h surrounded him far and wide at all times perplexed
him confusedly with its eternal questionings. Unknown to himself,
mechanically, by the mere pressure of external things, and without any
other effect than a strange, unconscious bewilderment, Gilliatt, in this
dreamy mood, blended his own toil somehow with the prodigious wasted
labour of the sea-waves. How, indeed, in that position, could he escape
the influence of that mystery of the dread, laborious ocean? how do
other than meditate, so far as meditation was possible, upon the
vacillation of the waves, the perseverance of the foam, the
imperceptible wearing down of rocks, the furious beatings of the four
winds? How terrible that perpetual recommencement, that ocean bed, those
Danaides-like clouds, all that travail and weariness for no end!

For no end? Not so! But for what? O Thou Infinite Unknown, Thou only
knowest!

XI

DISCOVERY

A rock near the coast is sometimes visited by men; a rock in mid-ocean
never. What object could any one have there? No supplies can be drawn
thence; no fruit-trees are there, no pasturage, no beasts, no springs of
water fitted for man's use. It stands aloft, a rock with its steep sides
and summits above water, and its sharp points below. Nothing is to be
found there but inevitable shipwreck.

This kind of rocks, which in the old sea dialect were called _Isoles_,
are, as we have said, strange places. The sea is alone there; she works
her own will. No token of terrestrial life disturbs her. Man is a terror
to the sea; she is shy of his approach, and hides from him her deeds.
But she is bolder among the lone sea rocks. The everlasting soliloquy of
the waves is not troubled there. She labours at the rock, repairs its
damage, sharpens its peaks, makes them rugged or renews them. She
pierces the granite, wears down the soft stone, and denudes the hard;
she rummages, dismembers, bores, perforates, and grooves; she fills the
rock with cells, and makes it sponge-like, hollows out the inside, or
sculptures it without. In that secret mountain which is hers, she makes
to herself caves, sanctuaries, palaces. She has her splendid and
monstrous vegetation, composed of floating plants which bite, and of
monsters which take root; and she hides away all this terrible
magnificence in the twilight of her deeps. Among the isolated rocks no
eye watches over her; no spy embarrasses her movements. It is there that
she develops at liberty her myste