I gave the order quickly, with a feeling of relief. But Yves, from aloft, replied to me with the help of his whistle, that they had almost finished; that they had only to replace one gasket which was broken, by a makeshift knot, and then they would all come down, having taken in their sail and completed their work.
Afterwards when they were all down I breathed more freely. No one now aloft, nothing more to be done up there, nothing to be done now but to watch and wait. Then it seemed to me that the weather was almost fair, that it was almost comfortable on this bridge, now that I was relieved of the heavy weight of my anxiety.
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
Midnight. The end of the watch; the hour when we could go and seek shelter.
Below, in the padded gun-room, one saw another aspect of the tempest, the grim reality of the misery it caused in the entrails of the ship.
Seen from end to end it was a kind of long dark hall dimly lighted by flickering lanterns. The big guns, supported on their mountings, remained more or less in position by virtue of their lashings of iron cables. And this whole place was in motion; it had the movements of a thing which is shaken in a sieve, shaken without respite, without mercy, perpetually, with a blind rage; it creaked everywhere, it trembled like an animate thing in pain, racked, exhausted, as if it were about to burst and die.
And the great waters outside, for ever seeking to enter, penetrated here and there in little streams, in sinister spoutings.
You were lifted up so quickly that your knees gave way—and then suddenly things slipped from under you, sank beneath your feet—and you descended with them, stiffening in spite of yourself, as for a kind of resistance.
There were shrill, discordant, alarming noises which came from all round; all this framework in the form of a fish which was the Médée was loosening little by little, and groaning under the terrible strain. And outside, on the other side of the wooden wall, always the same immense deep sound, the same deep voice of horror.
But all held fast nevertheless. The long gun-room remained intact, one saw it still from end to end, sometimes tilted, half-overturned, sometimes rising almost upright in a concussion, looking longer still in this darkness in which the lanterns were lost, seeming to change its shape and grow larger, in all this noise, as if it were some vague place of dreamland.