"What's that?" he cried, and then laughed as he understood. For a cloud of puffins, gulls, kittiwakes and shearwaters whirled upwards from that nursery of sea-birds and circled above his head, their cries sounding with infinite melancholy, their wings flickering like silver in that grey and desolate light.
"It's so like your Robinson Crusoe," said M. Fournier.
"It is more like our islands of Scilly," said the lighthouse-keeper, as he looked towards the wreck.
They climbed over the low rocks and walked along the crown of the island towards the wreck. There was no tree or shrub upon the barren soil, only here a stretch of sandy grass, there a patch of mallows--mallows of a rusty green and whitened with salt of the sea. In the midst of one such patch they came upon the body of a man. He was dressed in a pilot coat, sea boots and thick stockings drawn over his trousers to the hips, and he lay face downwards with his head resting upon his arms in a natural posture of sleep.
Fournier stood still. The lighthouse-keeper walked forward and tapped the sleeper upon the shoulder. But the sleeper did not wake. The lighthouse man knelt down and gently turned the man over upon his back; as he did so, or rather just before he did so, Fournier turned sharply away with a shudder. When the sailor was lying upon his back, the keeper of the lighthouse started with something of a shudder too. For the sailor had no face.
The lighthouse man drew his handkerchief from his pocket and gently covered the head. It seemed almost as if Fournier had been waiting, had been watching, for this action. For he turned about immediately and stood by the lighthouse-keeper's side. Above the lonely islet the sea-birds circled and called; on the sea the mist was now no more than a gauze, and through it the glow of the sun was faintly diffused.
"Strange that, isn't it?" said the lighthouse-keeper, in a hushed voice. "The sea dashed him upon the rocks and drew him down again and threw him up again until it got tired of the sport, and so tossed him here to lie quietly face downwards amongst the mallows like a man asleep."
Then he sat back upon his heels and measured the distance between the mallows and the sea with some perplexity upon his forehead--and the perplexity grew.
"It's a long way for the sea to have thrown him," he said, and as Fournier shifted restlessly at his side, he looked up into his face. "Good God, man, but you look white," he said.
"The sight is terrible," replied Fournier, as he wiped his forehead.