The end was near!

Wind, hail, the hurricane, the whirlwind—­these are wild combatants that may be overcome; the storm can be taken in the weak point of its armour; there are resources against the violence which continually lays itself open, is off its guard, and often hits wide.  But nothing is to be done against a calm; it offers nothing to the grasp of which you can lay hold.

The winds are a charge of Cossacks:  stand your ground and they disperse. 
Calms are the pincers of the executioner.

The water, deliberate and sure, irrepressible and heavy, rose in the hold, and as it rose the vessel sank—­it was happening slowly.

Those on board the wreck of the Matutina felt that most hopeless of catastrophes—­an inert catastrophe undermining them.  The still and sinister certainty of their fate petrified them.  No stir in the air, no movement on the sea.  The motionless is the inexorable.  Absorption was sucking them down silently.  Through the depths of the dumb waters—­without anger, without passion, not willing, not knowing, not caring—­the fatal centre of the globe was attracting them downwards.  Horror in repose amalgamating them with itself.  It was no longer the wide open mouth of the sea, the double jaw of the wind and the wave, vicious in its threat, the grin of the waterspout, the foaming appetite of the breakers—­it was as if the wretched beings had under them the black yawn of the infinite.

They felt themselves sinking into Death’s peaceful depths.  The height between the vessel and the water was lessening—­that was all.  They could calculate her disappearance to the moment.  It was the exact reverse of submersion by the rising tide.  The water was not rising towards them; they were sinking towards it.  They were digging their own grave.  Their own weight was their sexton.

They were being executed, not by the law of man, but by the law of things.

The snow was falling, and as the wreck was now motionless, this white lint made a cloth over the deck and covered the vessel as with a winding-sheet.

The hold was becoming fuller and deeper—­no means of getting at the leak.  They struck a light and fixed three or four torches in holes as best they could.  Galdeazun brought some old leathern buckets, and they tried to bale the hold out, standing in a row to pass them from hand to hand; but the buckets were past use, the leather of some was unstitched, there were holes in the bottoms of the others, and the buckets emptied themselves on the way.  The difference in quantity between the water which was making its way in and that which they returned to the sea was ludicrous—­for a ton that entered a glassful was baled out; they did not improve their condition.  It was like the expenditure of a miser, trying to exhaust a million, halfpenny by halfpenny.

The chief said, “Let us lighten the wreck.”

During the storm they had lashed together the few chests which were on deck.  These remained tied to the stump of the mast.  They undid the lashings and rolled the chests overboard through a breach in the gunwale.  One of these trunks belonged to the Basque woman, who could not repress a sigh.