It was very heavy weather, indeed, and it was necessary to keep watch. But, then, there was so much free space before them, space in which to run! And it happened also, that this year the _Marie_ had spent the season in the most western part of the Iceland fisheries; so that this headlong flight towards the coast was so much way made in their voyage home. Yann and Sylvestre were at the helm lashed by the waist. They were singing again the song of “Jean-François de Nantes”; drunk with movement and speed, they sang at the top of their voices, laughing to find they could not hear each other amid all this unloosing of noise, turning round in their high spirits, to sing against the wind and losing breath for their pains. “Hello, there! you youngsters, do you find it stuffy up there?” Guermeur asked them, putting his bearded face through the half-opened hatchway, like a devil ready to leap out of his box. No, there was no lack of air on deck, that was certain! They were not afraid, having a very exact notion of what was manageable, having confidence in the solidity of their boat, in the strength of their arms. And also in the protection of the faience Virgin who, during forty years of voyages to Iceland, had so often danced this same disagreeable dance, forever smiling between her bouquets of artificial flowers.... Jean-François de Nantes, Jean-François. Jean-François! In general, they could see but a short distance around them: some hundreds of yards away everything seemed to end in monstrous waves whose pale crests stood erect, shutting out the view. One seemed always to be, in the middle of a restricted scene, which, nevertheless, was perpetually changing; and, in addition, things were drowned in this kind of watery smoke, which scudded like a cloud, with an extreme swiftness, over all the surface of the sea. But, from time to time, a rift appeared in the northwest from which a sudden shift of wind would come; then, a glancing light arrived from the horizon; a trailing reflection, making the dome of the sky seem darker, shed itself on the white agitated crests. And this rift was sad to see; these glimpsed distances, these vistas oppressed the heart the more in that they made you realise only too well that there was the same chaos everywhere, the same fury--even beyond the great empty horizon, and infinitely beyond that again: the terror had no limits, and one was alone in the midst of it.