Above, the heavens had become completely overcast, a closed, oppressive vault--with darker shadings spread over it in shapeless smudges; the impression was almost of an immobile dome, and it was necessary to look close to realise that on the contrary it was in a very whirl of movement: great grey sheets, hastening to pass, and replaced without ceasing by others which came from below the horizon; funereal tapestries unwinding as if from an inexhaustible roll.... She ran before the wind the _Marie_, ever more quickly--and the wind ran, too--before I know not what mysterious and terrible power. The wind, the sea, the _Marie_, the clouds, all were seized with the same madness of flight and speed in the same direction. That which ran ahead the fastest was the wind; then the great heavings of the water, more lumbering, slower, followed after it; then the _Marie_, dragged in the universal movement. The waves pursued her, with their pale crests, which rolled on in a perpetual crashing, and she--continually overtaken, continually outstripped--escaped them, none the less, thanks to a wake she skilfully left behind her, an eddy on which their fury broke. And in this movement of flight, the chief sensation was an illusion of lightness; without any difficulty, without an effort, one felt oneself leap. When the _Marie_ rose on the waves she rose without shock as if the wind had lifted her, and her descent afterwards was like a sliding, causing those internal qualms one has in the simulated fallings of the switchback or in the imaginary descents of dreams. She slid backwards, as it were, the racing mountains slipping away from under her to continue their course, and then she plunged again in one of those deep troughs which raced in their turn; without taking hurt she touched the dreadful bottom of them, in a shower of spray which did not even wet her, but which sped on like everything else; which sped on and vanished ahead of her like smoke, like an intangible nothing.... At the bottom of these troughs there was a deeper gloom, and as each wave passed, one saw behind another coming on; another larger still which rose up quite green by transparency, with furious writhings, with volutes that threatened to close, with an air of saying: “Now I have got you, now I will engulf you.” But, no; it raised you merely, as with a lifting of a shoulder one might raise a feather: and, almost gently, you felt it passing under you, with its rustling foam, its roar as of a cascade. And so it went on, continuously. But getting worse all the time. The waves followed one another, becoming ever more enormous, in long chains of mountains the valleys of which began to cause fear. And all this madness of movement became faster, under a sky that grew darker and darker, amid a noise that swelled until it became a roar.