The other, the one who had crashed on the deck, they carried below as best they could, with great difficulty, letting him fall again on the way; and lay him in the infirmary which had become a foul sink in which swirled two feet of filthy, dark water, with broken bottles and odours of all sorts of spilt remedies. Not even a place where he might die in peace, for the sea had no pity on the sufferer; it continued to make him dance, to toss him more than ever. A kind of sound came now from his throat, a rattling which persisted for some little time, lost in the great uproar of things. One might have been able to succour him perhaps, to prolong his agony, with a little calm. But he died there quickly enough, in the hands of the sick-berth attendants who had become stupid with fear, and tried to make him eat. _Eight o'clock at night._ At this time the responsibility of the watch was heavy and it was my turn to take it. We carried on as best we might. We could see nothing now. We were in the midst of so much noise that the voices of the men seemed no longer to have any sound; the blasts of the whistles, blown with full might, came faintly, like the flute-like pipings of very small birds. We heard terrible blows struck against the sides of the ship, as by some enormous battering-ram. And everywhere and always great hollows opened, gaping wide; we felt ourselves being hurled into them, head lowered, in the pitch darkness. And then a force struck us with a brutal strength, carrying us high into the air, and the Médée vibrated in its whole being, as it were, like a monstrous drum. In vain then we tried to hold fast; we were forced to let go and quickly cling more strongly to something else, shutting our mouths and eyes as we did so, because we knew by instinct, without seeing, that it was the moment when a great mass of water would sweep through the air and maybe sweep us away with it. And this went on continuously, these headlong plunges, followed by these leaps with their accompanying terrifying drum-like sounds. And, after each of these shocks came again the streaming of water pouring in from all sides; the sound of a thousand things breaking, a thousand fragments rolling in the darkness. And all this prolonged in a sinister trail the horror of the first concussion. And the topmen and my poor Yves, what were they doing aloft? We could see the masts, the yards, now and then in the darkness, in silhouette, when the smarting pain caused by the hail allowed us to open our eyes and look; we could see the shapes of the great crosses, with double arms, after the fashion of Russian crosses, rocking in the darkness with movements of distress, with crazy gestures. "Bring them down," said the Commander, who preferred the danger of the unfurled sail to the fear of losing more of his men.