came from the
sea, that came from the land, that came from every direction and
whipped him with great lashes of the truth.

He understood. The document appeared to him in its real sense. The
Chambre des Demoiselles--Etretat--

"That's it," he thought, his brain filled with light, "it must be that.
But why didn't I guess earlier?"

He said to the shepherd, in a low voice:

"That will do--go away--you can go--thank you."

The man, not knowing what to think, whistled to his dog and went.

Left alone, Beautrelet returned to the fort. He had almost passed it
when, suddenly, he dropped to the ground and lay cowering against a
piece of wall. And, wringing his hands, he thought:

"I must be mad! If 'he' were to see me! Or his accomplices! I've been
moving about for an hour--!"

He did not stir another limb.

The sun went down. Little by little, the night mingled with the day,
blurring the outline of things.

Then, with little imperceptible movements, flat on his stomach,
gliding, crawling, he crept along one of the points of the promontory
to the extreme edge of the cliff.

He reached it. Stretching out his hands, he pushed aside some tufts of
grass and his head appeared over the precipice.

Opposite him, almost level with the cliff, in the open sea rose an
enormous rock, over eighty yards high, a colossal obelisk, standing
straight on its granite base, which showed at the surface of the water,
and tapering toward the summit, like the giant tooth of a monster of
the deep. White with the dirty gray white of the cliff, the awful
monolith was streaked with horizontal lines marked by flint and
displaying the slow work of the centuries, which had heaped alternate
layers of lime and pebble-stone one atop of the other.

Here and there, a fissure, a break; and, wherever these occurred, a
scrap of earth, with grass and leaves.

And all this was mighty and solid and formidable, with the look of an
indestructible thing against which the furious assault of the waves and
storms could not prevail. And it was definite and permanent and grand,
despite the grandeur of the cliffy rampart that commanded it, despite
the immensity of the space in which it stood.

Beautrelet's nails dug into the soil like the claws of an animal ready
to leap upon its prey. His eyes penetrated the wrinkled texture of the
rock, penetrated its skin, so it seemed to him, its very flesh. He
touched it, felt it, took cognizance and possession of it, ab