his glance nor a
drawer whose contents he did not know down to the slightest detail. His
body was accustomed to slip without embarrassment through the spaces of
his cabin furnishings. He had adapted himself to all incoming and
outgoing angles just as the body of the mollusk adapts itself to the
winding curves of its shells. The cabin seemed formed by the secretions
of his being. It was a covering, a sheath, that went with him from one
extreme of the ocean to the other, heating itself with the high
temperature of the tropics, or becoming as cosy as an Esquimo hut on
approaching the polar seas.

His love for it was somewhat like that which the friar has for his
cell; but this cell was a secular one, and entering it after a
tempestuous night on the bridge, or a trip ashore in most curious and
foreign ports, he found it always the same, with his papers and books
untouched on the table, his clothes hanging from their hooks, his
photographs fixed on the walls. The daily spectacle of seas and lands
was always changing--the temperature, the course of the stars, and the
people that one week were bundled up in winter greatcoats, and were
clad in white the week after, hunting the heavens for the new stars of
another hemisphere.... Yet his cozy little stateroom was always the
same, as though it were the corner of a planet apart, unaffected by the
variations of this world.

Upon awaking in it, he found himself every morning enwrapped in a
greenish and bland atmosphere as though he might have been sleeping in
the bottom of an enchanted lake. The sun traced over the whiteness of
his ceiling and sheets a restless network of gold whose meshes
constantly succeeded each other. This was the reflection of the
invisible water. When his ship was immovable in the ports, there always
came in through his window the whirling noise of the cranes, the cries
of the stevedores and the voices of those who were in the neighboring
vessels. On the high sea the cool and murmuring silence of immensity
used to fill his sleeping room. A wind of infinite purity that came
perhaps from the other side of the planet--slipping past thousands of
leagues, over the salty deserts without touching a single bit of
corruption--would come stealing into Ferragut's throat like an
effervescent wine. His chest always expanded to the impulses of this
life-giving draught as his eyes roved over the sparkling, luminous blue
of the horizon.

Here in his home, the first thing t