Cries of pain came from aloft, from this kind of hanging bunch of human grapes. Cries of men, hoarse cries, more ominous than those of women, because one is less accustomed to hear them; cries of horrible suffering: a hand caught somewhere, fingers jammed, from which the flesh was torn as they were drawn away—or maybe, some unfortunate fellow, less strong than the others, numbed with cold, who felt that he could hold out no longer, that his head was beginning to swim, that he was about to let go and fall. And the others, out of pity, bound him and tried to lower him to the deck.
For two hours this lasted; they were exhausted, beat; flesh and blood could do no more.
Then they were ordered down, and in their place were sent up the men of the larboard watch, who had been resting and were not so cold.
They came down, pale, wet, with icy water streaming down their chest and down their back, hands bleeding, nails torn, teeth chattering. For two days they had lived in water, had scarcely eaten, had scarcely slept, and their vitality was at an ebb.
It is this long watching, this long labour in the damp cold, which are the true horrors of the sea. Often poor fellows die, who, before they utter their last cry, their last sob of agony, have remained for days and nights wet through, dirty, covered with a muddy coating of cold sweat and salt, with a kind of veneer of death.
And still the wind increased. There were times when it whistled, shrill and strident, as in a paroxysm of evil exasperation; and others again, when its voice became deep, cavernous, powerful as the immense sounds of cataclysm. And we continued to leap from wave to wave, and, save for the sea which preserved still its unholy whiteness of foam and froth, everything was becoming darker. A glacial twilight was falling upon us; behind these dark curtains, behind all these masses of water which climbed to the sky, the sun had disappeared at its due hour; it abandoned us, and left us to find our way as best we could in the darkness. . . .
Yves had climbed with the larboard men into the disarray of the rigging, and then I kept my eyes aloft, blinded myself also, and only seeing momentarily now the human cluster in the air.
And, suddenly, in a lurch more violent than any that had gone before, the silhouette of this group was broken brusquely and changed its form; two bodies broke away from it and fell with outspread arms into the roaring volutes of the sea, while another crashed on the deck, without a cry, falling as a man might who was already dead.
"The foot-rope broken again!" said the officer of the watch, stamping his foot with rage. "Some rotten rope which they gave us in that damned port of Brest! Big Kerboul in the sea. And the other one, who was he?"
Others, clinging to ropes, swung for some moments in the void and then climbed, hand over hand, very rapidly, as monkeys might.