These foreshrouds were the larder of the topmen. By the side of the "draught-boards" and the petrels, even rats might sometimes be seen, stripped also of their skin, and hung by the tail.
One night we heard suddenly the rising of a great fearsome voice, and everybody bestirred himself and took to running.
At the same time the Sibylle leaned over, shuddering, as if in the grip of a tenebrous power.
Then even those who were not of the watch, even those who were sleeping on the spar deck, understood: it was the beginning of the great winds and the great swell; we had now entered the stormy latitudes of the south, amid which we should have to fight for our existence and at the same time make headway.
And the farther we advanced into this sullen ocean, the colder became the wind, and the more mountainous the swell.
The fall of the nights became sinister. We were in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn: desolation on the only land that was anywhere near, desolation on the sea, everywhere a desert. At this hour of the winter twilight, when one felt more particularly the need of a shelter, of getting near a fire, of covering under which to sleep—we had nothing, nothing—we kept vigil, for ever on the alert, lost amid all these moving things which made us dance in the darkness.
We tried hard to create an illusion of home in the little cabins rudely shaken, where swung the suspended lamps. But it was no use; there was no stability anywhere: we were in a little frail thing, lost, far from any land, in the midst of the immense desert of the southern waters. And, outside, we heard continuously the roar of the waves and the mournful moaning of the wind which smote the heart.
And Yves, for his part, had no more than his poor swinging hammock, in which, one night out of two, he was allowed the leisure to sleep a little warmly.
[CHAPTER XIV]
It was one morning, as we were entering the Celebean Sea, that the owl which was Yves' parrot died, a morning of high wind on which we took in the second reef of the topsail. It was accidentally crushed between the mast and the yard.