man, whom I had seen a moment ago hanging around our fire,
came timidly towards us. I had thought he was one of the crew, not
knowing that there was a shepherd on the island.

He was an old, leprous person, not quite all there, and affected by
some awful disease or other which gave him obscenely thickened lips,
horrible to look at. We took great trouble to tell him what it was all
about. Then, scratching his diseased lip, the old man told us that, yes
indeed, from inside his hut he had heard a fearful crash on the rocks
at midday on that day. The island was completely flooded, so he
couldn't go out-of-doors and it wasn't until the next day that he
opened up to see the shore covered in debris and bodies washed up by
the sea. Horrified, he ran to his boat to try to get some help from
Bonifacio.

The shepherd was tired by all this talking, and sat down, and the
Master took up the story:

--Yes, monsieur, this was the unfortunate old man that came to raise
the alarm. He was almost insane with fear, and from that day on, his
mind has been deranged. The truth is, the catastrophe was enough to do
it.... Imagine six hundred bodies piled up haphazardly on the beach
with splinters of wood and shreds of sail-cloth.... Poor
_Semillante_.... The sea had crushed everything to such tiny fragments,
that the shepherd, Palombo, couldn't find enough good timber to make a
fence round his hut.... As for the men, practically all of them were
disfigured and hideously mutilated.... it was pitiful to see them all
tangled up together. We found the captain in full dress uniform, and
the chaplain with his stole round his neck. In one place, between two
rocks, lay the ship's young apprentice, open-eyed.... He looked as
though he was still alive--but he wasn't. It was fated; no one could
have survived.

Here the Master broke off his tale:

--Hey, Nardi, he cried, the fire's going out.

Nardi threw two or three pieces of tarred planking onto the embers
which spluttered and then blazed. Lionetti continued,

--The saddest thing about this story is this.... Three weeks before the
disaster, a small corvette, similar to the _Semillante_, on its way to
the Crimea was also wrecked in the same way, almost at the same place.
This time however, we managed to save the crew and twenty soldiers in
transit who were on board.... These unfortunate soldiers, you see, were
not able to go about their business. We took them to Bonifacio and they
stayed with us