Fragments of a Paradise

I

All the Preparations for Departure…

All the preparations for departure having been completed, the two vessels set sail together on the 6th of July. On the 12th of the same month, they were within sight of the last headland of Europe, lying to their west-southwest at a distance of three nautical miles. On the 20th they passed two Spanish warships. One of them fired a warning shot at L’Indien, obliging it to lower its sails; but once the Spanish captain had come within hailing distance and learned that the French vessels were setting out on a voyage of discovery on the high seas, he made the appropriate apologies and took his leave politely, wishing them bon voyage. On the 26th at 9:00 in the evening, La Demoiselle and L’Indien dropped anchor in the harbor of Madeira, without further incident.

Around 11:00 on the morning of the 28th, the breeze, fairly light but steady until now, freshened with gusts from the west-northwest. The anchor of L’Indien broke loose, and as it wouldn’t take hold again, even though they’d let out as much as 110 fathoms of cable, they weighed anchor, set sail once more, and tacked around the roadstead. At 8:00 in the evening they moored at another location, in 16 fathoms, over a bed of soft mud and shells. Three members of the crew who’d gone off in the big dinghy to collect water were missing on deck and didn’t get back until the moment when the anchor was let go again.

The sea was grey and greenish, the way it is over great depths. When the sun went down, a broad expanse of sky lit up by increments, as if a wing of fire had slowly spread its feathers apart. The phenomenon was comprised of little, fluffy clouds, almost icy in appearance. They caught fire when they arrayed themselves, with a perceptible motion, in the expanse. The shafts of sunlight that illuminated them immediately made their structures—which really did resemble a bird’s feathers—manifest. In this way the light was soon to be seen scattered across the entire expanse of the sky, so much so that, despite the late hour, an uncanny sort of daylight shone from all the points of the compass. Objects had no shadows, and the lapping of the sea, lit up in every direction, sounded like it was coming from a punch bowl.

During the night, torrents of rain began to fall. They could hear it chorusing from every ravine in the interior of the island. At half past midnight an ocean wave stove in four of the five windows of the great cabin, even though their shutters had been secured with Saint Andrew’s crosses. The vessel heaved backward, as if it were foundering. A large storage chest—packed with salt and champagne—which was used as a table, broke free of its shackles. For a few moments the rolling of the ship made it tumble like a die. At last it swung open and the bottles spilled out, rolling and smashing against each other in an indescribable chaos. The carpenters worked through part of the night to fasten the chest back in place.

At daybreak some white and some copper-colored clouds were visible in the sky. The wind came out of the west, where the horizon was still a flaming red, as if the sun were intent on rising from that quarter. The east was completely dark. Despite these portents, the day was calm, though the sunlight remained murky and displaced.

The following day, aided by a gentle breeze from the south-southeast, the two vessels attempted once more to set sail and make headway; but an hour later the wind, after shifting in several directions, swung back to the west-southwest and the ships struggled to get back to the anchorage.

On the next day, the wind turned from north to northeast. They attempted again to take advantage of this, and La Demoiselle had already left the roadstead, when the incessant west wind returned, blowing stiff. They tried in vain to tack under full sail, but it was obvious that they were being pulled off course by the current, and at 4:00 in the afternoon they let themselves be drawn back to the anchorage yet again.

That evening at dusk, the same phenomenon appeared. There were no birds in the sky. The sea lay dead flat, and the silence was so profound, they could distinctly hear the voice of a shepherd calling out to the ships from the top of the coastal bluffs.

On the morning of the 3rd of August, tempted once more by a light north-easterly breeze, and following the example of a few fishing boats that had already set sail, the two vessels tried to do the same. The instant they rounded the cape, they were enveloped in a fog so thick, they could barely make out objects from one end of the ship to the other. Then the breeze subsided and they were becalmed yet again. Finally, around 2:00 in the morning, after a breeze had mounted gradually from the east, they were able to set course under full sail.

At 12:30 on the afternoon of the 5th of August, after winds varying in strength from several points of the compass, they sighted the northernmost of the Selvagens. From 4:00 to 6:00 they skirted along the eastern side of the archipelago. They saw nothing but sheer cliffs, apparently inaccessible. The sea was crashing with fury against their walls. Numberless legions of birds were wheeling in the sky and flocking together in clouds. Then, as if stretched out by the wind, the flocks would disperse. In the slanting rays of the sun, they flashed sometimes with the dazzling colors of land birds, sometimes with the cold pallor of sea birds.

At 5:30 on the morning of the following day, at sunrise, they made out the entire mass of Tenerife through dense clouds. Propelled by a stiff breeze from the northeast, they soon rounded Point Neva. They were only a short distance from the harbor when the wind picked up again. They judged it best to wait for the gale to die down before heading to anchor in a spot that offered so little protection. The ship tacked back out to sea. But that evening the wind rose even higher. They spent the night under sail and lost sight of the island while they raced downwind on a day darkened by storms and reddened by lightning. They caught a glimpse of the island of Palma.

Three kingfishers were pursuing L’Indien. They sheltered in the wake of the ship during the rough weather.

II

The Northeasterlies

In these vast open spaces where nothing forced the wind to shift or reverse, the northeasterlies prevailed across a broad front. They moved uninterrupted like a rising tide. You could tell they blew at extraordinary heights when a bird, smaller than the broad-winged predators that would attack it in due course, was swept away and lifted skyward. The air was so clear, after the creature’s frantic cry the very moment the wind took hold of it, you could watch it gaining in altitude. The silent black dot stayed in sight for a long while before it melted into the uppermost regions.

In spite of its intensity, the power of the wind was so steady, it was still possible to maneuver. But once you tried to imagine where its strength could have arisen, you were forced to imagine vaster and vaster barren stretches of ocean.

The roaring of this wind, after it had stopped up their ears, wrapped the men in a deep solitude. The sea was barely ruffled. It rocked with a long swell, almost flat, soundless; its motion was so extraordinarily languid, it showed only through flashes of iridescent color that ran suddenly across its surface. Rising at regular intervals, the vessel fell at regular intervals, almost without a sound, except for the groaning of a few belaying pins that betrayed the straining of the hull timbers.

But as soon as they paid attention to this continuous roaring, which entirely filled the air, they realized it wasn’t produced by the wind scouring over the sea. They could tell there was as much of a dull roar high up in the sky as there was on the water’s surface. As soon as night fell, sudden and stark, the stars were so abundant and showed in so many sectors of the heavens all at once, they were like a squall of snowflakes.

Often, when the night sky was perfectly clear, they would see showers of impressively large, luminous meteors. Sometimes one of these meteors would appear at the zenith and leave an enormous streak, aligned from east to west, which turned into a wide, luminous band and remained visible for several minutes. Now they were forced to comprehend that the roaring of the wind arose from its huge totality whirling around the earth.

As soon as daylight returned and they faced this limitless immensity, they were conscious, right away—with no need to reflect—that beyond the visible horizon, the barren stretch of ocean was hemmed in by another curve. And so, despite how fast they were making headway, they had an enormous feeling of immobility and suspense.

Only the whistling of the shrouds and sheets continued to give any sensation of a habitable world, and the swaying of a cable and its snapping against the mast were a comfort to the spirit. But suddenly the mainsails were sagging and luffing and the jibs were beating like drums. The yawing of the ship and the abrupt billowing of the sails, the loud creaking of all the stays, the groans coming from deep in the hull: all these revealed the violent forces they faced. At times, though nothing was disturbing the smooth undulation of the sea, a sharper sound began singing from up ahead across the expanse. The further on they sailed, the louder the sound became. Little by little it divided into parts, into modulations and rhythms, until they saw the tip of a mountainous island loom above the water.

As the ship got closer, the peaks and crags were scraping like bows on the long strings of the wind and making them vibrate in the depths of the valleys. The sailors could hear some tree-wrack crackling. During the time they skirted along the coast, the wind enveloped the ship in every kind of terrestrial sound. This was a great relief. They were suddenly conscious of things at a human scale.

But gradually, as the ship sped away, it left these pleasing sounds behind one by one, and it wasn’t long before the men were pent up once again in the vast solitude.

For many days on end the sky remained completely empty.

Every night the coming of darkness covered the ship in a luminous snowsquall, and every morning the men searched the skies for any remnants of celestial wreckage they could cling to. It was only after they’d waited a long while that a feathery wisp of icy cloud would break the line of the horizon. Often it would drop down right away as if it had been the spouting of some distant whales. The men needed to stay on watch constantly to keep their hopes up. Sometimes, after the wisp had appeared, a whole fan of pinions would go on spreading, and the sun would ignite them with dazzling colors. But as the cloud-wings were deploying, the anguish of solitude and the anxiety of the unknown would start to shroud the men’s hearts. What could they be, these monstrous birds that were sure enough of their plumage to be able to open it this wide in the face of such superhuman force! It would have been a relief to see the actual body of the monster appear, but the wind went on pounding it at will, and often by midday it was nothing more than a shapeless squall that raced ahead of the ship, gnashing at the sea in an angry downpour.

The wind had an awful smell. It was difficult to discern, because it was overpowering and pervasive. Even so, it got right up your nose and onto your tongue and you tasted it in your saliva. Under the shapeless, spotless azure of the daytime sky, when you were blinded by the countless fires glinting from the patches of foam and the sharp crests of the waves, you wanted night to come. It seemed that the hint of violet, which began by darkening the water’s surface and then spread until it blackened the whole of the east, was the bearer of calm and security. But it wasn’t long before this state of ease gave way to the uninterrupted, endless howling that filled the entire realm of sky and sea.

So it was the wind they were smelling. It had a salty taste: a little musky, not unpleasant, but it gave you a ferocious appetite for rocks, cliffs, and a boundless interior where you could at last feel solid ground underfoot. When the darkened east spread its shadow over the waves; when it engulfed the body of the ship and extinguished the reflections and foam that lay ahead; when it swiftly shrouded the gilded whiteness of the sails of La Demoiselle: then the anguish of having nothing firm to rely on held everyone in its grip.

Now the wind started drumming out a tom-tom on enormous gourds. In spite of what the maps showed; in spite of the steady, unobstructed breeze; in spite of the void through which they’d been plying without end, and the void the prow was cleaving ahead, so vast and deep it seemed to yawn like a dizzying height; in spite of all this, they could hear the wind pounding on distant islands. It landed with regular blows, with sonorities that made the sailors’ stomachs turn. In this way a regular, implacable pattern of drumbeats was locating tiny pieces of land that were lost in the immensity. The sailors were passing through the midst of these islets, blindly, unable to cry for help. It was even more terrible to have to acknowledge the impossible existence of these islets, and their tremendous remoteness as figments of the imagination.

The glassy rollers chafed ceaselessly against the sides of the ship.

But not long after, the wind started to beat on even gloomier drums. It pummeled the abysses and its power succeeded in drawing rumblings, in which it was impossible to find the least sign of hope, out of all the depths.

Sometimes, despite the dark, you could see the impact of this huge, invisible hand. From on board you glimpsed a colorless patch a few cable lengths away. This patch would come crashing down onto the waves and spray and abruptly light up with ember-like phosphorescence. After a second or two, during which you instinctively held your breath, the sound the impact had loosed would mount up from the depths. It was a tangible sound like the wind itself, and while you listened you could hear the walls of the ship moaning. And then a new smell would add itself to the smell of the wind. It was a smell of open sea. It wasn’t connected to anything you could possibly have known. There was nothing cheerful about it. It deepened your sense of aloneness because it spoke of things that were totally unfamiliar, things that had nothing in common with humanity. It could just as well have been the smell of a huge animal, or a huge plant, or a huge deity. It could just as well have been the smell of sweat, or claws, or teeth, or mouths, but it was impossible to imagine anything it was actually connected to. There was only one thing for certain: it was a smell of life.

It added terribly to the feeling of being alone, and you realized you were part of something unknown, something you would never know, and it was useless to make overtures or deferential bows toward it. The destiny that until now you thought you could shape, or control, or gently steer, you now understood was in no way susceptible to human powers. Abruptly, you knew for a fact that everything you had done up until the present moment, and everything you could expect to do until you died, was essentially minuscule. The power you’d often put to the test, the spirit that could face up to the greatest extremes in the world, you understood it was feeble, and that up until now you’d been totally blind. Even death, against which you never stopped struggling day in day out, in order to carry on: now you knew death didn’t have the dimensions you’d assumed until now, not at all.

The defenses you’d thrown up against death were turned inside out and engulfed by this flood, more powerful than the sea, and denser than this snowsquall of stars.

The wind, repeating the blows it was landing on the faraway islands and the abyss, kept drumming out, without letup, the same melancholy music that gave no reason for either hope or despair. While, at the same time every evening, when the wind freshened enough for you to feel it filling the jibs, the deck began to give way under your feet. A sort of sonorous magic made the remote, uplifted islands sing, along with their trees; the abysses and bottomless troughs deepened, and the ship seemed to be suspended each time it pitched downward. There was no dramatic show of the wind’s power, but a sort of calm and eternal certainty. This was not a romantic display of cosmic attitudes. Everything showed itself as a fact, and the sound of the gongs allowed this fact to dominate at all times.

Now the days and nights were calm and beautiful. The ship was easy to steer. The course gave no cause for concern. But all the routes they’d plied until now, in countless regions, in