le reliance. He had
exhausted and stripped himself in constructing and completing it; he
could neither fortify nor add to it. The stopgap was such that it must
remain as it was; and every further effort was useless. The apparatus,
hastily constructed, was at the mercy of the waves. How would this inert
obstacle work? It was this obstacle now, not Gilliatt, which had to
sustain the combat, that handfull of rags, not that intelligence. The
swell of a wave would suffice to re-open the fracture. More or less of
pressure; the whole question was comprised in that formula.

All depended upon a brute struggle between two mechanical quantities.
Henceforth he could neither aid his auxiliary, nor stop his enemy. He
was no longer any other than a mere spectator of this struggle, which
was one for him of life or death. He who had ruled over it, a supreme
intelligence, was at the last moment compelled to resign all to a mere
blind resistance.

No trial, no terror that he had yet undergone, could bear comparison
with this.

From the time when he had taken up his abode upon the Douvres, he had
found himself environed, and, as it were, possessed by solitude. This
solitude more than surrounded, it enveloped him. A thousand menaces at
once had met him face to face. The wind was always there, ready to
become furious; the sea, ready to roar. There was no stopping that
terrible mouth the wind, no imprisoning that dread monster the sea. And
yet he had striven, he, a solitary man, had combated hand to hand with
the ocean, had wrestled even with the tempest.

Many other anxieties, many other necessities had he made head against.
There was no form of distress with which he had not become familiar. He
had been compelled to execute great works without tools, to move vast
burdens without aid, without science to resolve problems, without
provisions to find food, without bed or roof to cover it, to find
shelter and sleep.

Upon that solitary rock he had been subjected by turns to all the
varied and cruel tortures of nature; oftentimes a gentle mother, not
less often a pitiless destroyer.

He had conquered his isolation, conquered hunger, conquered thirst,
conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered labour, conquered sleep. He
had encountered a mighty coalition of obstacles formed to bar his
progress. After his privations there were the elements; after the sea
the tempest, after the tempest the devil-fish, after the monster the
spectre.

A di