Читать книгу Человек, который смеется / The Man Who Laughs. Уровень 4 - Виктор Мари Гюго, Clara Inés Bravo Villarreal - Страница 9

England disappeared. The fugitives had now nothing round them but the sea. All at once night grew awful.

The sky became blackness. The snow began to fall slowly; a few flakes appeared. A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of ahydra, hung over ocean.

The boreal storm hurled itself on the boat. A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance. The roar of the abyss, nothing can be compared to it. It is the great brutish howl of the universe.

No thunderstrokes. The snowstorm is a storm blind and dumb; when it has passed, the ships also are often blind and the sailors dumb. To escape from such an abyss is difficult.

The howling of the wind became more and more frightful. The boat became a wreck, it was irrevocably disabled. The vessel drifted like a cork at the mercy of the waves. It sailed no longer – it merely floated, like a dead fish.

One of the women, the Irishwoman, told her beads[18] wildly. They neared the cliff. They were about to strike. The wave dashed the boat against the rock. Then came the shock. Nothing remained but the abyss.

But suddenly something terrible appeared to them in the darkness. On the port bow arose, standing stark, a tall, opaque mass, vertical a tower of the abyss. They watched it open-mouthed.

The storm was driving them towards it. They knew not what it was. It was the rock.

It was a moment of great anxiety. Meanwhile a thickening mist had descended on the drifting wretches. They were ignorant of their whereabouts.

Suddenly the boat was driven back. The wave reared up under the vessel. It was again on the open sea.

The hurricane had stopped. The fierce clarions of space were mute. None knew what had become of it; flakes replaced the hailstones, the snow began to fall slowly. No more swell: the sea flattened down. In a few minutes the boat was floating in sleeping waters.

All was silence, stillness, blindness. It was clear that they were delivered out of the storm, out of the foam, out of the wind, out of the uproar. In three or four hours it would be sunrise. Some passing ship would see them; they would be rescued. The worst was over. They said to themselves, “It is all over this time.”

Suddenly they found that all was indeed over.

One of the sailors, went down into the hold to look for a rope, then came above again and said, -

“The hold is full[19].”

“Of what?” asked the chief.

“Of water,” answered the sailor.

The chief cried out, -

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” replied the captain, “that in half an hour we shall founder.”