overhead beam. He dressed and opened the
hatchway to go up mechanically and take his place in the fishing.

CHAPTER IX--WORK CURES SORROW

When Yann was on deck, he looked around him with sleep-laden eyes, over
the familiar circle of the sea. That night the illimitable immensity
showed itself in its most astonishingly simple aspects, in neutral
tints, giving only the impression of depth. This horizon, which
indicated no recognisable region of the earth, or even any geological
age, must have looked so many times the same since the origin of time,
that, gazing upon it, one saw nothing save the eternity of things that
exist and cannot help existing.

It was not the dead of night, for a patch of light, which seemed to ooze
from no particular point, dimly lit up the scene. The wind sobbed as
usual its aimless wail. All was gray, a fickle gray, which faded before
the fixed gaze. The sea, during its mysterious rest, hid itself under
feeble tints without a name.

Above floated scattered clouds; they had assumed various shapes, for,
without form, things cannot exist; in the darkness they had blended
together, so as to form one single vast veiling.

But in one particular spot of the sky, low down on the waters, they
seemed a dark-veined marble, the streaks clearly defined although very
distant; a tender drawing, as if traced by some dreamy hand--some chance
effect, not meant to be viewed for long, and indeed hastening to die
away. Even that alone, in the midst of this broad grandeur, appeared to
mean something; one might think that the sad, undefined thought of
the nothingness around was written there; and the sight involuntarily
remained fixed upon it.

Yann's dazzled eyes grew accustomed to the outside darkness, and gazed
more and more steadily upon that veining in the sky; it had now taken
the shape of a kneeling figure with arms outstretched. He began to look
upon it as a human shadow rendered gigantic by the distance itself.

In his mind, where his indefinite dreams and primitive beliefs still
lingered, the ominous shadow, crushed beneath the gloomy sky, slowly
coalesced with the thought of his dead brother, as if it were a last
token from him.

He was used to such strange associations of ideas, that thrive in
the minds of children. But words, vague as they may be, are still
too precise to express those feelings; one would need that uncertain
language that comes in dreams, of which upon awakening, one retains