I dreamt I was lying in a hammock, as formerly during my first years at sea. Yves' hammock was near mine. We were swinging violently and his became unhooked. Beneath us there was a confused movement of something dark which it seemed to me was deep water, and he, Yves, was about to fall into it. I stretched out my hands to save him, but they seemed to have no strength, they were nerveless as in dreams. I tried then to seize him round the body, to knot my hands about his chest, remembering that his mother had entrusted him to me; and I realized with anguish that I could not do it, that I was no longer capable of it; he was going to slip from me and to disappear in all this moving blackness which roared beneath us. . . . And then, what struck me with a horror of fear, was that he did not waken and he was icy cold, with a cold which penetrated me also, to the marrow of my bones; and the canvas of his hammock had become rigid like the sheath of a mummy. . . .
And I felt in my head the real concussions, the real pain of all these shocks, I mixed the real with the imaginary of my dream, as happens in conditions of extreme fatigue, and on this account the sinister vision assumed all the more intensity and life.
Afterwards, I lost consciousness of everything, even of the movement and noise, and then only did my rest begin.
When I awoke it was morning. The first light was of that yellow colour which is peculiar to the sunrise on days of tempest; and the roaring of the wind persisted still.
Yves came and opened my door a little and looked in. He propped himself in the doorway, holding on by one hand, bending his body now this way and now that, according to the needs of the moment, in order to preserve his equilibrium. He had put on again his damp clothes, and was covered with sea salt which was deposited in his hair, in his beard, in the form of a white powder.
He smiled, looking very calm and good-humoured.
"I wanted to see you," he said, "for I dreamt about you a lot in the night. All night long I saw those good Burmese ladies with their long golden nails, you know. They surrounded you with their evil monkeyings, and I could not drive them away. At last they wanted to eat you. Fortunately the réveillé sounded then; I was in a cold sweat when I awoke."
"And I, too, am very glad to see you, my dear Yves, for I have dreamt a lot about you also. Is it as rough as yesterday?"
"Perhaps a little more manageable. And, anyhow, it's day. As long as it's light, you know, it's always easier to work at the masthead. But when it's as black as the devil's pit, as last night, I don't like it at all."
Yves glanced with satisfaction all round my room, arranged by him in anticipation of bad weather. Nothing had budged, thanks to his contrivance. On the floor there was indeed a pool of salt water in which divers things floated; but the objects to which I attached more or less value had remained suspended or fixed, like furniture, to the panels of the walls by bolts or angle-irons. Everything had been corded, tied, secured with an extreme care by means of tarred rope of various thicknesses. Arms and bronzes had been wrapped in articles of clothing in a strange higgledly-piggledly. Japanese masks with long human hair gazed at us through a network of tarred thread; they had the same remote smile, the same tilting of the eyes as the golden-nailed Burmese women who, in Yves' dream, had wanted to eat me. . . .