heat and the sun, which were unlessened by the autumn season, made
him feel out of his element.

One day they touched at Port Said. All the flags of Europe waved
overhead from long staves, which gave it an aspect of Babel on a
feast-day, and the glistening sands surrounded the town like a moving
sea.

They had stopped there, touching the quays, almost in the midst of the
long streets full of wooden shanties. Since his departure, Sylvestre
never had seen the outside world so closely, and the movement and
numbers of boats excited and amused him.

With never-ending screeching from their escape-pipes, all these boats
crowded up in the long canal, as narrow as a ditch, which wound itself
in a silvery line through the infinite sands. From his post on high he
could see them as in a procession under a window, till disappearing in
the plain.

On the canal all kinds of costumes could be seen; men in many-coloured
attire, busy and shouting like thunder. And at night the clamour of
confused bands of music mingled with the diabolical screams of the
locomotives, playing noisy tunes, as if to drown the heart-breaking
sorrow of the exiles who for ever passed onward.

The next day, at sunrise, they, too, glided into the narrow ribbon of
water between the sands. For two days the steaming in the long file
through the desert lasted, then another sea opened before them, and they
were once again upon the open. They still ran at full speed through this
warmer expanse, stained like red marble, with their boiling wake like
blood. Sylvestre remained all the time up in his top, where he would
hum his old song of "Jean-Francois de Nantes," to remind him of his dear
brother Yann, of Iceland, and the good old bygone days.

Sometimes, in the depths of the shadowy distance, some wonderfully
tinted mountain would arise. Notwithstanding the distance and the
dimness around, the names of those projected capes of countries appeared
as the eternal landmarks on the great roadways of the earth to the
steersmen of this vessel; but a topman is carried on like an inanimate
thing, knowing nothing, and unconscious of the distance over the
everlasting, endless waves.

All he felt was a terrible estrangement from the things of this world,
which grew greater and greater; and the feeling was very defined and
exact as he looked upon the seething foam behind, and tried to remember
how long had lasted this pace that never slackened night or day. Down on
deck, th