course which she must keep. She goes right on.
The man disappears, then appears again. He goes down and again comes upto the surface; he shouts, he holds up his arms, but they do not hearhim. The ship, shivering under the storm, has all she can do to takecare of herself. The sailors and the passengers can no longer even seethe drowning man; his luckless head is only a speck in the vastness ofthe waves.
His cries of despair sound through the depths. What a phantom thatis,--that sail, fast disappearing from view! He gazes after it; hiseyes are fixed upon it with frenzy. It is disappearing, it is fadingfrom sight, it is growing smaller and smaller. Only just now he wasthere; he was one of the crew; he was going and coming on the deck withthe rest; he had his share of air and sun; he was a living man. What,then, has happened? He has slipped, he has fallen; it is all over withhim.
He is in the huge waves. There is nothing now under his feet butdeath and sinking. The fearful waves, torn and frayed by the wind,surround him; the swells of the abyss sweep him along; all the crestsof the waves are blown about his head; a crowd of waves spit upon him;uncertain gulfs half swallow him; every time he plunges down he catchesa glimpse of precipices black as night; frightful, unknown seaweedsseize him, tie his feet, drag him down to them. He feels that he isbecoming a part of the abyss, of the foam; the waves throw him fromone to another; he tastes the bitterness; the cowardly ocean has givenitself up to drowning him; the vastness sports with his agony. All thiswater seems to be hate.
Still he struggles.
He tries to save himself, to keep himself up; he strikes out, he swims.He, this pitiful force, at once exhausted, is matched against theinexhaustible.
Where is the ship now? Way down there, barely visible in the paleobscurity of the horizon. The squalls hum about him, the wave-crestswash over him. He raises his eyes, and sees only the lividness of theclouds. In his death struggle he takes part in the madness of thesea. He is tortured by this madness. He hears sounds, strange to man,which seem to come from beyond the earth, and from some terrible worldoutside.
There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above humangriefs, but what can they do for him? There is one, flying, singing,and hovering, while he has the death-rattle in his throat.
He feels himself buried at the same time by these two Infinites, theocean and the heavens; the one a tomb, the other a shroud.
Night falls; he has been swimming now for hours; his strength hasreached its end; this ship, this far-off thing where there were men, isblotted from his sight; he is alone in the fearful gulf of twilight;he sinks, he braces himself, he writhes, he feels below him the rovingmonsters of the invisible. He cries aloud.
"There are no longer any men here." "Where is God?"
He calls "Somebody!" "Somebody!" He keeps on calling.
Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.
He implores the waste of waters, the wave, the seaweed, the rock; it isdeaf. He supplicates the tempest; the pitiless tempest obeys only theInfinite.
Around him is darkness, mist, solitude, the stormy and unreasoningtumult, the boundless rolling of the wild waters. In him is horror andweariness. Under him the abyss. There is nothing to rest on. He thinksof what will happen to his body in the boundless shades. The infinitecold benumbs him. His hands shrivel; they clutch and find nothing.Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, puffs, useless stars. What is he to do? Indespair, he gives up. Worn out as he is, he makes up his mind to die,he abandons himself, he lets himself go, he relaxes himself, and therehe is rolling forever into the dismal depths in which he is swallowedup.
Oh, implacable course of human society! What a loss of men and of soulson the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets fall. Wickedvanishing of help! Oh, moral death!
The sea is the pitiless social night into which the penal law thrustsits condemned; the sea is boundless wretchedness.
The soul, swept with the stream into this gulf, may be drowned. Whowill bring it to life again?