n in this dreadful spot resembled a duel, in which a
suspicion of some treachery haunts the mind of one of the combatants.

Now it seemed a coalition of obscure forces which surrounded him. He
felt that there was somewhere a determination to be rid of his presence.
It is thus that the glacier chases the loitering ice-block.

Almost without seeming to touch him this latent coalition had reduced
him to rags; had left him bleeding, distressed, and, as it were, _hors
de combat_, even before the battle. He laboured, indeed, not the
less--without pause or rest; but as the work advanced, the workman
himself lost ground. It might have been fancied that Nature, dreading
his bold spirit, adopted the plan of slowly undermining his bodily
power. Gilliatt kept his ground, and left the rest to the future. The
sea had begun by consuming him; what would come next?

The double Douvres--that dragon made of granite, and lying in ambush in
mid-ocean--had sheltered him. It had allowed him to enter, and to do his
will; but its hospitality resembled the welcome of devouring jaws.

The desert, the boundless surface, the unfathomable space around him and
above, so full of negatives to man's will; the mute, inexorable
determination of phenomena following their appointed course; the grand
general law of things, implacable and passive; the ebbs and flows; the
rocks themselves, dark Pleiades whose points were each a star amid
vortices, a centre of an irradiation of currents; the strange,
indefinable conspiracy to stifle with indifference the temerity of a
living being; the wintry winds, the clouds, and the beleaguering waves
enveloped him, closed round him slowly, and in a measure shut him in,
and separated him from companionship, like a dungeon built up by degrees
round a living man. All against him; nothing for him; he felt himself
isolated, abandoned, enfeebled, sapped, forgotten. His storehouse empty,
his tools broken or defective; he was tormented with hunger and thirst
by day, with cold by night. His sufferings had left him with wounds and
tatters, rags covering sores, torn hands, bleeding feet, wasted limbs,
pallid cheeks, and eyes bright with a strange light; but this was the
steady flame of his determination.

The virtue of a man is betrayed by his eyes. How much of the man there
is in us may be read in their depths. We make ourselves known by the
light that gleams beneath our brows. The petty natures wink at us, the
larger send forth