CHAPTER XV.
PORTENTOSUM MARE.
Meanwhile a thickening mist had descended on the drifting wretches. Theywere ignorant of their whereabouts, they could scarcely see a cable'slength around. Despite a furious storm of hail which forced them to benddown their heads, the women had obstinately refused to go below again.No one, however hopeless, but wishes, if shipwreck be inevitable, tomeet it in the open air. When so near death, a ceiling above one's headseems like the first outline of a coffin.
They were now in a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates itsconstraint. Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by theboiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they wereunconsciously coasting Aurigny. Between the west of Ortach and theCaskets and the east of Aurigny the sea is hemmed in and cramped, andthe uneasy position determines locally the condition of storms. The seasuffers like others, and when it suffers it is irritable. That channelis a thing to fear.
The _Matutina_ was in it.
Imagine under the sea a tortoise shell as big as Hyde Park or the ChampsElysees, of which every striature is a shallow, and every embossment areef. Such is the western approach of Aurigny. The sea covers andconceals this ship-wrecking apparatus. On this conglomeration ofsubmarine breakers the cloven waves leap and foam--in calm weather, achopping sea; in storms, a chaos.
The shipwrecked men observed this new complication without endeavouringto explain it to themselves. Suddenly they understood it. A pale vistabroadened in the zenith; a wan tinge overspread the sea; the livid lightrevealed on the port side a long shoal stretching eastward, towardswhich the power of the rushing wind was driving the vessel. The shoalwas Aurigny.
What was that shoal? They shuddered. They would have shuddered even morehad a voice answered them--Aurigny.
No isle so well defended against man's approach as Aurigny. Below andabove water it is protected by a savage guard, of which Ortach is theoutpost. To the west, Burhou, Sauteriaux, Anfroque, Niangle, Fond duCroc, Les Jumelles, La Grosse, La Clanque, Les Eguillons, Le Vrac, LaFosse-Maliere; to the east, Sauquet, Hommeau Floreau, La Brinebetais, LaQueslingue, Croquelihou, La Fourche, Le Saut, Noire Pute, Coupie, Orbue.These are hydra-monsters of the species reef.
One of these reefs is called Le But, the goal, as if to imply that everyvoyage ends there.
This obstruction of rocks, simplified by night and sea, appeared to theshipwrecked men in the shape of a single dark band, a sort of black bloton the horizon.
Shipwreck is the ideal of helplessness; to be near land, and unable toreach it; to float, yet not to be able to do so in any desireddirection; to rest the foot on what seems firm and is fragile; to befull of life, when o'ershadowed by death; to be the prisoner of space;to be walled in between sky and ocean; to have the infinite overheadlike a dungeon; to be encompassed by the eluding elements of wind andwaves; and to be seized, bound, paralyzed--such a load of misfortunestupefies and crushes us. We imagine that in it we catch a glimpse ofthe sneer of the opponent who is beyond our reach. That which holds youfast is that which releases the birds and sets the fishes free. Itappears nothing, and is everything. We are dependent on the air which isruffled by our mouths; we are dependent on the water which we catch inthe hollow of our hands. Draw a glassful from the storm, and it is but acup of bitterness--a mouthful is nausea, a waveful is extermination. Thegrain of sand in the desert, the foam-flake on the sea, are fearfulsymptoms. Omnipotence takes no care to hide its atom, it changesweakness into strength, fills naught with all; and it is with theinfinitely little that the infinitely great crushes you. It is with itsdrops the ocean dissolves you. You feel you are a plaything.
A plaything--ghastly epithet!
The _Matutina_ was a little above Aurigny, which was not an unfavourableposition; but she was drifting towards its northern point, which wasfatal. As a bent bow discharges its arrow, the nor'-wester was shootingthe vessel towards the northern cape. Off that point, a little beyondthe harbour of Corbelets, is that which the seamen of the Normanarchipelago call a "_singe_."
The "_singe_," or race, is a furious kind of current. A wreath offunnels in the shallows produces in the waves a wreath of whirlpools.You escape one to fall into another. A ship caught hold of by the race,winds round and round until some sharp rock cleaves her hull; then theshattered vessel stops, her stern rises from the waves, the stemcompletes the revolution in the abyss, the stern sinks in, and all issucked down. A circle of foam broadens and floats, and nothing more isseen on the surface of the waves but a few bubbles here and there risingfrom the smothered breathings below.
The three most dangerous races in the whole Channel are one close to thewell-known Girdler Sands, one at Jersey between the Pignonnet and thePoint of Noirmont, and the race of Aurigny.
Had a local pilot been on board the _Matutina_, he could have warnedthem of their fresh peril. In place of a pilot, they had their instinct.In situations of extreme danger men are endowed with second sight. Highcontortions of foam were flying along the coast in the frenzied raid ofthe wind. It was the spitting of the race. Many a bark has been swampedin that snare. Without knowing what awaited them, they approached thespot with horror.
How to double that cape? There were no means of doing it.
Just as they had seen, first the Caskets, then Ortach, rise before them,they now saw the point of Aurigny, all of steep rock. It was like anumber of giants, rising up one after another--a series of frightfulduels.
Charybdis and Scylla are but two; the Caskets, Ortach, and Aurigny arethree.
The phenomenon of the horizon being invaded by the rocks was thusrepeated with the grand monotony of the abyss. The battles of the oceanhave the same sublime tautology as the combats of Homer.
Each wave, as they neared it, added twenty cubits to the cape, awfullymagnified by the mist; the fast decreasing distance seemed moreinevitable--they were touching the skirts of the race! The first foldwhich seized them would drag them in--another wave surmounted, and allwould be over.
Suddenly the hooker was driven back, as by the blow of a Titan's fist.The wave reared up under the vessel and fell back, throwing the waifback in its mane of foam. The _Matutina_, thus impelled, drifted awayfrom Aurigny.
She was again on the open sea.
Whence had come the succour? From the wind. The breath of the storm hadchanged its direction.
The wave had played with them; now it was the wind's turn. They hadsaved themselves from the Caskets. Off Ortach it was the wave which hadbeen their friend. Now it was the wind. The wind had suddenly veeredfrom north to south. The sou'-wester had succeeded the nor'-wester.
The current is the wind in the waters; the wind is the current in theair. These two forces had just counteracted each other, and it had beenthe wind's will to snatch its prey from the current.
The sudden fantasies of ocean are uncertain. They are, perhaps, anembodiment of the perpetual, when at their mercy man must neither hopenor despair. They do and they undo. The ocean amuses itself. Every shadeof wild, untamed ferocity is phased in the vastness of that cunning sea,which Jean Bart used to call the "great brute." To its claws and theirgashings succeed soft intervals of velvet paws. Sometimes the stormhurries on a wreck, at others it works out the problem with care; itmight almost be said that it caresses it. The sea can afford to take itstime, as men in their agonies find out.
We must own that occasionally these lulls of the torture announcedeliverance. Such cases are rare. However this may be, men in extremeperil are quick to believe in rescue; the slightest pause in the storm'sthreats is sufficient; they tell themselves that they are out of danger.After believing themselves buried, they declare their resurrection; theyfeverishly embrace what they do not yet possess; it is clear that thebad luck has turned; they declare themselves satisfied; they are saved;they cry quits with God. They should not be in so great a hurry to givereceipts to the Unknown.
The sou'-wester set in with a whirlwind. Shipwrecked men have never anybut rough helpers. The _Matutina_ was
dragged rapidly out to sea by theremnant of her rigging--like a dead woman trailed by the hair. It waslike the enfranchisement granted by Tiberius, at the price of violation.
The wind treated with brutality those whom it saved; it rendered servicewith fury; it was help without pity.
The wreck was breaking up under the severity of its deliverers.
Hailstones, big and hard enough to charge a blunderbuss, smote thevessel; at every rotation of the waves these hailstones rolled about thedeck like marbles. The hooker, whose deck was almost flush with thewater, was being beaten out of shape by the rolling masses of water andits sheets of spray. On board it each man was for himself.
They clung on as best they could. As each sea swept over them, it waswith a sense of surprise they saw that all were still there. Several hadtheir faces torn by splinters.
Happily despair has stout hands. In terror a child's hand has the graspof a giant. Agony makes a vice of a woman's fingers. A girl in herfright can almost bury her rose-coloured fingers in a piece of iron.With hooked fingers they hung on somehow, as the waves dashed on andpassed off them; but every wave brought them the fear of being sweptaway.
Suddenly they were relieved.