—"Mais ni qui chose qui douôle içitt!... There is something queer, Stéphane; there is something queer."...
—"Ah! you begin to see now, Maximilien!—it is the current!"
—"A devil-current, Stéphane.... We are drifting: we will go to the horizon!"...
To the horizon—"nou kallé Ihorizon!"—a phrase of terrible picturesqueness.... In the creole tongue, "to the horizon" signifies to the Great Open—into the measureless sea.
—"C'est pa lapeine pagayé atouèlement!" (It is no use to paddle now), sobbed Maximilien, laying down his palettes.
—"Si! si!" said Stéphane, reversing the motion: "paddle with the current."
—"With the current! It runs to La Dominique!"
—"Pouloss," phlegmatically returned Stéphane,—"ennou!—let us make for La Dominique!"
—"Thou fool!—it is more than past forty kilometres.... Stéphane, mi! gadé!—mi qui gouôs requ'em!"
A long black fin cut the water almost beside them, passed, and vanished,—a requin indeed! But, in his patois, the boy almost re-echoed the name as uttered by quaint Père Du Tertre, who, writing of strange fishes more than two hundred years ago, says it is called REQUIEM, because for the man who findeth himself alone with it in the midst of the sea, surely a requiem must be sung.