“I walked quickly over the yellow plain.  It was elastic, like flesh and seemed to sweat beneath my tread.  The sea had been there very lately.  Now I perceived it at a distance, escaping out of sight, and I no longer could distinguish the line which separated the sands from ocean.  I felt as though I were looking at a gigantic supernatural work of enchantment.  The Atlantic had just now been before me, then it had disappeared into the sands, just as scenery disappears through a trap; and I was now walking in the midst of a desert.  Only the feeling, the breath of the salt-water, remained in me.  I perceived the smell of the wrack, the smell of the sea, the good strong smell of sea coasts.  I walked fast; I was no longer cold.  I looked at the stranded wreck, which grew in size as I approached, and came now to resemble an enormous shipwrecked whale.

“It seemed fairly to rise out of the ground, and on that great, flat, yellow stretch of sand assumed wonderful proportions.  After an hour’s walk I at last reached it.  It lay upon its side, ruined and shattered, its broken bones showing as though it were an animal, its bones of tarred wood pierced with great bolts.  The sand had already invaded it, entering it by all the crannies, and held it and refused to let it go.  It seemed to have taken root in it.  The bow had entered deep into this soft, treacherous beach, while the stern, high in air, seemed to cast at heaven, like a cry of despairing appeal, the two white words on the black planking, Marie Joseph.

“I climbed upon this carcass of a ship by the lowest side; then, having reached the deck, I went below.  The daylight, which entered by the stove-in hatches and the cracks in the sides, showed me dimly long dark cavities full of demolished woodwork.  They contained nothing but sand, which served as foot-soil in this cavern of planks.

“I began to take some notes about the condition of the ship.  I was seated on a broken empty cask, writing by the light of a great crack, through which I could perceive the boundless stretch of the strand.  A strange shivering of cold and loneliness ran over my skin from time to time, and I would often stop writing for a moment to listen to the mysterious noises in the derelict:  the noise of crabs scratching the planking with their crooked claws; the noise of a thousand little creatures of the sea already crawling over this dead body or else boring into the wood.

“Suddenly, very near me, I heard human voices.  I started as though I had seen a ghost.  For a second I really thought I was about to see drowned men rise from the sinister depths of the hold, who would tell me about their death.  At any rate, it did not take me long to swing myself on deck.  There, standing by the bows, was a tall Englishman with three young misses.  Certainly they were a good deal more frightened at seeing this sudden apparition on the abandoned three-master than I was at seeing them.  The youngest girl turned and ran, the two others threw their arms round their father.  As for him, he opened his mouth—­that was the only sign of emotion which he showed.