It was high time to depart, and the diligence was waiting for us.
Throughout our journey over this golden-coloured moor, during the long May twilight, our eyes were fixed on the Creizker tower which was disappearing in the distance, and was lost at last in the depths of the limpid darkness. We were bidding it adieu, for we were going to leave to-morrow for very distant seas, where it would no longer be able to see us pass.
"To-morrow morning," said Yves, "you must let me come into your room on board very early, so that I may write at your desk. I want to tell all that we have found out to my mother before leaving France. And, you know, I am sure that tears will come into her eyes when my letter is read to her."
[CHAPTER XI]
June, 1875.
It was now the twentieth parallel of latitude, in the region of the trade winds. The hour was about six in the morning. On the deck of a ship which rode solitary in the midst of the immense blue, was a group of young men, stripped to the waist, in the warmth of the rising sun.
It was Yves' band, the topmen of the foremast and those of the bowsprit.
They had thrown over their shoulders, all of them, the handkerchiefs which they had just washed, and they stood there gravely with back to the sun to dry them. Their bronzed faces, their laughter, had still a youthful, almost childlike, grace, and in their movements, in the supple, flexible way in which they placed their bare feet there was something catlike.
And every morning, at this same hour, in this same sunshine, in this same costume, this group foregathered on these same boards which carried them along, all heedless, in the midst of the infinity of the sea.
This particular morning they were talking about the moon, about its human face, which had remained with them since the night as a pale, persistent image graven in their memory. Throughout their watch they had seen it on high, solitary and round, in the midst of the immense bluish void; they had even been obliged to cover their faces (as they slept on their backs in the open) on account of the maladies and evil spells it casts on the eyes of sailors, when they sleep under its gaze.