ld in mid-air. And what did he
find? The machinery was saved, but it was lost. The ocean saved it, only
to demolish it at leisure--like a cat playing 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. 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, could, under the frown of that
implacable spot, escape from slow destruction seemed a madness even to
imagine.

Gilliatt looked about him.

When he had made a lodging for himself, and had suffered the misfortune
of losing the basket containing his provisions, Gilliatt considered his
difficulties.

In order to raise the engine of the Durande from the wreck in which it
was three-fourths buried, with any chance of success--in order to
accomplish a salvage in such a place and such a season, it seemed almost
necessary to be a legion of men. Gilliatt was alone. A complete
apparatus of carpenter's and engineer's tools and implements were
wanted. Gilliatt had a saw, a hatchet, a chisel, and a hammer. He wanted
both a good workshop and a good shed; Gilliatt had not a roof to cover
him. Provisions, too, were necessary on that bare rock, but he had not
even bread.

Anyone who could have seen Gilliatt working on the rock during all that
first week might have been puzzled to determine the nature of his
operations. He seemed to be no longer thinking of the Durande or the two
Douvres. He was busy only among the breakers. He seemed absorbed in
saving the smaller parts of the shipwreck. He took advantage of every
high tide to strip the reefs of everything that the ship-wreck had
distributed among them. He went from rock to rock, picking up whatever
the sea had scattered--tatters of sail-cloth, pieces of iron, splinters
of panels, shattered planking, broken yards; here a beam, there a chain,
there a pulley.

He lived upon limpets, hermit-crabs, and rain-water. He was surrounded
by a screaming garrison of gulls, cormorants, and sea-mews. The deep
boom of the waves among the caves and reefs was never out of his ears.
By day he was roasted in the terrific heat which beat with pitiless
force on this exposed pinnacle; at night he was chilled to the marrow by
the cold of the open sea. And for ever he was hungry, thirsty--famished.

One day, in exploring for sa