The Toilers of the Sea Read Online Free Page A

this is the formless coast. Draw nearer, and there is nothing there. Stone can sometimes disappear like this. Here there is a fortress, there a crudely shaped temple, elsewhere a chaos of dilapidated houses and dismantled walls: all the ruins of a deserted city. But there is no city there, no temple, no fortress—only the cliffs. As you draw closer or move farther away, as you drift off or turn back, the coast falls to pieces. No kaleidoscope is quicker to disintegrate. The view breaks apart and re-forms; perspective plays its tricks. This block of rock is a tripod; then it is a lion; then it is an angel and unfolds its wings; then it is a seated figure reading a book. Nothing changes form so quickly as clouds, except perhaps rocks.
    These forms call up the idea of grandeur, not of beauty. Far from it: they are sometimes unhealthy and hideous. The rocks have swellings and tumors and cysts and bruises and growths and warts. Mountains are the humps on the earth’s surface. Madame de Staël, hearing Chateaubriand, 6 who had rather high shoulders, speaking slightingly of the Alps, called it the “jealousy of the hunchback.” The grand lines and great majesties of nature, the level of the seas, the silhouette of the mountains, the somber shades of the forests, the blue of the sky are affected by some huge and mysterious dislocation mingled with their harmony. Beauty has its lines; deformity has, too. There is a smile; there is also a distorted grin. Disintegration has the same effects on rocks as on clouds.
This
one floats and decomposes;
that
one is stable and incoherent. The creation retains something of the anguish of chaos. Splendors bear scars. An element of ugliness, which may sometimes be dazzling, mingles with the most magnificent things, seeming to protest against order. There is something of a grimace in the cloud. There is a celestial grotesquerie. All lines are broken in waves, in foliage and in rocks, in which strange parodies can be glimpsed. In them shapelessness predominates. No single outline is correct. Grand? Yes. Pure? No. Examine the clouds: all kinds of faces can be seen in them, all kinds of resemblances, all kinds of figures; but you will look in vain for a Greek profile. You will find Caliban, not Venus; you will never see the Parthenon. But sometimes, at nightfall, a great table of shadow, resting on jambs of cloud and surrounded by blocks of mist, will figure forth in the livid crepuscular sky an immense and monstrous cromlech.

VII
    LAND AND SEA MINGLED
    The farmhouses of Guernsey are monumental. Some of them have, lining the road, a length of wall like a stage set with a carriage gate and a pedestrians’ gate side by side. In the jambs and arches time has carved out deep crevices in which tortula moss nestles, ripening its spores, and where it is not unusual to find bats sleeping. The hamlets under the trees are decrepit but full of life. The cottages seem as old as cathedrals. In the wall of a stone hovel on the Les Hubies road is a recess containing the stump of a small column and the date 1405. Another, near Balmoral, displays on its façade, like the peasant houses of Ernani and Astigarraga, 7 a coat of arms carved in the stone. At every step you will come across farmhouses displaying windows with lozenged panes, staircase turrets, and archivolts in the style of the Renaissance. Not a doorway but has its granite mounting-block. Other little houses have once been boats; the hull of a boat, turned upside down and perched on posts and cross-beams, forms a roof. A vessel with its keel uppermost is a church; with the vaulting downward it is a ship; the recipient of prayer, reversed, tames the sea. In the arid parishes of western Guernsey the communal well with its little dome of white stonework set amid the untilled land has almost the appearance of an Arab marabout. 8 A perforated beam, with a stone for pivot, closes the entrance to a field enclosed by hedges; there are certain