e to
recognise our inevitable immortality, the possibility of an eternity; to
grasp amid this prodigious deluge of universal life, the persistent,
imperishable _Me_; to look at the stars and say, The living soul within
me is akin to you; to gaze into darkness and cry, I am as unfathomable
as thou! Such immensity is of night, and, added to solitude, weighed
heavily on Gilliatt's mind.

Did he understand it? No.

Did he feel it? Yes.

All these vague imaginings, increased and intensified by solitude,
weighed upon Gilliatt.

He understood them little, but he felt them. His was a powerful
intellect clouded; a great spirit wild and untaught.

VI

GILLIATT PLACES THE SLOOP IN READINESS

This rescue of the machinery of the wreck as meditated by Gilliatt was,
as we have already said, like the escape of a criminal from a
prison--necessitating all the patience and industry recorded of such
achievements; industry carried to the point of a miracle, patience only
to be compared with a long agony. A certain prisoner named Thomas, at
the Mont Saint Michel, found means of secreting the greater part of a
wall in his paillasse. Another at Tulle, in 1820, cut away a quantity of
lead from the terrace where the prisoners walked for exercise. With what
kind of knife? No one would guess. And melted this lead with what fire?
None have ever discovered; but it is known that he cast it in a mould
made of the crumbs of bread. With this lead and this mould he made a
key, and with this key succeeded in opening a lock of which he had never
seen anything but the keyhole. Some of this marvellous ingenuity
Gilliatt possessed. He had once climbed and descended from the cliff at
Boisrose. He was the Baron Trenck of the wreck, and the Latude of her
machinery.

The sea, like a jailor, kept watch over him.

For the rest, mischievous and inclement as the rain had been, he had
contrived to derive some benefit from it. He had in part replenished his
stock of fresh water; but his thirst was inextinguishable, and he
emptied his can as fast as he filled it.

One day--it was on the last day of April or the first of May--all was at
length ready for his purpose.

The engine-room was, as it were, enclosed between the eight cables
hanging from the tackle-blocks, four on one side, four on the other. The
sixteen holes upon the deck and under the keel, through which the cables
passed, had been hooped round by sawing. The planking had been sawed,
th