engine
had been destroyed, Gilliatt would have been uninjured. He had still the
sloop by which to escape.

But to wait till the sloop was removed from the anchorage where she was
inaccessible; to allow it to be fixed in the defile of the Douvres; to
watch until the sloop, too, was, as it were, entangled in the rocks; to
permit him to complete the salvage, the moving, and the final
embarkation of the machinery; to do no damage to that wonderful
construction by which one man was enabled to put the whole aboard his
bark; to acquiesce, in fact, in the success of his exploits so far; this
was but the trap which the elements had laid for him. Now for the first
time he began to perceive in all its sinister characteristics the trick
which the sea had been meditating so long.

The machinery, the sloop, and their master were all now within the gorge
of the rocks. They formed but a single point. One blow, and the sloop
might be dashed to pieces on the rock, the machinery destroyed, and
Gilliatt drowned.

The situation could not have been more critical.

The sphinx, which men have imagined concealing herself in the cloud,
seemed to mock him with a dilemma.

"Go or stay."

To go would have been madness; to remain was terrible.

VI

THE COMBAT

Gilliatt ascended to the summit of the Great Douvre.

From hence he could see around the horizon.

The western side was appalling. A wall of cloud spread across it,
barring the wide expanse from side to side, and ascending slowly from
the horizon towards the zenith. This wall, straight lined, vertical,
without a crevice in its height, without a rent in its structure, seemed
built by the square and measured by the plumb-line. It was cloud in the
likeness of granite. Its escarpment, completely perpendicular at the
southern extremity, curved a little towards the north, like a bent sheet
of iron, presenting the steep slippery face of an inclined plane. The
dark wall enlarged and grew; but its entablature never ceased for a
moment to be parallel with the horizon line, which was almost
indistinguishable in the gathering darkness. Silently, and altogether,
the airy battlements ascended. No undulation, no wrinkle, no projection
changed its shape or moved its place. The aspect of this immobility in
movement was impressive. The sun, pale in the midst of a strange sickly
transparence, lighted up this outline of the Apocalypse. Already the
cloudy bank had blotted out one half the s