de it.

While he had been occupied with the devil-fish and the skeleton, the
rising tide had submerged the entrance to the cave. He was only enabled
to leave it by plunging under the arched entrance. He got through
without difficulty; for he knew the entrance well, and was master of
these gymnastics in the sea.

It is easy to understand the drama which had taken place there during
the ten weeks preceding. One monster had preyed upon another; the
devil-fish had seized Clubin.

These two embodiments of treachery had met in the inexorable darkness.
There had been an encounter at the bottom of the sea between these two
compounds of mystery and watchfulness; the monster had destroyed the
man: a horrible fulfilment of justice.

The crab feeds on carrion, the devil-fish on crabs. The devil-fish
seizes as it passes any swimming animal--an otter, a dog, a man if it
can--sucks the blood, and leaves the body at the bottom of the water.
The crabs are the spider-formed scavengers of the sea. Putrefying flesh
attracts them; they crowd round it, devour the body, and are in their
turn consumed by the devil-fish. Dead creatures disappear in the crab,
the crab disappears in the pieuvre. This is the law which we have
already pointed out.

The devil-fish had laid hold of him, and drowned him. Some wave had
carried his body into the cave, and deposited it at the extremity of the
inner cavern, where Gilliatt had discovered it.

He returned searching among the rocks for sea-urchins and limpets. He
had no desire for crabs; to have eaten them now would have seemed to him
like feeding upon human flesh.

For the rest, he thought of nothing but of eating what he could before
starting. Nothing now interposed to prevent his departure. Great
tempests are always followed by a calm, which lasts sometimes several
days. There was, therefore, no danger from the sea. Gilliatt had
resolved to leave the rocks on the following day. It was important, on
account of the tide, to keep the barrier between the two Douvres during
the night, but he intended to remove it at daybreak, to push the sloop
out to sea, and set sail for St. Sampson. The light breeze which was
blowing came from the south-west, which was precisely the wind which he
would want.

It was in the first quarter of the moon, in the month of May; the days
were long.

When Gilliatt, having finished his wanderings among the rocks, and
appeased his appetite to some extent, returned to the pas