He knew his master and welcomed him with little joyous flappings of his wings. Yves fed him regularly with his own ration of meat, although he used to let him loose. It amused him greatly to peer into its eyes from quite near, and to see how it shrank away, and arched its back with an air of offended dignity, nodding its head after the manner of a bear. Then he would burst out laughing, and say to it in his Breton accent: "Oh! but you are a stupid little fool, my old parrot!" From aloft one dominated as from a great height the deck of the _Sibylle_, a _Sibylle_ flattened out and tapering, very strange to see from this domain of Yves, having the appearance of a long wooden fish, whose colour of new spruce contrasted with the deep and infinite blues of the sea. And, through all these transparent blues, behind, in our wake, a little grey thing having the same shape as the ship which it followed unceasingly under water: the shark. It is always one shark which follows, rarely two; but if the one is caught, another comes. For days and nights it follows, follows without ever getting tired, waiting for what may fall from the ship: debris of any kind, living men or dead men. And now and then a number of quite small swallows came also to bear us company, amusing themselves, for a while, in picking up the crumbs of biscuits which we scattered behind us in this watery desert, and then disappeared in the distance describing joyous curves. Little beasts of a rare kind, reddish in colour with a white tail, which live one knows not how, lost amid the great waters, always in the open sea. Yves, who wanted one, set traps for them, but they were too shrewd to be caught. We were approaching the Equator, and the regular breath of the trade wind began to die away. There were now erratic breezes which shifted suddenly, followed by times of calm in which everything became immobilized in a kind of immense blue splendour; and then the yards, the tops, and the great white sails were reflected in the water in the form of inverted pictures undulating and incomplete. The _Sibylle_ scarcely moved, she was slow and lazy, she had the movements of one half asleep. In the great moist heat, which even the nights did not diminish, things, as well as men, seemed to be taken with drowsiness. Gradually in the air a strange calm began to reign. And presently clouds, heavy and obscure, gathered over the warm sea like large dark curtains. The Equator was now quite near. Sometimes flights of swallows, large ones these and strange in movement, rose suddenly from the sea, taking flight in startled fashion with long pointed wings of a glistening blue, and then settled again, and one saw them no more. These were shoals of flying-fish which had lain in our course and which we had disturbed. The sails, the cordage hung limp, like dead things; we drifted lifeless like a wreck.