hroughout.

On the other hand, the trunk of the hull, fixed between the Douvres,
held together, as we have already said, and it appeared strong.

There was something like derision in this preservation of the machinery;
something which added to the irony of the misfortune. The sombre malice
of the unseen powers of mischief displays itself sometimes in such
bitter mockeries. The machinery was saved, but its preservation did not
make it any the less lost. The ocean seemed to have kept it only to
demolish it at leisure. It was like the playing of the cat with her
prey.

Its fate was to suffer there and to be dismembered day by day. It was to
be the plaything of the savage amusements of the sea. It was slowly to
dwindle, and, as it were, to melt away. For what could be done? That
this vast block of mechanism and gear, at once massive and delicate,
condemned to fixity by its weight, delivered up in that solitude to the
destructive elements, exposed in the gripe of the rock to the action of
the wind and wave, could, under the frown of that implacable spot,
escape from slow destruction, seemed a madness even to imagine.

The Durande was the captive of the Douvres.

How could she be extricated from that position?

How could she be delivered from her bondage?

The escape of a man is difficult; but what a problem was this--the
escape of a vast and cumbrous machine.

IV

A PRELIMINARY SURVEY

Gilliatt was pressed on all sides by demands upon his labours. The most
pressing, however, was to find a safe mooring for the barge; then a
shelter for himself.

The Durande having settled down more on the larboard than on the
starboard side, the right paddle-box was higher than the left.

Gilliatt ascended the paddle-box on the right. From that position,
although the gut of rocks stretching in abrupt angles behind the Douvres
had several elbows, he was able to study the ground-plan of the group.

This survey was the preliminary step of his operations.

The Douvres, as we have already described them, were like two high
gable-ends, forming the narrow entrance to a straggling alley of small
cliffs with perpendicular faces. It is not rare to find in primitive
submarine formations these singular kinds of passages, which seem cut
out with a hatchet.

This defile was extremely tortuous, and was never without water even in
the low tides. A current, much agitated, traversed it at all times from
end to end. The sharpness of i