by Victor Hugo
The chief of the band, gazing intently into the darkness, shouted:
"Te burlas de nosotros?"
To this defiant exclamation there followed another cry. "Let go the anchor. Save the skipper."
They rushed to the capstan and let go the anchor.
Hookers carry but one. In this case the anchor reached the bottom, but only to be lost. The bottom was of the hardest rock. The billows were raging with resistless force. The cable snapped like a thread.
The anchor lay at the bottom of the sea. At the cut-water there remained but the cable-end protruding from the hawse-hole.
From this moment the hooker became a wreck. The Matutina was irrevocably disabled. The vessel, just before in full sail, and almost formidable in her speed, was now helpless. All her evolutions were uncertain and executed at random. She yielded passively and like a log to the capricious fury of the waves. That in a few minutes there should be in place of an eagle a useless cripple, such a transformation is to be witnessed only at sea. The howling of the wind became more and more frightful. A hurricane has terrible lungs; it makes unceasingly mournful additions to darkness, which can not be intensified. The bell on the sea rang despairingly, as if tolled by a weird hand.
The Matutina drifted like a cork at the mercy of the leaves. She sailed no Longer--she merely floated. Every moment she seemed about to turn over on her back, like a dead fish. The good condition and perfectly water-tight state of the hull alone saved her from this disaster. Below the water-line not a plank had started. There was not a cranny, chink, or crack; and she had not made a single drop of water in the hold. This was lucky, as the pump, being out of order, was useless.
The hooker pitched and rolled frightfully in the seething billows. The vessel had throes as of sickness, and seemed to be trying to belch forth the unhappy crew.
Helpless they clung to the standing rigging, to the transoms, to the shank painters, to the gaskets, to the trolled planks, the protruding nails of which tore their hands, to the warped riders, and to all the rugged projections of the stumps of the masts. From time to time they listened. The toll of the bell came over the waters fainter and fainter; one would have thought that it also divas in distress. Its ringing was no more than an intermittent rattle. Then this rattle died away. Where were they? At what distance from the buoy? The sound of the bell had frightened them--its silence terrified them. The northwester drove them forward in, perhaps, a fatal course. They felt themselves wafted on by maddened and ever-recurring gusts of wind. The wreck sped forward in the darkness. There is nothing more fearful than being hurried forward blindfold. They felt the abyss before them, over them, under them. It was no longer a run, it was a rush.
Suddenly, through the appalling density of the snowstorm, there loomed a red
light.
"A lighthouse!" cried the crew.
* * *
XI
THE CASKETS
IT WAS, indeed, the Caskets light.
A lighthouse of the nineteenth century is a high cylinder of masonry, surmounted by scientifically constructed machinery for throwing light. The Caskets lighthouse in particular is a triple white tower, bearing three light-rooms. These three chambers revolve on clockwork wheels with such precision that the man on watch who sees them from sea can invariably take ten steps during their irradiation and twenty-five during their eclipse. Everything is based on the focal plan, and on the rotation of the octagon drum, formed of eight wide simple lenses, in range, having above and below it two series of dioptric rings; and algebraic gear, secured from the effects of the beating of winds and waves by glass a millimetre thick, yet sometimes broken by the sea-eagles, which dash themselves like great moths against these gigantic lanterns. The building which incloses and sustains this mechanism, and in which it is set, is also mathematically constructed. Everything about it is plain, exact, bare, precise, correct. A lighthouse is a mathematical figure.
In the seventeenth century a lighthouse was a sort of plume of the land on the seashore. The architecture of a lighthouse tower was magnificent and extravagant. It was covered with balconies, balusters, lodges, alcoves, weathercocks. Nothing but masks, statues, foliage, vow lutes, reliefs, figures large and small, medallions with inscriptions. Pax in bello, said the Eddystone lighthouse. We may as well observe, by the way, that this declaration of peace did not always disarm the ocean. Winstanley repeated it on a lighthouse which he constructed at his own expense, on a wild spot near Plymouth. The tower being finished, he shut himself up in it to have it tried by the tempest. The storm came and carried off the lighthouse, and Winstanley in it. Such excessive adornment gave too great a hold to the hurricane; as generals too brilliantly equipped in battle draw the enemy's fire. Besides whimsical designs in stone, they were loaded with whimsical designs in iron, copper, and wood. The ironwork was in relief, the woodwork stood out. On the sides of the lighthouse there jutted out, clinging to the walls among the arabesques, engines of every description, useful and useless, windlasses, tackles, pulleys, counterpoises, ladders, cranes, grapnels. On the pinnacle around the light, delicately wrought ironwork held great iron chandeliers, in which were placed pieces of rope steeped in resin; wicks which burned doggedly, and which no wind extinguished; and from top to bottom the tower was covered by a complication of sea standards, banderoles, banners, flags, pennons, colours which rose from stage to stage, from story to story, a medley of all hues, all shapes, all heraldic devices, all signals, all confusion, up to the light chamber, making, in the storm, a gay riot of tatters about the blaze. That insolent light on the brink of the abyss showed like a defiance, and inspired shipwrecked men with a spirit of daring. But the Caskets light was not after this fashion.
It was, at that period, merely an old barbarous lighthouse, such as Henry I had built it after the loss of the "White Ship"--a flaming pile of wood under an iron trellis, a brazier behind a railing, a head of hair flaming in the wind.
The only improvement made in this lighthouse since the twelfth century was a pair of forge-bellows worked by an indented pendulum and a stone weight, which had been added to the light chamber in 1610.
The fate of the sea-birds who chanced to fly against these old lighthouses was more tragic than those of our days. The birds dashed against them, attracted by the light, and fell into the brazier, where they could be seen struggling like black spirits in a hell, and at times they would fall back again between the railings upon the rock, red hot, smoking, lame, blind, like half-burned flies out of a lamp.
To a full-rigged ship in good trim, answering readily to the pilot's handling the Caskets light is useful; it cries--Look out; it warns her of the shoal. To a disabled ship it is simply terrible. The hull, paralysed and inert, without resistance, without defence against the impulse of the storm, or the mad heaving of the waves, a fish without fins, a bird without wings, can but go where the wind wills. The lighthouse shows the end--points out the spot where it is doomed to disappear--throws light upon the burial. It is the torch of the sepulchre.
To light up the inexorable chasm--to warn against the inevitable--what more tragic mockery!
* * *
XII
FACE TO FACE WITH THE ROCK
THE WRETCHED PEOPLE in distress on board the Matutina understood at once the mysterious derision which mocked their shipwreck. The appearance of the lighthouse raised their spirits at first, then overwhelmed them. Nothing could be done, nothing attempted. What has been said of kings, we may say of the waves--we are their people, we are their prey. All that they rave must be borne. The nor'wester was driving the hooker on the Caskets. They were nearing them; no evasion was possible. They drifted rapidly toward the reef; they felt that they were getting into shallow waters; the lead, if they could have thrown it to any purpose, would not have shown more than three or four fathoms. The shipwrecked people heard the dull sound of the waves being sucked within the submarine caves of the steep rock. They made out, under the lighthouse, like a dark cutting between two plates of gr
anite, the narrow passage of the ugly wild-looking little harbour, supposed to be full of the skeletons of men and carcasses of ships. It looked like the mouth of a cavern, rather than the entrance of a port. They could hear the crackling of the pile on high within the iron grating. A ghastly purple illuminated the storm, the collision of the rain and hail disturbed the mist. The black cloud and the red flame fought, serpent against serpent; live ashes, reft by the wind, flew from the fire, and the sudden assaults of the sparks seemed to drive the snowflakes before them. The breakers, blurred at first in outline, now stood out in bold relief, a medley of rocks with peaks, crest, and vertebrae. The angles were formed by strongly marked red lines, and the inclined planes in blood-like streams of light. As they neared it, the outline of the reefs increased and rose--sinister.
One of the women, the Irishwoman, told her beads wildly.
In place of the skipper, who was the pilot, remained the chief, who was the captain. The Basques all know the mountain and the sea. They are bold on the precipice, arid inventive in catastrophes.
They neared the cliff. They were about to strike. Suddenly they were so close to the great north rock of the Caskets that it shut out the lighthouse from them. They saw nothing but the rock and the red light behind it. The huge rock looming in the mist was like a gigantic black woman with a hood of fire.
That ill-famed rock is called the Biblet. It faces the north side the reef, which on the south is faced by another ridge, L'Etacqaux giulmets. The chief looked at the Biblet, and shouted--
"A man with a will to take a rope to the rock. Who can swim?"
No answer.
No one on board knew how to swim, not even the sailors. An ignorance not uncommon among seafaring people.
A beam nearly free of its lashings was swinging loose. The chief clasped it with both hands, crying, "Help me.
They unlashed the beam. They had now at their disposal the very thing they wanted. From the defensive, they assumed the offensive.
It was a longish beam of heart of oak, sound and strong, useful either as a support or as an engine of attack, a lever for a burden, a ram against a tower.
"Ready!" shouted the chief.
All six getting foothold on the stump of the mast, threw their weight on the spar projecting over the side, straight as a lance toward a projection of the cliff.
It was a dangerous manoeuvre. To strike at a mountain is audacity indeed. The six men might well have been thrown into the water by the shock.
There is variety in struggles with storms. After the hurricane the shoal, after the wind the rock. First the intangible, then the immovable, to be encountered.
Some minutes passed, such minutes as whiten men's hair.
The rock and the vessel were about to come in collision. the rock, like a culprit, awaited the blow.
A resistless wave rushed in; it ended the respite. It caught the vessel underneath, raised it, and swayed it for an instant as the sling swings its projectile.
"Steady!" cried the chief, "it is only a rock, and we are men."
The beam was couched, the six men were one with it, its sharp bolts tore their arm-pits, but they did not feel them.
The wave dashed the hooker against the rock.
Then came the shock.
It came under the shapeless cloud of foam which always hides such catastrophes.
When this cloud fell back into the sea, when the waves rolled back from the rock, the six men were tossing about the deck, but the Matutina was floating alongside the rock--clear of it. The beam had stood and turned the vessel; the sea was running so fast that in a few seconds she had left the Caskets behind.
Such things sometimes occur. It was a straight stroke of the bowsprit that saved Wood of Largo at the mouth of the Tay. In the wild neighbourhood of Cape Winterton, and under the command of Captain Hamilton, it was the appliance of such a lever against the dangerous rock, Branodu-um that saved the Royal Mary from ship-wreck, although she was but a Scotch-built frigate. The force of the waves can be so abruptly discomposed, that changes of direction can be easily managed, or at least are possible even in the most violent collisions. There is a brute in the tempest. The hurricane is a bull, and can be turned.
The whole secret of avoiding shipwreck is to try and pass from the secant to the tangent.
Such was the service rendered by the beam to the vessel. It had done the work of an oar, had taken the place of a rudder. But the manoeuvre once performed could not be repeated. The beam was overboard; the shock oil the collision had wrenched it out of the men's hands, and it was lost in the waves. To loosen another beam would have been to dislocate the hull.
The hurricane carried off the Matutina. Presently the Caskets showed as a harmless encumbrance on the horizon. Nothing looks more out of countenance than a reef of rocks under such circumstances. There are in nature, in its obscure aspects, in which the visible blends with the invisible, certain motionless, surly profiles, which seem to express that a prey has escaped.
Thus glowered the Caskets while the Matutina fled.
The lighthouse paled in distance, faded, and disappeared.
There was something mournful in its extinction. Layers of mist sank down upon the now uncertain light. Its rays died in the waste of waters, the flame floated, struggled, sank, and lost its form. It might have been a drowning creature. The brazier dwindled to the snuff of a candle; then nothing more but a weak, uncertain flutter. Around it spread a circle of extravasated glimmer; it was like the quenching of light in the pit of night.
The bell which had threatened was dumb. The lighthouse which had threatened had melted away. And yet it was more awful now that they had ceased to threaten. One was a voice, the other a torch. There was something human about them.
They were gone, and naught remained but the abyss.
* * *
XIII
FACE TO FACE WITH NIGHT
AGAIN WAS the hooker running with the shadow into immeasurable darkness.
The Matutina, escaped from the Caskets, sank and rose from billow to billow. A respite, but in chaos.
Spun round by the wind, tossed by all the thousand motions of the wave, she reflected every mad oscillation of the sea. She scarcely pitched at all, a terrible symptom of a ship's distress. Wrecks merely roll. Pitching is a convulsion of the strife. The helm alone can turn a vessel to the wind.
In storms, and more especially in the meteors of snow, sea and night end by melting into amalgamation, resolving into nothing but a smoke. Mists, whirlwinds, gales, motion in all directions, no basis, no shelter, no stop. Constant recommencement, one gulf succeeding another. No horizon visible; intense blackness for background. Through all these the hooker drifted.
To have got free of the Caskets, to have eluded the rock, was a victory for the shipwrecked men; but it was a victory which left them in stupor. They had raised no cheer; at sea such an imprudence is not repeated twice. To throw down a challenge where they could not cast the lead would have been too serious a jest.
The repulse of the rock was an impossibility achieved. They were petrified by it. By degrees, however, they began to hope again. Such are the insubmergible mirages of the soul! There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths. These poor wretches were ready to acknowledge to themselves that they were saved. It was on their lips.
But suddenly something terrible appeared to them in the darkness.
On the port bow arose, standing stark, cut out on the background of mist, a tall, opaque mass, vertical, right-angled, a tower of the abyss.
They watched it open-mouthed.
The storm was driving them toward it.
They knew not what it was. It was the Ortach rock.
* * *
XIV
ORTACH
THE REEF reappeared. After the Caskets comes Ortach. The storm is no artist; brutal and all-powerful, it never varies its appliances. The darkness is inexhaustible. Its snares
and perfidies never come to an end. As for man, he soon comes to the bottom of his resources. Man expends his strength, the abyss never.
The shipwrecked men turned toward their chief, their hope. He could only shrug his shoulders. Dismal contempt of helplessness.
A pavement in the midst of the ocean, such is the Ortach rock. The Ortach, all of a piece, rises up in a straight line to eighty feet above the angry beating of the waves. Waves and ships break against it. An immovable cube, it plunges its rectilinear planes apeak into the numberless serpentine curves of the sea.
At night it stands an enormous block resting on the folds of a huge black sheet. In time of storm it awaits the stroke of the axe, which is the thunderclap.
But there is never a thunderclap during the snow-storm. True, the ship has the bandage round her eyes; darkness is knotted about her; she is like one prepared to be led to the scaffold. As for the thunderbolt, which makes quick ending, it is not to be hoped for.
The Matutina, nothing better than a log upon the waters, drifted toward this rock, as she had drifted toward the other. The poor wretches on board, who had for a moment believed themselves saved, relapsed into their agony. The destruction they had left behind faced them again. The reef reappeared from the bottom of the sea. Nothing had been gained.
The Caskets are a figuring iron [1] with a thousand compartments. The Ortach is a wall. To be wrecked on the Caskets is to be cut into ribbons; to strike on the Ortach is to be crushed into powder.
Nevertheless, there was one chance.
On a straight frontage such as that of the Ortach, neither the wave nor the cannon-ball can ricochet. The operation is simple; first the flux, then the reflux; a wave advances, a billow returns.