Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

Danger threatened on all sides; the sea writhed into countless voracious mouths, here, there, horrible fascinating mouths that came mooing up at you. There would be a sudden upsurge of water, and the mouth would rise rapidly towards the level of the causeway. For a moment it would hang there, only a few inches away, opening and closing its toothless gums, so that behind that slobbering curtain of spray you could see the black tunnel of its throat. It reached up towards the living flesh, imploringly, with its long tonsils and palpitating gullet and eager belly: it resembled the huge liquid eye of some big carnivore, struggling to reach up further, but struggling in vain. The waves could no longer sustain it, and it would fall back in a burst of fury, break up on the groyne with a thunderous report that left the causeway’s stone foundations quivering for some time afterwards. The iron guide-rail shuddered under Besson’s hand, and this shuddering sensation passed up his arm into every part of his body, troubling the waters, dredging up silt off the bottom, rapidly opening and closing the feed-valves of depression. Then the healing cloud rose right overhead in the sky, the angry breathing of the frustrated elements was all around him. Besson leaned back and for several long seconds let the chill rain drive down on his face and clothes, which absorbed it hungrily. Then, refreshed by this break he broke into a run.

When he was about half-way to the lighthouse, he came upon a kind of shelter built as a protection against the wind. He stopped there a moment to rest and smoke a cigarette. But the packet had got damp, and the tobacco burnt badly; Besson needed at least fifteen matches to smoke one cigarette right through.

Here in the shelter he had his back to the sea. He heard the noise of the storm behind him, but he himself was facing the town. In the distance, outside the harbour, he could dimly see the old crumbling houses, squared up against the wind, not budging, letting the gusts buffet their vertical façades. Grey, pink-tinged clouds of spume, whipping up off the waves, drifted across in front of their walls and gave them the appearance of retreating. But they did not retreat one inch. They stayed exactly where they were, closed in, four-square to the elements, a chiaroscuro of deep black and the palest grey, like a line of rocks that had tumbled down from the mountainside centuries before. The storm was moving down the valley now: trees bent groundwards, and now and then with a sharp crack, a branch would break. Fields of grass were flattened in every direction, and across the curving hills there was a motion as of some giant hand, stroking their surface to and fro in a kind of caress. Further still, right on the horizon, at the most distant point from the source of the storm, the mountains reared their violet-tinged bastion against the clouds. Sometimes there would be a flash of bluish light above one of the peaks, but no thunder was audible afterwards. The whole landscape was dim, pitch-dark, crazy, and the bowl of the wind had blotted out all other sounds.

When he had finished looking at the pink-flushed sea-front and the rounded hills and the rampart of mountains behind them, Besson abandoned his shelter and began to advance along the causeway again. Progress became more and more difficult the further out into the sea one got. Worst of all, the handrail stopped before the lighthouse, and Besson was reduced to crawling along the causeway on all fours. At one point the water seemed to gather itself, the sea sank back, withdrew so far that the rocks on the sea-bottom, with their clustering limpets, were exposed to view. For a second or so there was nothing but this huge sinister well, this boiling vortex at the foot of the causeway. Then in a flash the hole filled up, and a great column of water soared shuddering into the air. When it began to topple above the sea-wall, Besson flung himself down flat and held his breath. The vast liquid mass came hissing down on him, with such force that it poured across into the harbour basin. As soon as the water had ebbed away again, Besson got up and began to run in the direction of the lighthouse. He reached it at last, and took shelter behind the tall stone bastion on which it stood.

He remained there some minutes, an hour perhaps, in the midst of the hurricane, unconscious of the cold, not noticing that his clothes were soaked through with sea-water. All around him, to left and right, straight ahead, even under his feet, the wild spectacle continued. The waves mouthed and slapped against the jetty, with a drawn-out, clinging, wetly explosive sound. Clouds of spray rose and mingled in the air, daylight acquired rainbow tints. The long black headlands stretching out on either side seemed to cleave through the water like surfaced submarines. Warring gusts tore and ripped at each other, made strange thin noises like seagulls or crying children. On the horizon sea and sky blurred together in a welter of spray, cloud, and bright heaving hollows of water. Sometimes the sun appeared for a moment or two, suddenly exposed through some rent in the middle of the dense cloud-base, and yellow rays would slant down on the surface of the waves. At times, again, strange and baffling shadows (or what looked like shadows) formed under the swell, as though some vast creature were swimming along on the bottom. Harsh and incandescent blue patches, like streams of marine lava, would suddenly appear.

The movement of these masses of water was constant and indefatigable. Under the transparent grey skin, with its endless rising and falling rhythm, heavy triangular shapes were in constant movement, leaving lines of bubbles, swift straight eddies, the occasional branching, fibrous vortex boiling round on its own axis. Above, the swooping, gusty air thrust down on this grey and opaque surface with the full force of its atmospheric pressure, carved out hollows, sculpted undulating valleys and mountain ridges and volcanoes and angry, belching sulphur-springs. It was like a dance in which everything joined, even the fish and the waving seaweed in the shadowy depths below, a dance that moved each mass of green and clouded slime, swung it softly but firmly to and fro with the rest. This music, mingled with the wind’s shrill whine, marked out a rhythm for the sea’s overall sequence of movements. First there came a deep, deep indrawing as of breath, when the water shrank back into itself, emptying the rock-pools, cascading and gurgling down, pouring back on its own substance. Then came the counter-wave, surging back against the sea-wall, trying to breach it, then in its panic-stricken flight creating a loud, choppy crest of water from the two liquid masses in opposition. After this there would be a brief silence while the sea grew still and collected its strength, followed by the muted roar of unleashed energy, the rush and hiss of moving water, a sort of tchchchchchchchch , steadily increasing in volume, a harsh, rasping note that echoed round the surging curve of the wave. Finally the sound made by this climatic discharge underwent a swift transformation, reverberating and swelling into a long, solemn roll of thunder, though by now the waves were so huge that even this remained almost inaudible. A vast chchchbrooooom! , a thunderous explosion made solid and palpable, a majestic circle, a rampart of stone and spray that rose slowly skywards and floated amid the wind, slowing down everything around it, checking time’s pendulum, making the world, for one brief moment, an abode of giants.

Standing there behind the lighthouse, his eyes fixed on the sea. Besson felt himself possessed by this rhythm — the rhythm of eternity, or something very like it. His mind vanished utterly, was lost amid the dance of the waves: it was as though the wind had entered into him, blowing straight through the open windows of his body. Each fresh assault by the waves took shape simultaneously in the very depths of his being, making him stiffen, filling him with an agony of hatred. The violence of these great liquid masses, ton upon ton of water, possessed him completely, and as each wave broke a complementary explosion took place somewhere inside his chest, metamorphosing him into a kind of human bomb. When he was fully attuned to the rhythm of wind and sea, when he was one with it, standing four-square against the assaults of the elements, yet at the same time vibrating with their own exultation, like a rock, or some old black slimy ring-bolt, covered with wrack and barnacles, then he began to breathe. Slowly, surely, he breathed in harmony with them. His lungs filled with the same air as the wave imbibed, leaning on the cloud-swollen horizon, accumulating the same vast burden of violence and determination. His breast expanded magnificently to contain it all, stretched almost to bursting point, he was taller and broader than a mountain. Then the intake of breath ended, and for a moment the elemental forces hung poised in equilibrium. But at the mysterious signal from that whole wide expanse of sea, the unknown signal with so strong and regular a rhythm that he no longer even heard it, the sluice-gates opened and another great mass of water hurled itself at the obstacle in its way — at the town, too, and at those vast gawping crowds — while a sound like a great gong-stroke spread rippling out to the four corners of the horizon, a sun of sheer sound, its rays swimming far above the earth, creating universal panic, leaving all inconsequential objects scattered face downwards.