All the crew were gathered forward; a boat was rowing away from the ship, Captain Stock and the mate were in it, and they were making for the nearest war-ship. The Anne Martin was close in shore and the vast, formless, blanketed city cast its chill gray reflection on the water of the harbour. Mounds of ashes terraced by the heavy rains, wildernesses of ashes mounting to wildernesses of ashes, ghosts of buildings vaguely outlined beneath their cerement of ashes—cinders, dust, and ashes, and from all that immensity of desolation not a sound, save now and then a call from one of the working parties, half invisible amidst the ruins.
He cast his eyes over it all and then up to Pelée still fuming in the windless blue; like a madman, exhausted, the great mountain seemed inexpressibly sinister above the ruins of the city it had protected for long years, fed with the gouyave water, sheltered from the winds. Gaspard stretched out his arms, his fingers were crooked, it was as though the man were saying to the mountain, “Ah, what would I not do with you, if I only had you in my grip!”
Then he clambered over the starboard rail.
The men forward did not hear the splash, nor did they notice the black head of the swimmer passing towards the shore.
He had not even kicked off the deck shoes he was wearing, he swam with ease and half unconsciously; in his condition all things were possible to him, he would have guided his way through a turbulent sea just as surely as across this summer-smooth harbour. And now he was clinging to the angle of a great block of stone shaken out from the once quay-wall and slobbered round by the tide. He dragged himself on to it, and from it to the next.
The Place Bertine had been here; here in the sunlight the tamarinds had shaken their leaves to the wind and cast dancing shadows on the sun-smitten pavement, the songs of the canotiers had mixed with the sounds of trade—here where tamarind trees would bloom no more; where the blasting scoriae had fused broken stones and broken building; where the sunlight was horrible.
Around him lay nothing but mounds where once the sugar barrels had been piled, where buildings had been. Mounds like the sand dunes on a desolate coast. A little wind had arisen and, just as amidst the dunes the wind brings the whisper of sand, here, it brought the faint silky whisper of dust.
He had no objective—no object, here, but to feel the ruin; to touch it, walk amidst it, become part of it. To torture his soul. All this was her bed, the dust he trod on her winding sheet, the desolation her silence.
He passed amidst the mounds. In the great mountain of ashes before him the rains had washed out what seemed the bed of a mountain torrent. It had once been a street. He began to climb it. This horrible ravine was tainted by a faint sickly smell of corruption, the crust of the scoriae broke beneath his feet so that he plunged sometimes knee-deep, the sweat ran from his brow, and the sun struck fiercely on him. The heat was terrific. Never, even in the old days of the stokehold, had he experienced such heat, yet still he climbed.
He had reached, now, a transverse ravine, a huge donga with steep banks from which here and there broke out the walls of ruined houses. It was the Rue Victor Hugo.