All that gaiety and colour decking the ruin of man’s work was like laughter coming from under the seas.
Yves felt nothing of this.
“Come,” said the Moco, turning towards the shore, “let’s go back.”
As they tramped their way through the brushwood they talked of the thing they had seen. Yves thought that from the height of her poop she must be very old, or it might be that it was only a very big deck-house snowed over with coral; he slapped his thigh as he walked, pleased with the idea of the snow; when a boy in Brittany he had seen things heaped with snow and bulked out in size, carts, barrels, and so forth, just as the old ship was heaped and bulked out with coral; but the simile was lost on Gaspard; you do not get snow at Montpellier to any extent; also his mind more trained by early education, and more supple by heredity, refused to draw images from gross bulk; the colours appealed to him; “mordieu,” said he, “she reminds me most of a ship of flowers I once saw drawn along in the carnival procession at Montpellier.”
“Flowers,” laughed Yves, “where would you get flowers under the sea?” The stupidity of Yves roused Gaspard’s ever-ready anger.
“From the devil, maybe—I was not talking of flowers under the sea; I was talking of what I had seen in Montpellier.”
They had reached the southern beach, where the palm trees grew, and Yves set about lighting a fire of dry brushwood; when it was burning he heaped on some wreck-wood; the ship of coral, the wreck of the Rhone, their position, all were banished from his mind by the business in hand.
When supper was finished they sat each with his back against a palm tree. The work of the day was over. They had rigged up a rough sort of tent with the boat sail and some broken spars, but the warm night held them in the open.
The red light of the fire lit the white sand to within a few yards of the sea edge, where the waves were falling gently, rhythmically, drowsily, Haassh—Haassh—Haassh—a chill and dreamy sound. Above, the sky solid with stars, voiceless, windless, seemed a thing more alive and active than the sea. From the slight elevation where they sat a ghostly white streak on the starlit sea to the southward indicated the reef that had slain the Rhone; only at low tide and half way between flood and ebb tide did the snow of the surf indicate the position of the murderer.
“She had a lot of gold in her for Havana,” said Yves, breaking silence and nodding in the direction of the reef; “seems a pity that it should be lying there under the sea and no one to spend it.”