a crab, or a few _chataignes de
mer_, the only food to be found among those rocks; and shivering like
his knotted cord, mounted again to sleep in his cell upon the Great
Douvre.

The very materialism of his daily occupation increased the kind of
abstraction in which he lived. To be steeped too deeply in realities is
in itself a cause of visionary moods. His bodily labour, with its
infinite variety of details, detracted nothing from the sensation of
stupor which arose from the strangeness of his position and his work.
Ordinary bodily fatigue is a thread which binds man to the earth; but
the very peculiarity of the enterprise he was engaged in kept him in a
sort of ideal twilight region. There were times when he seemed to be
striking blows with his hammer in the clouds. At other moments his tools
appeared to him like arms. He had a singular feeling, as if he was
repressing or providing against some latent danger of attack. Untwisting
ropes, unravelling threads of yarn in a sail, or propping up a couple of
beams, appeared to him at such times like fashioning engines of war. The
thousand minute pains which he took about his salvage operations
produced at last in his mind the effect of precautions against
aggressions little concealed, and easy to anticipate. He did not know
the words which express the ideas, but he perceived them. His instincts
became less and less those of the worker; his habits more and more those
of the savage man.

His business there was to subdue and direct the powers of nature. He had
an indistinct perception of it. A strange enlargement of his ideas!

Around him, far as eye could reach, was the vast prospect of endless
labour wasted and lost. Nothing is more disturbing to the mind than the
contemplation of the diffusion of forces at work in the unfathomable and
illimitable space of the ocean. The mind tends naturally to seek the
object of these forces. The unceasing movement in space, the unwearying
sea, the clouds that seem ever hurrying somewhere, the vast mysterious
prodigality of effort, all this is a problem. Whither does this
perpetual movement tend? What do these winds construct? What do these
giant blows build up? These howlings, shocks, and sobbings of the storm,
what do they end in? and what is the business of this tumult? The ebb
and flow of these questionings is eternal, as the flux and reflux of
the sea itself. Gilliatt could answer for himself; his work he knew, but
the agitation whic