Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/272

252 to the shattered mast and the rigging, while a fifth clung to the broken rudder. The men he beheld saw him, doubtless, for their cries were carried to his ears by the wind. Above the splintered mast a sail rent to tatters was flapping; suddenly the ropes that still held it gave way, and it disappeared in the darkness of the night like a vast sea-bird.

At the same moment a violent crash was heard, and cries of distress. Perched like a sphinx on the summit of the rock, Dantès saw, by the lightning, the vessel in pieces; and amongst the fragments were visible the agonized features of the unhappy sailors. Then all became dark again. The dreadful spectacle had lasted only the time of the lightning-flash.

Dantès ran down the rocks at the risk of being himself dashed to pieces; he listened, he strove to examine, but he heard and saw nothing—all human cries had ceased, and the tempest alone continued to rage and foam. By degrees the wind abated, vast gray clouds rolled toward the west, and the blue firmament appeared studded with bright stars. Soon a red streak toward the east became visible in the horizon, the waves whitened, a light played over them, and gilded their foaming crest with gold. It was day.

Dantès stood silent and motionless before this vast spectacle, as if he saw it for the first time, for since his captivity he had forgotten it. He turned toward the fortress, and looked both at the sea and the land. The gloomy building rose from the bosom of the ocean with that imposing majesty of inanimate objects that seems at once to watch and to command. It was about five o'clock. The sea continued to grow calmer.

"In two or three hours," thought Dantès, "the turnkey will enter my chamber, find the body of my poor friend, recognize it, seek for me in vain, and give the alarm. Then the passage will be discovered; the men who cast me into the sea, and who must have heard the cry I uttered, will be questioned. Then boats filled with armed soldiers will pursue the wretched fugitive. The cannon will warn every one to refuse shelter to a man wandering about naked and famished. The police of Marseilles will be on the alert by land, whilst the governor pursues me by sea. I am cold, I am hungry. I have lost even the knife that saved me. I am at the mercy of the first boor who would like to make twenty francs by giving me up; I have neither strength, ideas, nor courage. O my God! I have suffered enough, surely. Have pity on me, and do for me what I am unable to do for myself."

As Dantes (his eyes turned in the direction of the Château d'If) uttered this prayer in a kind of delirium, he saw appear, at the extremity of the isle of Pomegue, like a bird skimming over the sea, a small bark, with its lateen sail, that the eye of a sailor alone could recognize as a Genoese tartan. She was coming out of Marseilles harbor, and