When the time comes that he can sail no longer, the mariner makes his home near the sea; and when it moans he rises to watch, unable to sleep longer; like a nurse who hears a little child complain in the night.
I do likewise, and, by the living virtue of the sea in my blood, my mind communicates with the movement of the waters as does a city by its secret drains.
While I am speaking or writing, resting or eating, I participate in the sea, which rises toward or recedes from me. And often at noon, temporary citizen of this commercial coast, I gaze on what the tide brings us: the tribute of the ocean gathered into this flowing channel in one wide current of yellow water.
I observe the approach of all the people of the sea, the procession of ships towed by the tide as if on the chain of a barge, the junks with their four bulging sails as smooth and stiff as blades, in a puff of wind. Those from Foutchéou carry an enormous fagot of beams lashed to each side; then, among a scattering of tri-colored sampans, come the giants of Europe, the American sailing ships full of gasoline; all the “camels” of Madian, all the cargoes of Hamburg and London, all the carriers of the Coast and the Islands.
The air is very clear. I enter into a light so pure that neither my secret conscience, it seems, nor my body, offer resistance to it. It is deliciously cool. With closed mouth, I breathe the sunlight, my nostrils open to the exhilarating air. Meanwhile noon sounds from the tower of the Customs; the ball of the semaphore drops, all the boats mark off the hour, cannon thunder, the Angelus rings its part, the whistles of the factories mingle with the long tumult of the siren.
All humanity gathers together to eat; the sampan man at the stern of his skiff, lifting a wooden cover, surveys with a contented eye the simmering of his stew. The wharf-hands, tied up in thick bundles of rags, each yoke carried over the shoulder like a pike, surround the open-air kitchen; those who are already served, all laughing, seated on the edges of the wheelbarrows, with bowls of smoking rice between their hands, test the heat with the ends of their greedy tongues.
The regulator of Life’s level rises; all the sluices of the earth are filled; the rivers suspend their course; and the sea, mingling her salt with their sands, joins them, to drink fully at their mouths. It is the hour of plenitude. Now the tortuous canals which cross the city become long serpents of close-packed barges advancing amid vociferations; and the irresistible waters, in their expansion, float bridges of boats and dead bodies from the mud, like corks.
THE PERIL OF THE SEA
As I cannot eat, I remount to the poop, a piece of bread in my pocket; and, staggering, deafened, blown about, I join in the wild darkness and the indescribable confusion of noise. In this void, opening my lips, I carry a mouthful blindly to them. Soon, leaving the binnacle, little by little I can make out the form of the ship, and beyond, just at the limit of the contracted horizon, the sea in the clutches of the wind. In that black circle, I see the pale charging cavalry of the foam.
Nowhere about me is there solidity. I stand amid chaos. I am lost in the inner caverns of Death. My heart is grasped by the bitterness of the last hour. This is no menace brandished at me; it is simply that I have intruded into the uninhabitable. I am of no importance. I am voyaging through an indifferent element. I am at the mercy of the moods of the deep, of the mind, of the powers of the abyss. In the cataclysm that surrounds me, no compact holds; and the handful of human souls which this narrow vessel contains, may be scattered over the waters like a basket of bran. A delicate balance sustains me on the bosom of this abyss which is ready to join with my own weight and engulf me.