It was I who used to climb from time to time to visit him, although my duty no longer required me to do so, since I had been promoted from the rank of midshipman; but I was rather fond of this domain of Yves where one was fanned by a still purer air.
In this top, he had his little belongings; a pack of playing cards in a box, needles and thread for sewing, stolen bananas, greenstuffs taken during the night from the Commander's store, anything he was able to find in his nocturnal marauding that was fresh and green (sailors are partial to these rare things which soothe gums parched by salt). And then he had his "parrot" attached by a claw, its eyes blinking in the sun.
The "parrot" was a large-headed owl of the pampas which had fallen on board one day after a high wind.
There are some strange destinies on the earth, but few stranger than that of this owl making the tour of the world at the top of a mast. How unexpected a fate!
He knew his master and welcomed him with little joyous flappings of his wings. Yves fed him regularly with his own ration of meat, although he used to let him loose.
It amused him greatly to peer into its eyes from quite near, and to see how it shrank away, and arched its back with an air of offended dignity, nodding its head after the manner of a bear. Then he would burst out laughing, and say to it in his Breton accent:
"Oh! but you are a stupid little fool, my old parrot!"
From aloft one dominated as from a great height the deck of the Sibylle, a Sibylle flattened out and tapering, very strange to see from this domain of Yves, having the appearance of a long wooden fish, whose colour of new spruce contrasted with the deep and infinite blues of the sea.
And, through all these transparent blues, behind, in our wake, a little grey thing having the same shape as the ship which it followed unceasingly under water: the shark. It is always one shark which follows, rarely two; but if the one is caught, another comes. For days and nights it follows, follows without ever getting tired, waiting for what may fall from the ship: debris of any kind, living men or dead men.
And now and then a number of quite small swallows came also to bear us company, amusing themselves, for a while, in picking up the crumbs of biscuits which we scattered behind us in this watery desert, and then disappeared in the distance describing joyous curves. Little beasts of a rare kind, reddish in colour with a white tail, which live one knows not how, lost amid the great waters, always in the open sea.