Every morning there was first of all a kind of frenzy of cleaning which began with the réveillé. One saw them, half-awake, jump up and start running to commence as quickly as might be the great diurnal washing. Naked, in their pompomed bonnets, or maybe wearing a "tricot de combat" (a little knitted thing for the neck, not unlike a baby's bib) they set to work to swill the deck. Water spurted from hosepipes; water was flung by hand from buckets. Wasting no time they threw it over legs and over backs until they were all besplashed, all streaming; they overturned everything in order to wash everything; afterwards, scouring the deck, already clean and white, with mops and scrapers to make it cleaner and whiter still. Sometimes they would be ordered to break off and go aloft to make some alteration in the rigging, to shake out a reef or trim the sails; then they would dress themselves hastily, for decency's sake, before climbing, and quickly carry out the manœuvre ordered, eager to get down again and amuse themselves in the water. This is the work which makes arms strong and chests round; and the feet, too, from being used to climbing bare, become in some measure prehensile, like those of monkeys. At about eight o'clock, at the roll of a drum, the washing would be done. Then, while the hot sun was quickly drying all these things which they had made wet, they would begin to furbish; the copper-work, the iron-work, even the ordinary rings were made to shine like mirrors. Each one would address himself to the little pulley, the little object, the toilet of which had been specially entrusted to him and would polish it with solicitude, stepping back every now and then with a critical air to see how it looked, to see whether it did him credit. And, around these great children, was still and always the blue circle, the inexorable blue circle, the resplendent solitude, profound, having no end, where nothing ever changed and nothing ever passed. Nothing passed save the madcap bands of flying fish, moving like arrows, so rapidly that one had time only to see the glistening of their wings and they were gone. They were of several kinds; some large, which were steel-blue in colour; some smaller and rarer which seemed to have colours of mauve and peony; they surprised you by their rosy flight, and, when you tried to distinguish them, it was too late; a little patch of water eddied still and sparkled in the sunshine as if under a hail of bullets; it was there they had made their plunge, but they were no longer there. Sometimes a frigate bird--a great mysterious bird which is always alone--crossed, at a great height, the regions of the air, flying straight with its narrow wings and scissor-like tail, hastening as if it had a goal. Then the sailors pointed out to one another the strange traveller, following it with their eyes as long as it remained in sight, and its passage was recorded in the ship's log.