But of all this Gilliatt, arriving at the Douvres, knew nothing.  He was absorbed by the spectacle of the ship held in mid-air.  And what did he find?  The machinery was saved, but it was lost.  The ocean saved it, only to demolish it at leisure—­like a cat playing with her prey.  Its fate was to suffer there, and to be dismembered day by day.  It was to be the plaything of the savage amusements of the sea.  For what could be done?  That this vast block of mechanism and gear, at once massive and delicate, condemned to fixity by its weight, delivered up in that solitude to the destructive elements, could, under the frown of that implacable spot, escape from slow destruction seemed a madness even to imagine.

Gilliatt looked about him.

When he had made a lodging for himself, and had suffered the misfortune of losing the basket containing his provisions, Gilliatt considered his difficulties.

In order to raise the engine of the Durande from the wreck in which it was three-fourths buried, with any chance of success—­in order to accomplish a salvage in such a place and such a season, it seemed almost necessary to be a legion of men.  Gilliatt was alone.  A complete apparatus of carpenter’s and engineer’s tools and implements were wanted.  Gilliatt had a saw, a hatchet, a chisel, and a hammer.  He wanted both a good workshop and a good shed; Gilliatt had not a roof to cover him.  Provisions, too, were necessary on that bare rock, but he had not even bread.

Anyone who could have seen Gilliatt working on the rock during all that first week might have been puzzled to determine the nature of his operations.  He seemed to be no longer thinking of the Durande or the two Douvres.  He was busy only among the breakers.  He seemed absorbed in saving the smaller parts of the shipwreck.  He took advantage of every high tide to strip the reefs of everything that the ship-wreck had distributed among them.  He went from rock to rock, picking up whatever the sea had scattered—­tatters of sail-cloth, pieces of iron, splinters of panels, shattered planking, broken yards; here a beam, there a chain, there a pulley.

He lived upon limpets, hermit-crabs, and rain-water.  He was surrounded by a screaming garrison of gulls, cormorants, and sea-mews.  The deep boom of the waves among the caves and reefs was never out of his ears.  By day he was roasted in the terrific heat which beat with pitiless force on this exposed pinnacle; at night he was chilled to the marrow by the cold of the open sea.  And for ever he was hungry, thirsty—­famished.

One day, in exploring for salvage some of the grottoes of his rock, Gilliatt came upon a cave within a cave, so beautiful with sea-flowers that it seemed the retreat of a sea-goddess.  The shells were like jewels; the water held eternal moonlight.  Some of the flowers were like sapphires.  Standing in this dripping grotto, with his feet on the edge of a probably bottomless pool, Gilliatt suddenly became aware in