Like feudal barons, who lance in hand ride over their empty manors ruined by war, the cruisers traverse a lifeless waste. During the slow succession of days, they are glad to sight, by chance, the stacks of their companions of the patrol. As she comes to the boundaries of her rectangle, the sister ship seems to give us a nod and a good-day. Suddenly our world is alive again. Our thoughts are directed toward our neighbor, and her’s toward us. Whether it is the _Renan_, the _Quinet_, the _Gambetta_, or an entirely different one, we follow her and accompany her movements; the sailors abandon their work and their reveries for this reality which wavers before them. “She is approaching!” “I see her bridge!” “Look, the forestack is pouring out black smoke. They are stoking up the fires!” “Ah! She is coming on the left. Her masts are passing one after the other.” “Are we not a good twenty-two thousand meters away?” “She is farther away. Do you still see her masts?” “Yes! No! Yes! No! No more.” The cruiser vanishes and our world becomes empty again. This lasts a day or a week. Sometimes between two clearings of the weather some darker spot appears in the distance, cloud or mountain, cliff or play of the clearing storm, no one can say. But the mechanics and the stokers, the hidden hosts of the depths, who come on deck between two watches ask curiously in the darkness: “What do we see over there?” The gunners and seamen, with a grand manner, repeat the scraps of officers’ talk they have overheard and remembered. They announce the oracle: “It is Epirus;” “it is Apulia;” “it is the Peloponnesus;” “it is Albania;” “it is Etna;” “it is nothing at all; we are a hundred miles from land.” The baffled men store up these complicated names, and in the next letter to their fathers or to some women in the country, each will write them down painfully; the strange words will carry to French cottages the echo of our geographical Odyssey. I should like to know the impressions made by these sonorous names, full of dignity, but without meaning to the ignorant. What do our brave sailors see in this fresco of coasts which we never approach? They are like the imaginary forms created in sleep; wavering, rising, disappearing on the borders of the horizon, they pass like Edens where we shall never land. The cruiser goes and comes on its rectangle of water, and while the officers strive to guess the meaning of this formless nothingness that emerges from the rain, the sailors pursue their dreams, the rain falls or is blown away in the caprices of the gale.