He crossed to the southern beach. There lay the palms, snapped off and dashed into the sand; a little mound just by the sea edge drew him towards it; it was the case of provisions. Hurled along by the wind, it had struck a lump of coral and been sanded over; it had been shaken almost to pieces and a few blows with his heel burst the staves apart. It was packed with tins of American preserved meat, such as are exported especially to the West Indies. He haggled a tin open with his knife and set to on its contents. As he ate he saw something tangled in the fronds of one of the broken palms. He came to it, kicked the sand aside and found the bag of biscuit. Things were not, then, so bad; but his mind was so dazed and benumbed that he scarcely felt satisfaction at the sight of the food and the knowledge that for a time, at least, he was saved from starvation. He stood chewing the meat and gazing about him, as an animal might gaze on finding itself in a strange place.
Ever since his first landing upon it with Yves, the island had seemed possessed of some diabolical presence. Yet on looking back, there was nothing to be perceived but just an ordinary and logical chain of events. With the exception of finding the gold and the coral ship in the lagoon, all the events, even the killing of Yves, came within the province of ordinary sequence. Yet how sinister were they, taken as a whole, from the first glimpse of the ship in the water to the last glimpse of La Belle Arlésienne hurled to her death by the waves.
He was thinking nothing of this as he stood chewing the food and gazing about him. The satisfaction of his hunger was all that troubled him for the moment; then he sought the little spring amidst the bushes, and drank.
He had not eaten for more than twenty-four hours, and now the food he had taken made him feel drowsy, heavy with weariness. He came to the blown-down palms, made what shelter he could from the sun with their fronds, lay down beside them and fell asleep.
When he awoke some hours later, his mind was clear and his first thought was of Sagesse. So strange a thing is the human mind that here, cast away, marooned on this desolate spot without a tent to shelter him or a soul to share his loneliness, his first sensation on fully regaining his faculties was one of triumph. Sagesse had gone under, that hateful mind, perfidious and dark, would trouble him no more. He was revenged. He rose to his feet and shook the sand from his clothes. The wind was still blowing strong, but the sea had fallen. The gulls had not returned, and the only sounds in all that blue and breezy world were the sounds of the wind and the breaking waves. The frost-white glitter of the bay-cedar bushes lent an extra touch of brilliancy to the scene. Never had he seen the island like this, sea-dashed and wind-blown, surrounded with tumultuous life.
He crossed over to the northern beach. He wished to see what he could of the wreck, but even before he was half way across he could see that nothing remained of La Belle Arlésienne but a few spars washing about in the lagoon water, where ship of wood and ship of coral lay locked together in ruin.
But things were washing ashore on the full tide—black things to make one shudder, forms with limbs outspread, looking like enormous jet-black starfish, forms locked together in a deadly embrace as though they had gone to their death fighting.
Then as Gaspard stepped from the bushes he saw with a thrill of horror that the sands were in motion. Thousands upon thousands of little crabs were congregating to the feast; he trod on them as he walked, and amidst them, like moving rocks, giant crabs from the eastern beach were advancing like captains of this army of destruction.
He would have fled the hateful place had he not noticed a form that the sea had cast up almost free of the waves.
It was the body of Sagesse.