CHAPTER XXVIII

_Midnight._ The end of the watch; the hour when we could go and seek shelter.

Below, in the padded gun-room, one saw another aspect of the tempest, the grim reality of the misery it caused in the entrails of the ship.

Seen from end to end it was a kind of long dark hall dimly lighted by flickering lanterns. The big guns, supported on their mountings, remained more or less in position by virtue of their lashings of iron cables. And this whole place was in motion; it had the movements of a thing which is shaken in a sieve, shaken without respite, without mercy, perpetually, with a blind rage; it creaked everywhere, it trembled like an animate thing in pain, racked, exhausted, as if it were about to burst and die.

And the great waters outside, for ever seeking to enter, penetrated here and there in little streams, in sinister spoutings.

You were lifted up so quickly that your knees gave way--and then suddenly things slipped from under you, sank beneath your feet--and you descended with them, stiffening in spite of yourself, as for a kind of resistance.

There were shrill, discordant, alarming noises which came from all round; all this framework in the form of a fish which was the _Médée_ was loosening little by little, and groaning under the terrible strain. And outside, on the other side of the wooden wall, always the same immense deep sound, the same deep voice of horror.

But all held fast nevertheless. The long gun-room remained intact, one saw it still from end to end, sometimes tilted, half-overturned, sometimes rising almost upright in a concussion, looking longer still in this darkness in which the lanterns were lost, seeming to change its shape and grow larger, in all this noise, as if it were some vague place of dreamland.

On the low ceiling were hung interminable rows of canvas pockets, swollen all of them by their heavy contents, looking like the little pockets which spiders hang to walls--grey pockets enclosing each a human being, the sailors' hammocks.

Here and there one saw an arm hanging out, or a bare leg. Some slept peacefully, exhausted by their labours; others moved restlessly and talked aloud in bad dreams. And all their hammocks swung and jostled one another in a perpetual movement, and sometimes came in violent collision and heads suffered.

On the floor, beneath the hapless sleepers, was a lake of dark water which swirled this way and that, carrying with it soiled articles of clothing, pieces of bread and biscuit, spilt porridge, every sort of debris and unclean refuse. And from time to time came men, pale, exhausted, half-naked, shivering in their wet shirts, who wandered beneath these rows of grey hammocks, seeking theirs, seeking their poor little suspended bed, the only place where they might find a little warmth, a little dryness, and what would have to serve for rest. They stumbled as they passed, holding on to anything that offered to prevent themselves from falling, and bumping their heads against those who slept. Every man for himself in times such as this; none cared what happened to another. Their feet slipped in the pools of water and filth; they gave no more thought to their dirtiness than animals in distress.

A suffocating reek filled the gun-room; all this filth which slid about the floor gave the impression of a lair of sick beasts, and one smelt the acrid stench which is peculiar to the hold of a ship in times of bad weather.

At midnight, Yves, in turn, descended into the gun-room with the other men of the larboard watch; their spell of duty had been extended for an hour on account of the necessity for securing the boats. They slid down through the half-opened hatchway which closed upon them, and mingled with this floating misery below.

They had spent five hours at their rough work, rocked in the void, lashed by the furious winds above, and soaked to the skin by the stinging rain which seared their faces. They made a grimace of disgust as they entered this closed place where the atmosphere savoured of death.

And Yves said, in his big disdainful way:

"It's those Parisians[3] again, I'll bet, who have made this place stink."

They were not ill, these fellows who were real sailors: their lungs were still filled with the wind of the masthead, and the healthy fatigue which they had just endured assured them now of a wholesome sleep.

They stepped on the rings, on the angle-blocks, on the ends of the gun-carriages, with precaution, in order to avoid the dirty water and the filth--placing their bare feet on any projection that offered, using the precarious footholds of cats. Near their hammocks they undressed, hung up their caps, hung up their large leather-chained knives, their soaked clothing, hung up everything and hung up themselves; and when they were stripped they brushed off with their hands the water which trickled still down their muscular chests.

After that, they raised themselves to the ceiling with the lightness of acrobats, and stretched themselves, against the white beams, in their narrow little canvas beds. Overhead, above them, after each shock, one heard what seemed the passage of a cataract: the waves, the great masses of water which swept the bridge. But the row of their hammocks assumed nevertheless the slow swinging motion of the neighbouring rows, grinding on the iron hooks, and they slept soundly in the midst of the mighty uproar.

Soon, around Yves' hammock, the Burmese women came and danced. In the midst of a cloud of incense, rendered more murky by his dream, they came one after another with their dead smile, in strange silken costumes, covered with glistening stones.

They swayed their haunches slowly, to the sound of the gong, their hands upraised in the air, their fingers outspread, like so many phantoms. They twisted their wrists in epileptic movements, and their long nails enclosed in the golden sheaves became entangled.

The gong--it was the tempest which sounded it, outside, against the sides. . . .

[Footnote 3: "Parisian" is a term of insult as used by sailors; it means: no sailor, a weakling, a sick man.]