الفصل الفصل 23 · BILLOWS AND SHADOWS

A man overboard!

What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre

ship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.

The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the

surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The

vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own

workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;

his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He

gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is

that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It

retreats, it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just

now, he was one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the

rest, he had his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man.

Now, what has taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an

end.

He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees

and crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him

hideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues of

water dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused

openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses

of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations

seize him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that

he is becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss

him from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly

ocean attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his

agony. It seems as though all that water were hate.

Nevertheless, he struggles.

He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes an

effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly,

combats the inexhaustible.

Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of

the horizon.

The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his

eyes and beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid

his death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this

madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond

the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region

beyond.

There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human

distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float,

and he, he rattles in the death agony.

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,

at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.

Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is

exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has

vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he

stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous

billows of the invisible; he shouts.

There are no more men. Where is God?

He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.

Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.

He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are

deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only

the infinite.

Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,

the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.

Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy

adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold

paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp

nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is

to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the

alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons

his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary

depths of engulfment.

Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls

on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!

Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!

The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling

their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.

The soul, going downstream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall

resuscitate it?