Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/271

Rh and compact clouds lowered toward him; at the same time he felt a violent pain in his knee. His imagination, with its inconceivable rapidity, told him a ball had struck him, and that in a moment he would hear the report; but he heard nothing. Dantès put out his hand, and felt resistance; he then drew up his leg, and felt the land, and in an instant guessed the nature of the object he had taken for a cloud.

Before him rose a mass of strangely formed rocks, that resembled nothing so much as a vast fire petrified at the moment of its most fervent combustion. It was the isle of Tiboulen. Dantès rose, advanced a few steps, and, with a fervent prayer of gratitude, stretched himself on the granite, which seemed to him softer than down. Then, in spite of the wind and rain, he fell into the deep sweet sleep of those worn out by fatigue; whose soul is still awake with the consciousness of unexpected good fortune. At the expiration of an hour Edmond was awakened by the roar of the thunder. The tempest was unchained and let loose in all its fury; from time to time a flash of lightning stretched across the heavens like a fiery serpent, lighting up the clouds that rolled on like the waves of an immense chaos.

Dantès with his sailor's eye had not been deceived—he had reached the first of the two isles, which was, in reality, Tiboulen. He knew that it was barren and without shelter; but when the sea became more calm, he resolved to plunge into its waves again, and swim to Lemaire, equally arid, but larger, and consequently better adapted for concealment.

An overhanging rock offered him a temporary shelter, and scarcely had he availed himself of it when the tempest burst forth in all its fury. Edinond felt the rock beneath which he lay tremble; the waves, dashing themselves against the granite rock, wetted him with their spray. In safety, as he was, he felt himself become giddy in the midst of this war of the elements and the dazzling brightness of the lightning. It seemed to him that the island trembled to its base, and that it would, like a vessel at anchor, break her moorings, and bear him off into the center of the storm.

He then recollected that he had not eaten or drunk for four and twenty hours. He extended his hands, and drank greedily of the rainwater that had lodged in a hollow of the rock. As he rose, a flash of lightning, that seemed as if the whole of the heavens were opened, illumined the darkness. By its light, between the isle of Lemaire and Cape Croiselle, a quarter of a league distant, Dantès saw, like a specter, a fishing-boat driven rapidly on by the force of the winds and waves. A second after, he saw it again, approaching nearer with terrible speed. Dantes cried at the top of his voice to warn them of their danger, but they saw it themselves. Another flash showed him four men clinging