Yves glanced with satisfaction all round my room, arranged by him in anticipation of bad weather. Nothing had budged, thanks to his contrivance. On the floor there was indeed a pool of salt water in which divers things floated; but the objects to which I attached more or less value had remained suspended or fixed, like furniture, to the panels of the walls by bolts or angle-irons. Everything had been corded, tied, secured with an extreme care by means of tarred rope of various thicknesses. Arms and bronzes had been wrapped in articles of clothing in a strange higgledly-piggledly. Japanese masks with long human hair gazed at us through a network of tarred thread; they had the same remote smile, the same tilting of the eyes as the golden-nailed Burmese women who, in Yves' dream, had wanted to eat me. . . . A bugle-call suddenly, brisk and joyful: the summons to "wash deck!" The bugle sounded a little thin, a little silvery, in the formidable bellowing of the wind. To wash the deck when the seas were breaking over it might seem a somewhat senseless operation to people who live on land. But we found nothing very extraordinary in it; it was done every morning, without fail and in all circumstances; it is one of the primordial rules of life at sea. And Yves left me saying, as if it was the most natural thing in the world: "I must be off to my washing station." Nevertheless the bugle had sinned by excess of zeal, and sounded without order, at its usual hour; for this morning the deck was not to be washed. One felt that things were more manageable, as Yves had said; the movements were longer, more regular, more like the rollings of the swell. The sea was less angry, and the deep, heavy-sounding concussions were less frequent. And then it was day--a vile day, it is true, with a strange livid yellowness, but day nevertheless, less sinister than the night. Our hour, it seemed, had not yet come, for on the second day following we ran into calm water, in a port in China, at Hong Kong. CHAPTER XXX _September_, 1877. The _Médée_ had been homeward bound for many a day. Wind and current had favoured her. She sailed rapidly, so rapidly, for days and nights on end, that one lost the notion of places and distances. Vaguely we had seen pass the Straits of Malacca, taken in our course; the Red Sea, ascended under steam in a blaze of sunlight; then the point of Sicily, and at last the great couchant lion of Gibraltar. Now we are watching the horizon and the first land, which may appear at any moment, will be the land of Brittany. I had joined the _Médée_ only during the latter part of the voyage and, this time, my tour with Yves will have lasted less than five months. Amid the grey expanse little white lines now appear; then a tower with dark little islets scattered about: all this still very distant and scarcely visible in the dull wan daylight which envelopes us.