He who writes these lines has seen with his own eyes at
Sark, in the cave called the Shops, an octopus swimming and
chasing a bather.
Sark, in the cave called the Shops, an octopus swimming and
chasing a bather.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
Some of these
men were yawning. Their rags were terrible; their feet hung
down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed together,
their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their fists.
clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses. In the
rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.
This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful.
It was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring
rain might descend, that it might be followed by another and
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7755
another, and that their dilapidated garments would be drenched,
that once soaked these men would not get dry again, that once
chilled they would not again get warm, that their linen trousers
would be glued to their bones by the downpour, that the water
would fill their shoes, that no lashes from the whips would be
able to prevent their jaws from chattering, that the chain would
continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs would con-
tinue to dangle; and it was impossible not to shudder at the
sight of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath
the cold clouds of autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the
blast, to all the furies of the air, like trees and stones.
Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of
the sick men, who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless
on the seventh wagon, and who appeared to have been tossed
there like sacks filled with misery.
Suddenly the sun made its appearance; the immense light of
the Orient burst forth, and one would have said that it had set
fire to all those ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed;
a conflagration of grins, oaths, and songs exploded. The broad
horizontal sheet of light severed the file into two parts, illumin-
ating heads and bodies, leaving feet and wheels in the obscurity.
Thoughts made their appearance on these faces: it was a terrible
moment; visible demons with their masks removed, fierce souls
laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in
gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through
which they blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women;
the dawn accentuated these lamentable profiles with the blackness
of its shadows; there was not one of these creatures who was
not deformed by reason of wretchedness; and the whole was so
monstrous that one would have said that the sun's brilliancy had
been changed into the glare of the lightning. The wagon-load
which headed the line had struck up a song, and were shouting
at the top of their voices, with a haggard joviality, a pot-pourri
by Desaugiers, then famous, called 'The Vestal'; the trees shiv-
ered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois.
listened in idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by spec-
tres.
All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos: here
were to be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old
men, youths, bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour
resignation, savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted
## p. 7756 (#574) ###########################################
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VICTOR HUGO
by caps, heads like those of young girls with corkscrew curls
on the temples, infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible
thin skeleton faces, to which death alone was lacking. On the
first cart was a negro, who had been a slave in all probability,
and who could make a comparison of his chains. The frightful
leveler from below, shame, had passed over these brows; at that
degree of abasement, the last transformations were suffered by
all in their extremest depths, and ignorance converted into dull-
ness was the equal of intelligence converted into despair. There
was no choice possible between these men, who appeared to the
eye as the flower of the mud. It was evident that the person
who had had the ordering of that unclean procession had not
classified them. These beings had been fettered and coupled
pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder probably, and loaded hap-hazard
on those carts. Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped together,
always end by evolving a result; all additions of wretched
men give a sum total: each chain exhaled a common soul, and
each dray-load had its own physiognomy. By the side of the
one where they were singing, there was one where they were
howling; a third where they were begging; one could be seen
in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced
the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as
the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven
circles of hell on the march; the march of the damned to their
tortures, performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and
flaming chariot of the Apocalypse, but what was more mournful
than that, on the gibbet cart.
One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel,
made a pretense from time to time of stirring up this mass of
human filth. An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to
her little boy five years old, and said to him, "Rascal, let that
be a warning to you! "
As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who ap-
peared to be the captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at
that signal a fearful dull and blind flogging, which produced the
sound of hail, fell upon the seven dray-loads: many roared and
foamed at the mouth; which redoubled the delight of the street
urchins who had hastened up, a swarm of flies on these wounds.
Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They
were no longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects
which replace the glance in the case of certain wretched men,
## p. 7757 (#575) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7757
which seem unconscious of reality, and in which flames the
reflection of terrors and of catastrophes. He was not looking
at a spectacle, he was seeing a vision. He tried to rise, to
flee, to make his escape: he could not move his feet. Some-
times the things that you see, seize upon you and hold you fast.
He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself
athwart confused and inexpressible anguish what this sepulchral
persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium
which was pursuing him. All at once he raised his hand to
his brow, a gesture habitual to those whose memory suddenly
returns: he remembered that this was in fact the usual itiner-
ary; that it was customary to make this detour in order to avoid
all possibility of encountering royalty on the road to Fontaine-
bleau, and that five-and-thirty years before he had himself passed
through that barrier.
Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did
not understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be pos-
sible: at length she cried:-
"Father! what are those men in those carts? "
Jean Valjean replied, "Convicts. "
"Whither are they going? "
"To the galleys. "
At that moment the cudgeling, multiplied by a hundred
hands, became zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were
mingled with it, it was a perfect storm of whips and clubs; the
convicts bent before it, a hideous obedience was evoked by the
torture, and all held their peace, darting glances like chained.
wolves.
Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:
"Father, are they still men? "
"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.
It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before day-
break from Bicêtre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to
avoid Fontainebleau, where the King then was. This caused the
horrible journey to last three or four days longer; but torture
may surely be prolonged with the object of sparing the royal
personage a sight of it.
Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such
encounters are shocks, and the memory that they leave behind
them resembles a thorough shaking-up.
-:
## p. 7758 (#576) ###########################################
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VICTOR HUGO
THE COMBAT WITH THE OCTOPUS
From The Toilers of the Sea. ' Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood.
right 1888, by T. Y. Crowell & Co.
Copy-
Jus
UST as Gilliatt was making up his mind to resign himself to
sea-urchins and sea-chestnuts, a splash was made at his feet.
A huge crab, frightened by his approach, had just dropped
into the water. The crab did not sink so deeply that Gilliatt lost
sight of it.
Gilliatt set out on a run after the crab along the base of the
reef. The crab sought to escape.
Suddenly, he was no longer in sight.
The crab had just hidden in some crevice under the rock.
Gilliatt clung to the projections of the rock, and thrust for-
ward his head to get a look under the overhanging cliff.
There was in fact a cavity there. The crab must have taken
refuge in it.
It was something more than a crevice. It was a sort of
porch.
The sea entered beneath this porch, but was not deep. The
bottom was visible, covered with stones. These stones were
smooth and clothed with algæ, which indicated that they were
never dry. They resembled the tops of children's heads covered
with green hair.
Gilliatt took his knife in his teeth, climbed down with his
hands and feet from the top of the cliff, and leaped into the
It reached almost to his shoulders.
water.
He passed under the porch. He entered a much worn cor-
ridor in the form of a rude pointed arch overhead. The walls
were smooth and polished. He no longer saw the crab. He kept
his foothold, and advanced through the diminishing light. He
began to be unable to distinguish objects.
After about fifteen paces, the vault above him came to an
end. He was out of the corridor. He had here more space,
and consequently more light; and besides, the pupils of his eyes
now dilated: he saw with tolerable clearness. He had a
surprise.
were
He was just re-entering that strange cave which he had visited
a month previously.
Only he had returned to it by way of the sea.
## p. 7759 (#577) ###########################################
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7759
That arch which he had then seen submerged was the one
through which he had just passed. It was accessible at certain
low tides.
His eyes became accustomed to the place. He saw better and
better. He was astounded. He had found again that extraor-
dinary palace of shadows, that vault, those pillars, those purple
and blood-like stains, that jewel-like vegetation, and at the end
that crypt, almost a sanctuary, and that stone which was almost
an altar.
He had not taken much notice of these details; but he carried
the general effect in his mind, and he beheld it again.
Opposite him, at a certain height in the cliff, he saw the
crevice through which he had made his entrance on the first
occasion, and which, from the point where he now stood, seemed
inaccessible.
He beheld again, near the pointed arch, those low and obscure
grottoes, a sort of caverns within the cavern, which he had already
observed from a distance. Now he was close to them.
The one
nearest to him was dry and easily accessible.
Still nearer than that opening he noticed a horizontal fissure
in the granite above the level of the water. The crab was prob-
ably there. He thrust in his hand as far as he could and began
to grope in this hole of shadows.
All at once he felt himself seized by the arm.
What he felt at that moment was indescribable horror.
Something thin, rough, flat, slimy, adhesive, and living, had
just wound itself round his bare arm in the dark.
It crept up
towards his breast. It was like the pressure of a leather thong
and the thrust of a gimlet. In less than a second an indescrib-
able spiral form had passed around his wrist and his elbow,
and reached to his shoulder. The point burrowed under his arm-
pit.
Gilliatt threw himself backwards, but could hardly move. He
was as though nailed to the spot; with his left hand, which
remained free, he took his knife, which he held between his
teeth, and holding the knife with his hand he braced himself
against the rock, in a desperate effort to withdraw his arm. He
only succeeded in disturbing the ligature a little, which resumed
its pressure. It was as supple as leather, as solid as steel, as
cold as night.
## p. 7760 (#578) ###########################################
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VICTOR HUGO
A second thong, narrow and pointed, issued from the crevice
of the rock. It was like a tongue from the jaws of a monster.
It licked Gilliatt's naked form in a terrible fashion, and suddenly
stretching out, immensely long and thin, it applied itself to his
skin and surrounded his whole body. At the same time, unheard-
of suffering, which was comparable to nothing he had previously
known, swelled Gilliatt's contracted muscles. He felt in his skin
round and horrible perforations; it seemed to him that innumer-
able lips were fastened to his flesh and were seeking to drink his
blood.
A third thong undulated outside the rock, felt of Gilliatt, and
lashed his sides like a cord. It fixed itself there.
Anguish is mute when at its highest point. Gilliatt did not
utter a cry.
There was light enough for him to see the repuls-
ive forms adhering to him.
A fourth ligature, this one as swift as a dart, leaped towards
his belly and rolled itself around there.
Impossible either to tear or to cut away these shiny thongs
which adhered closely to Gilliatt's body, and by a number of
points.
Each one of those points was the seat of frightful and
peculiar pain. It was what would be experienced if one were
being swallowed simultaneously by a throng of mouths which
were too small.
A fifth prolongation leaped from the hole. It superimposed
itself upon the others, and folded over Gilliatt's chest. Compres-
sion was added to horror; Gilliatt could hardly breathe.
These thongs, pointed at their extremity, spread out gradually
like the blades of swords towards the hilt. All five evidently
belonged to the same centre. They crept and crawled over Gill-
iatt. He felt these strange points of pressure, which seemed to
him to be mouths, changing their places.
Suddenly a large, round, flat, slimy mass emerged from the
lower part of the crevice.
It was the centre; the five thongs were attached to it like
spokes to a hub; on the opposite side of this foul disk could be
distinguished the beginnings of three other tentacles, which re-
mained under the slope of the rock. In the middle of this
sliminess there were two eyes gazing.
The eyes were fixed on Gilliatt.
Gilliatt recognized the octopus (devil-fish).
## p. 7761 (#579) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7761
II
TO BELIEVE in the octopus, one must have seen it.
Compared with it, the hydras of old are laughable.
At certain moments one is tempted to think that the intan-
gible forms which float through our vision encounter in the
realm of the possible, certain magnetic centres to which their
lineaments cling, and that from these obscure fixations of the
living dream, beings spring forth. The unknown has the mar-
velous at its disposal, and it makes use of it to compose the
monster. Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod were only able to make
the Chimæra: God made the octopus.
When God wills it, he excels in the execrable.
All ideals being admitted, if terror be an object, the octopus
is a masterpiece.
The whale has enormous size, the octopus is small; the hip-
popotamus has a cuirass, the octopus is naked; the jararoca
hisses, the octopus is dumb; the rhinoceros has a horn, the octo-
pus has no horn; the scorpion has a sting, the octopus has no
sting; the buthus has claws, the octopus has no claws; the ape
has a prehensile tail, the octopus has no tail; the shark has sharp
fins, the octopus has no fins; the vespertilio vampire has wings
armed with barbs, the octopus has no barbs; the hedgehog has
quills, the octopus has no quills; the sword-fish has a sword, the
octopus has no sword; the torpedo-fish has an electric shock,
the octopus has none; the toad has a virus, the octopus has no
virus; the viper has a venom, the octopus has no venom; the lion
has claws, the octopus has no claws; the hawk has a beak, the
octopus has no beak; the crocodile has jaws, the octopus has no
teeth.
The octopus has no muscular organization, no menacing cry,
no breastplate, no horn, no dart, no pincers, no prehensile or
bruising tail, no cutting pectoral fins, no barbed wings, no quills,
no sword, no electric discharge, no virus, no venom, no claws, no
beak, no teeth. Of all creatures, the octopus is the most formida-
bly armed.
What then is the octopus? It is the cupping-glass.
In open sea reefs, where the water displays and hides all its
splendors, in the hollows of unvisited rocks, in the unknown caves
where vegetations, crustaceans, and shell-fish abound, beneath the
deep portals of the ocean,- the swimmer who hazards himself
XIII-486
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VICTOR HUGO
there, led on by the beauty of the place, runs the risk of an
encounter. If you have this encounter, be not curious but fly.
One enters there dazzled, one emerges from thence terrified.
This is the nature of the encounter always possible among
rocks in the open sea.
A grayish form undulates in the water: it is as thick as a
man's arm, and about half an ell long; it is a rag; its form re-
sembles a closed umbrella without a handle. This rag gradually
advances towards you, suddenly it opens: eight radii spread out
abruptly around a face which has two eyes; these radii are
alive; there is something of the flame in their undulation; it is
a sort of wheel; unfolded, it is four or five feet in diameter.
Frightful expansion. This flings itself upon you.
The hydra harpoons its victim.
This creature applies itself to its prey; covers it, and knots its
long bands about it. Underneath, it is yellowish; on top, earth-
colored: nothing can represent this inexplicable hue of dust; one
would pronounce it a creature made of ashes, living in the water.
In form it is spider-like, and like a chameleon in its coloring.
When irritated it becomes violet in hue. Its most terrible qual-
ity is its softness.
Its folds strangle; its contact paralyzes.
It has an aspect of scurvy and gangrene. It is disease em-
bodied in monstrosity.
It is not to be torn away. It adheres closely to its prey.
How? By a vacuum. Its eight antennæ, large at the root,
gradually taper off and end in needles. Underneath each one
of them are arranged two rows of decreasing pustules, the largest
near the head, the smallest ones at the tip. Each row consists
of twenty-five; there are fifty pustules to each antenna, and the
whole creature has four hundred of them. These pustules are
cupping-glasses.
These cupping-glasses are cylindrical, horny, livid cartilages.
On the large species they gradually diminish from the diameter
of a five-franc piece to the size of a lentil. These fragments of
tubes are thrust out from the animal and retire into it. They
can be inserted into the prey for more than an inch.
This sucking apparatus has all the delicacy of a key-board.
It rises, then retreats. It obeys the slightest wish of the animal.
The most exquisite sensibilities cannot equal the contractibility
of these suckers, always proportioned to the internal movements
## p. 7763 (#581) ###########################################
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7763
of the creature and to the external circumstances.
is like a sensitive-plant.
This dragon
This is the monster which mariners call the poulp, which
science calls the cephalopod, and which legend calls the kraken.
English sailors call it the "devil-fish. " They also call it the
"blood-sucker. " In the Channel Islands it is called the pieuvre.
It is very rare in Guernsey, very small in Jersey, very large
and quite frequent in Sark.
A print from Sonnini's edition of Buffon represents an octo-
pus crushing a frigate. Denis Montfort thinks that the octopus
of the high latitudes is really strong enough to sink a ship.
Bory Saint Vincent denies this, but admits that in our latitudes
it does attack man. Go to Sark and they will show you, near
Brecq-Hou, the hollow in the rock where, a few years ago, an
octopus seized and drowned a lobster-fisher.
Péron and Lamarck are mistaken when they doubt whether
the octopus can swim, since it has no fins.
He who writes these lines has seen with his own eyes at
Sark, in the cave called the Shops, an octopus swimming and
chasing a bather. When killed and measured it was found to
be four English feet in spread, and four hundred suckers could
be counted. The dying monster thrust them out convulsively.
According to Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose
strong gift of intuition causes them to descend or to ascend
even to magianism, the octopus has almost the passions of a
man; the octopus hates. In fact, in the absolute, to be hideous
is to hate.
The misshapen struggles under a necessity of elimination, and
this consequently renders it hostile.
THE Octopus when swimming remains, so to speak, in its
sheath. It swims with all its folds held close. Let the reader
picture to himself a sewed-up sleeve with a closed fist inside of
it. This fist, which is the head, pushes through the water, and
advances with a vague, undulating movement.
Its two eyes,
though large, are not very distinct, being the color of the water.
The octopus on the chase or lying in wait, hides; it contracts,
it condenses itself; it reduces itself to the simplest possible ex-
pression. It confounds itself with the shadow. It looks like a
ripple of the waves. It resembles everything except something
living.
## p. 7764 (#582) ###########################################
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VICTOR HUGO
When one pays no heed to it,
suddenly it opens.
A glutinous mass possessed of a will-what more frightful?
Glue filled with hatred.
It is in the most beautiful azure of the limpid water that this
hideous, voracious star of the sea arises.
The octopus is a hypocrite.
It gives no warning of its approach, which renders it more
terrible. Almost always, when one sees it, one is already caught.
At night, however, and in breeding season, it is phosphores
cent. This terror has its passions. It awaits the nuptial hour.
It adorns itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; and from the
summit of a rock one can see it beneath, in the shadowy depths,
spread out in a pallid irradiation,- a spectre sun.
It has no bones, it has no blood, it has no flesh. It is flabby.
There is nothing in it. It is a skin. One can turn its eight
tentacles wrong side out, like the fingers of a glove.
It has a single orifice in the centre of its radiation. Is this
one hole the vent? Is it the mouth? It is both.
The same aperture fulfills both functions.
The entrance is the
exit.
The whole creature is cold.
The carnarius of the Mediterranean is repulsive. An odious
contact has this animated gelatine, which envelops the swimmer,
into which the hands sink, where the nails scratch, which one
rends without killing and tears off without pulling away, a sort
of flowing and tenacious being which slips between one's fingers;
but no horror equals the sudden appearance of the octopus,-
Medusa served by eight serpents.
No grasp equals the embrace of the cephalopod.
It is the pneumatic machine attacking you. You have to
deal with a vacuum furnished with paws. Neither scratches nor
bites; an indescribable scarification. A bite is formidable, but
less so than a suction. A claw is nothing beside the cupping-
glass. The claw means the beast entering into your flesh; the
cupping-glass means yourself entering into the beast.
Your muscles swell, your fibres writhe, your skin cracks
under the foul weight, your blood spurts forth and mingles
frightfully with the lymph of the mollusk. The creature super-
imposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incor-
porates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with
the hydra.
You form but one. This dream is upon you. The
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7765
tiger can only devour you; the octopus, oh horror! breathes you
in. It draws you to it, and into it; and bound, ensnared, power-
less, you feel yourself slowly emptied into that frightful pond,
which is the monster itself.
Beyond the terrible, being devoured alive, is the inexpressi-
ble, being drunk alive.
SUCH was the creature in whose power Gilliatt had been for
several moments.
This monster was the inhabitant of that grotto. It was the
frightful genius of the place. A sort of sombre demon of the
water.
All these magnificences had horror for their centre.
A month previously, on the day when for the first time Gill-
iatt had made his way into the grotto, the dark outline, of which
he had caught a glimpse in the ripples of the water, was this
octopus.
This was its home.
When Gilliatt, entering that cave for the second time in pur-
suit of the crab, had perceived the crevices in which he thought
the crab had taken refuge, the octopus was lying in wait in that
hole.
Can the reader picture that lying in wait?
Not a bird would dare to brood, not an egg would dare to
hatch, not a flower would dare to open, not a breast would dare
to give suck, not a heart would dare to love, not a spirit would
dare to take flight, if one meditated on the sinister shapes pa-
tiently lying in ambush in the abyss.
Gilliatt had thrust his arm into the hole; the octopus had
seized it.
It held it.
He was the fly for this spider.
Gilliatt stood in water to his waist, his feet clinging to the
slippery roundness of the stones, his right arm grasped and sub-
dued by the flat coils of the octopus's thongs, and his body
almost hidden by the folds and crossings of that horrible band-
age. Of the eight arms of the octopus, three adhered to the
rock while five adhered to Gilliatt. In this manner, clamped cn
one side to the granite, on the other to the man, it chained
Gilliatt to the rock. Gilliatt had two hundred and fifty suckers
## p. 7766 (#584) ###########################################
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VICTOR HUGO
upon him.
A combination of anguish and disgust. To be
crushed in a gigantic fist, whose elastic fingers, nearly a metre
in length, are inwardly full of living pustules which ransack
your flesh.
As we have said, one cannot tear one's self away from the
octopus. If one attempts it, one is but the more surely bound.
It only clings the closer. Its efforts increase in proportion to
yours. A greater struggle produces a greater constriction.
Gilliatt had but one resource,- his knife.
He had only his left hand free; but as the reader knows, he
could make powerful use of it. It might have been said of him
that he had two right hands.
His open knife was in his hand.
The tentacles of an octopus cannot be cut off; it is leathery
and difficult to sever, it slips away from under the blade. More-
over, the superposition is such that a cut into these thongs would
attack your own flesh.
The octopus is formidable; nevertheless there is a way of
getting away from it. The fishermen of Sark are acquainted
with it; any one who has seen them executing abrupt move-
ments at sea knows it. Porpoises also know it: they have a
way of biting the cuttlefish which cuts off its head. Hence all
the headless squids and cuttlefish which are met with on the
open sea.
The octopus is in fact vulnerable only in the head.
Gilliatt was not ignorant of this fact.
He had never seen an octopus of this size. He found himself
seized at the outset by one of the larger species. Any other
man would have been terrified.
In the case of the octopus as in that of the bull, there is
a certain moment at which to seize it: it is the instant when
the bull lowers his neck, it is the instant when the octopus
thrusts forward its head - a sudden movement. He who misses
that juncture is lost.
All that we have related lasted but a few minutes. But
Gilliatt felt the suction of the two hundred and fifty cupping-
glasses increasing.
The octopus is cunning. It tries to stupefy its prey in the
first place. It seizes, then waits as long as it can.
Gilliatt held his knife. The suction increased.
He gazed at the octopus, which stared at him.
## p. 7767 (#585) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7767
All at once the creature detached its sixth tentacle from the
rock, and launching it at him, attempted to seize his left arm.
At the same time it thrust its head forward swiftly. A second
more and its mouth would have been applied to Gilliatt's breast.
Gilliatt, wounded in the flank and with both arms pinioned,
would have been a dead man.
But Gilliatt was on his guard. Being watched, he watched.
He avoided the tentacle, and at the moment when the creat-
ure was about to bite his breast, his armed fist descended on the
monster.
Two convulsions in opposite directions ensued: that of Gilliatt
and that of the octopus.
It was like the conflict of two flashes of lightning.
Gilliatt plunged the point of his knife into the flat, viscous
mass, and with a twisting movement, similar to the flourish of a
whip, describing a circle around the two eyes, he tore out the
head as one wrenches out a tooth.
It was finished.
The whole creature dropped.
It resembled a sheet detaching itself. The air-pump destroyed,
the vacuum no longer existed. The four hundred suckers released
their hold, simultaneously, of the rock and the man.
It sank to the bottom.
Gilliatt, panting with the combat, could perceive on the rocks
at his feet two shapeless, gelatinous masses, the head on one
side, the rest on the other. We say "the rest," because one
could not say the body.
Gilliatt, however, fearing some convulsive return of agony,
retreated beyond the reach of the tentacles.
But the monster was really dead.
Gilliatt closed his knife.
IT WAS time that Gilliatt killed the octopus. He was almost
strangled; his right arm and his body were violet in hue; more
than two hundred swellings were outlined upon them; the blood
spurted from some of them here and there. The remedy for
these wounds is salt water: Gilliatt plunged into it. At the same
time he rubbed himself with the palm of his hand. The swell-
ings subsided under this friction.
## p. 7768 (#586) ###########################################
7768
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
(1769-1859)
B
ARON Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, better
known as Alexander von Humboldt, the scientist and au-
thor, was one of those rare scholars who, while devoting
themselves to the pursuit of exact knowledge, and leaving works of
moment in the advance of human thought, possess a general culture
and a gift of expression which give their work distinct value to the
student of literature.
Humboldt was born in Berlin, September 14th, 1769. His father
was an officer of high rank in the Seven Years' War, and afterwards
a court chamberlain. The son first received private instruction, with
his elder brother Wilhelm, the celebrated scholar and statesman, and
then studied philology, history, and other branches, at Frankfort
and Göttingen, making occasional trips to the Hartz Mountains or on
the Rhine, a result of these jaunts being a monograph on a geo-
logical subject. In 1790 came travel in Holland, Belgium, England,
and France, an experience which first suggested further travels in
far-lying tropic lands; then came more study at a trades-school in
Hamburg and at the well-known Mining School at Freiburg. His
work won for him in 1792 the position of mining engineer; and tours
in Switzerland and the Tyrol gave him material for several volumes in
geological or chemical fields. The year 1799 marked a turning-point
in his career; for he resigned his post in order to give himself unre-
servedly to the study of science. Some months were spent in Jena,
where he enjoyed the society of Goethe and Schiller; starting in 1797,
in company with Bonpland, the distinguished French botanist, upon
a series of wanderings in Spain, Switzerland, Italy, and France. In
1799, still with his fellow scientist, he set out for South America, and
spent five years in that country and in Mexico, engaged in various
investigations; his adventures including the climbing of Chimborazo
to an altitude higher than had hitherto been attained. Except for
occasional visits to Berlin and other cities, he resided by permission
of the German king in Paris, pursuing his researches, writing and
preparing for the press his many treatises: but finally came back to
Berlin for good and all in 1827, to begin his famous lectures at the
University upon physical geography; holding too the position of court.
chamberlain, like his father before him. His natal city was his home
until his death more than thirty years later.
## p. 7769 (#587) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7769
In 1829, at the instigation of the Russian Emperor Nicholas, he
undertook with other scientists a journey to Siberia and the Caspian
Sea. During the next decade he executed several government mis-
sions in Paris; was instrumental in organizing observation stations,
which led to the fine system of meteorological stations now obtain-
ing in Germany; and completed the editing of one of his greatest
works, the 'Critical Examination of the History of Geography of the
New Continent,' written in the French tongue. With the exception
of brief journeys to England and Denmark in 1841 and 1845, Hum-
boldt remained in Germany, and with the zeal and enthusiasm of
a young man carried on his labors as teacher and scholar in Berlin;
the richest fruits of which are seen in his master work 'Cosmos: A
Sketch of a Physical Cosmography (1845-1858). This comprehensive
study of the physical universe exhibits the rare union of qualities
which makes Humboldt truly a genius in science. Of encyclopædic
knowledge, a specialist pursuing technical analyses to their minutest
details, the founder of meteorology and physical geography, a discov-
erer on the subjects of sea and plant life, a thinker who did original
work in geology, astronomy, zoölogy, botany, and mineralogy,― he
yet had the synthetic grasp, the insatiable desire for an all-embracing
conception of the world of matter. He used his wonderful acquire-
ments as a foundation upon which to rear a lofty structure whence
all nature might be viewed and a sense of her as a living whole be
gained. The 'Cosmos,' because of this broad outlook and nobility of
spirit, is a unique work in scientific literature. Its general scheme
embraces a fine introduction,- from which the selections below are
chosen, in which the author's views on Nature as a vast organic
unity are set forth with eloquence; a grand review of natural phe-
nomena, sidereal and terrestrial, and including the study of man as
an inhabitant of the planet; followed by a consideration of the incite-
ments to nature's study found in the literature of many lands; and
concluded by a sweeping survey of the progress among mankind of
natural conceptions with regard to the universe. There is nothing
dry or repellently technical about the treatment, which is broad, pro-
foundly ethical, and aglow with elevated feeling.
Humboldt, moreover, showed himself be a man of wide human
sympathy by presenting his theories and discoveries in lectures and
popular articles, simply and plainly, so that those who ran could
read and understand. It was natural that one who had this catholic
sympathy, this feeling for the ideal significance of the natural world,
this wish to put it before his fellow-men in the way of literature
rather than of science, should have done writing of artistic worth.
A list of Humboldt's works would be very long, and is necessa-
rily omitted. He died May 6th, 1859, at the great age of ninety. He
## p. 7770 (#588) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7770
was, as a German critic remarks, the Nestor of scientific investigators
in his own land, and indeed in Europe. As his statue is one of
the proud ornaments of the stately entrance of Berlin University, so
he himself is one of the proud intellectual adornments of his race,
a race conspicuous in the accomplishments of learning and genius.
THE BEAUTY AND UNITY OF NATURE
From 'Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe'
-
IN
N ATTEMPTING, after a long absence from my native country,
to develop the physical phenomena of the globe and the
simultaneous action of the forces that pervade the regions
of space, I experience a twofold cause of anxiety. The subject
before me is so inexhaustible and so varied, that I fear either
to fall into the superficiality of the encyclopædist, or to weary
the mind of my reader by aphorisms consisting of mere gener
alities clothed in dry and dogmatical forms. Undue conciseness
often checks the flow of expression, whilst diffuseness is detri-
mental to a clear and precise exposition of our ideas. Nature is
a free domain; and the profound conceptions and enjoyments
she awakens within us can only be vividly delineated by thought
clothed in exalted forms of speech, worthy of bearing witness to
the majesty and greatness of the creation.
In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely
in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general
influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its
noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain
of connection by which all natural forces are linked together and
made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the per-
ception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our
enjoyments. Such a result, however, can only be reaped as the
fruit of observation and intellect, combined with the spirit of
the age, in which are reflected all the varied phases of thought.
He who can trace, through bygone times, the stream of our
knowledge to its primitive source, will learn from history how for
thousands of years man has labored, amid the ever recurring
changes of form, to recognize the invariability of natural laws,
and has thus by the force of mind gradually subdued a great
portion of the physical world to his dominion. In interrogating
the history of the past, we trace the mysterious course of ideas
## p. 7771 (#589) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7771
yielding the first glimmering perception of the same image of a
Cosmos, or harmoniously ordered whole, which, dimly shadowed
forth to the human mind in the primitive ages of the world, is
now fully revealed to the maturer intellect of mankind as the
result of long and laborious observation.
Each of those epochs of the contemplation of the external
world - the earliest dawn of thought, and the advanced stage of
civilization has its own source of enjoyment. In the former,
this enjoyment, in accordance with the simplicity of the primi-
tive ages, flowed from an intuitive feeling of the order that was
proclaimed by the invariable and successive reappearance of the
heavenly bodies, and by the progressive development of organized
beings; whilst in the latter, this sense of enjoyment springs from
a definite knowledge of the phenomena of nature. When man
began to interrogate nature, and not content with observing,
learnt to evoke phenomena under definite conditions; when once.
he sought to collect and record facts, in order that the fruit of
his labors might aid investigation after his own brief existence.
had passed away,-the philosophy of Nature cast aside the vague
and poetic garb in which she had been enveloped from her ori-
gin; and having assumed a severer aspect, she now weighs the
value of observations, and substitutes induction and reasoning for
conjecture and assumption. The dogmas of former ages survive
now only in the superstitions of the people and the prejudices of
the ignorant, or are perpetuated in a few systems, which, con-
scious of their weakness, shroud themselves in a veil of mystery.
We may also trace the same primitive intuitions in languages
exuberant in figurative expressions; and a few of the best chosen
symbols engendered by the happy inspiration of the earliest ages,
having by degrees lost their vagueness through a better mode of
interpretation, are still preserved amongst our scientific terms.
Nature considered rationally-that is to say, submitted to
the process of thought-is a unity in diversity of phenomena;
a harmony, blending together all created things, however dis-
similar in form and attributes; one great whole (rò a) animated
by the breath of life. The most important result of a rational
inquiry into nature is therefore to establish the unity and har-
mony of this stupendous mass of force and matter, to determine
with impartial justice what is due to the discoveries of the past
and to those of the present, and to analyze the individual parts
of natural phenomena without succumbing beneath the weight of
-
## p. 7772 (#590) ###########################################
7772
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
the whole. Thus, and thus alone, is it permitted to man, while
mindful of the high destiny of his race, to comprehend nature,
to lift the veil that shrouds her phenomena, and as it were, sub-
mit the results of observation to the test of reason and intellect.
In reflecting upon the different degrees of enjoyment presented
to us in the contemplation of nature, we find that the first place
must be assigned to a sensation which is wholly independent
of an intimate acquaintance with the physical phenomena pre-
sented to our view, or of the peculiar character of the region
surrounding us. In the uniform plain bounded only by a distant
horizon, where the lowly heather, the cistus, or waving grasses
deck the soil; on the ocean shore, where the waves softly rip-
pling over the beach leave a track green with the weeds of the
sea: everywhere the mind is penetrated by the same sense of
the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul
by a mysterious inspiration the existence of laws that regulate
the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere
contact with the free air, exercises a soothing yet strengthening
influence on the wearied spirit, calms the storm of passion, and
softens the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths.
Everywhere, in every region of the globe, in every stage of intel-
lectual culture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouch-
safed to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by
a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment
of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and
from the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our
own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side;
whether we look upwards to the starry vault of heaven, scan the
far-stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim horizon
across the vast expanse of ocean.
The contemplation of the individual characteristics of the
landscape, and of the conformation of the land in any definite
region of the earth, gives rise to a different source of enjoyment,
awakening impressions that are more vivid, better defined, and
more congenial to certain phases of the mind than those of which
we have already spoken. At one time the heart is stirred by a
sense of the grandeur of the face of nature, by the strife of the
elements, or as in Northern Asia, by the aspect of the dreary
barrenness of the far-stretching steppes; at another time softer
emotions are excited by the contemplation of rich harvest wrested
by the hand of man from the wild fertility of nature, or by the
## p. 7773 (#591) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7773
sight of human habitations raised beside some wild and foaming
torrent. Here I regard less the degree of intensity, than the dif-
ference existing in the various sensations that derive their charm.
and permanence from the peculiar character of the scene.
If I might be allowed to abandon myself to the recollections
of my own distant travels, I would instance among the most
striking scenes of nature the calm sublimity of a tropical night,
when the stars, not sparkling as in our northern skies, shed
their soft and planetary light over the gently heaving ocean; or I
would recall the deep valleys of the Cordilleras, where the tall
and slender palms pierce the leafy veil around them, and waving
on high their feathery and arrow-like branches, form, as it were,
«< a forest above a forest"; or I would describe the summit of the
Peak of Teneriffe, when a horizontal layer of clouds, dazzling
in whiteness, has separated the cone of cinders from the plain
below, and suddenly the ascending current pierces the cloudy
veil, so that the eye of the traveler may range from the brink
of the crater, along the vine-clad slopes of Orotava, to the orange
gardens and banana groves that skirt the shore. In scenes like
these, it is not the peaceful charm uniformly spread over the
face of nature that moves the heart, but rather the peculiar
physiognomy and conformation of the land, the features of the
landscape, the ever-varying outline of the clouds, and their blend-
ing with the horizon of the sea, whether it lies spread before us
like a smooth and shining mirror, or is dimly seen through the
morning mist. All that the senses can but imperfectly compre-
hend, all that is most awful in such romantic scenes of nature,
may become a source of enjoyment to man by opening a wide
field to the creative powers of his imagination. Impressions
change with the varying movements of the mind, and we are led
by a happy illusion to believe that we receive from the external
world that with which we have ourselves invested it.
*
When, far from our native country, after a long voyage, we
tread for the first time the soil of a tropical land, we experi-
ence a certain feeling of surprise and gratification in recognizing
in the rocks that surround us the same inclined schistose strata,
and the same columnar basalt covered with cellular amygdaloids,
that we had left in Europe, and whose identity of character in
latitudes so widely different reminds us that the solidification of
the earth's crust is altogether independent of climatic influences.
But these rocky masses of schist and of basalt are covered with
## p. 7774 (#592) ###########################################
7774
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
vegetation of a character with which we are unacquainted, and of
a physiognomy wholly unknown to us; and it is then, amid the
colossal and majestic forms of an exotic flora, that we feel how
wonderfully the flexibility of our nature fits us to receive new
impressions, linked together by a certain secret analogy.
men were yawning. Their rags were terrible; their feet hung
down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed together,
their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their fists.
clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses. In the
rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.
This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful.
It was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring
rain might descend, that it might be followed by another and
## p. 7755 (#573) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7755
another, and that their dilapidated garments would be drenched,
that once soaked these men would not get dry again, that once
chilled they would not again get warm, that their linen trousers
would be glued to their bones by the downpour, that the water
would fill their shoes, that no lashes from the whips would be
able to prevent their jaws from chattering, that the chain would
continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs would con-
tinue to dangle; and it was impossible not to shudder at the
sight of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath
the cold clouds of autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the
blast, to all the furies of the air, like trees and stones.
Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of
the sick men, who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless
on the seventh wagon, and who appeared to have been tossed
there like sacks filled with misery.
Suddenly the sun made its appearance; the immense light of
the Orient burst forth, and one would have said that it had set
fire to all those ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed;
a conflagration of grins, oaths, and songs exploded. The broad
horizontal sheet of light severed the file into two parts, illumin-
ating heads and bodies, leaving feet and wheels in the obscurity.
Thoughts made their appearance on these faces: it was a terrible
moment; visible demons with their masks removed, fierce souls
laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in
gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through
which they blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women;
the dawn accentuated these lamentable profiles with the blackness
of its shadows; there was not one of these creatures who was
not deformed by reason of wretchedness; and the whole was so
monstrous that one would have said that the sun's brilliancy had
been changed into the glare of the lightning. The wagon-load
which headed the line had struck up a song, and were shouting
at the top of their voices, with a haggard joviality, a pot-pourri
by Desaugiers, then famous, called 'The Vestal'; the trees shiv-
ered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois.
listened in idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by spec-
tres.
All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos: here
were to be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old
men, youths, bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour
resignation, savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted
## p. 7756 (#574) ###########################################
7756
VICTOR HUGO
by caps, heads like those of young girls with corkscrew curls
on the temples, infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible
thin skeleton faces, to which death alone was lacking. On the
first cart was a negro, who had been a slave in all probability,
and who could make a comparison of his chains. The frightful
leveler from below, shame, had passed over these brows; at that
degree of abasement, the last transformations were suffered by
all in their extremest depths, and ignorance converted into dull-
ness was the equal of intelligence converted into despair. There
was no choice possible between these men, who appeared to the
eye as the flower of the mud. It was evident that the person
who had had the ordering of that unclean procession had not
classified them. These beings had been fettered and coupled
pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder probably, and loaded hap-hazard
on those carts. Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped together,
always end by evolving a result; all additions of wretched
men give a sum total: each chain exhaled a common soul, and
each dray-load had its own physiognomy. By the side of the
one where they were singing, there was one where they were
howling; a third where they were begging; one could be seen
in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced
the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as
the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven
circles of hell on the march; the march of the damned to their
tortures, performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and
flaming chariot of the Apocalypse, but what was more mournful
than that, on the gibbet cart.
One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel,
made a pretense from time to time of stirring up this mass of
human filth. An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to
her little boy five years old, and said to him, "Rascal, let that
be a warning to you! "
As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who ap-
peared to be the captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at
that signal a fearful dull and blind flogging, which produced the
sound of hail, fell upon the seven dray-loads: many roared and
foamed at the mouth; which redoubled the delight of the street
urchins who had hastened up, a swarm of flies on these wounds.
Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They
were no longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects
which replace the glance in the case of certain wretched men,
## p. 7757 (#575) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7757
which seem unconscious of reality, and in which flames the
reflection of terrors and of catastrophes. He was not looking
at a spectacle, he was seeing a vision. He tried to rise, to
flee, to make his escape: he could not move his feet. Some-
times the things that you see, seize upon you and hold you fast.
He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself
athwart confused and inexpressible anguish what this sepulchral
persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium
which was pursuing him. All at once he raised his hand to
his brow, a gesture habitual to those whose memory suddenly
returns: he remembered that this was in fact the usual itiner-
ary; that it was customary to make this detour in order to avoid
all possibility of encountering royalty on the road to Fontaine-
bleau, and that five-and-thirty years before he had himself passed
through that barrier.
Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did
not understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be pos-
sible: at length she cried:-
"Father! what are those men in those carts? "
Jean Valjean replied, "Convicts. "
"Whither are they going? "
"To the galleys. "
At that moment the cudgeling, multiplied by a hundred
hands, became zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were
mingled with it, it was a perfect storm of whips and clubs; the
convicts bent before it, a hideous obedience was evoked by the
torture, and all held their peace, darting glances like chained.
wolves.
Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:
"Father, are they still men? "
"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.
It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before day-
break from Bicêtre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to
avoid Fontainebleau, where the King then was. This caused the
horrible journey to last three or four days longer; but torture
may surely be prolonged with the object of sparing the royal
personage a sight of it.
Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such
encounters are shocks, and the memory that they leave behind
them resembles a thorough shaking-up.
-:
## p. 7758 (#576) ###########################################
7758
VICTOR HUGO
THE COMBAT WITH THE OCTOPUS
From The Toilers of the Sea. ' Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood.
right 1888, by T. Y. Crowell & Co.
Copy-
Jus
UST as Gilliatt was making up his mind to resign himself to
sea-urchins and sea-chestnuts, a splash was made at his feet.
A huge crab, frightened by his approach, had just dropped
into the water. The crab did not sink so deeply that Gilliatt lost
sight of it.
Gilliatt set out on a run after the crab along the base of the
reef. The crab sought to escape.
Suddenly, he was no longer in sight.
The crab had just hidden in some crevice under the rock.
Gilliatt clung to the projections of the rock, and thrust for-
ward his head to get a look under the overhanging cliff.
There was in fact a cavity there. The crab must have taken
refuge in it.
It was something more than a crevice. It was a sort of
porch.
The sea entered beneath this porch, but was not deep. The
bottom was visible, covered with stones. These stones were
smooth and clothed with algæ, which indicated that they were
never dry. They resembled the tops of children's heads covered
with green hair.
Gilliatt took his knife in his teeth, climbed down with his
hands and feet from the top of the cliff, and leaped into the
It reached almost to his shoulders.
water.
He passed under the porch. He entered a much worn cor-
ridor in the form of a rude pointed arch overhead. The walls
were smooth and polished. He no longer saw the crab. He kept
his foothold, and advanced through the diminishing light. He
began to be unable to distinguish objects.
After about fifteen paces, the vault above him came to an
end. He was out of the corridor. He had here more space,
and consequently more light; and besides, the pupils of his eyes
now dilated: he saw with tolerable clearness. He had a
surprise.
were
He was just re-entering that strange cave which he had visited
a month previously.
Only he had returned to it by way of the sea.
## p. 7759 (#577) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7759
That arch which he had then seen submerged was the one
through which he had just passed. It was accessible at certain
low tides.
His eyes became accustomed to the place. He saw better and
better. He was astounded. He had found again that extraor-
dinary palace of shadows, that vault, those pillars, those purple
and blood-like stains, that jewel-like vegetation, and at the end
that crypt, almost a sanctuary, and that stone which was almost
an altar.
He had not taken much notice of these details; but he carried
the general effect in his mind, and he beheld it again.
Opposite him, at a certain height in the cliff, he saw the
crevice through which he had made his entrance on the first
occasion, and which, from the point where he now stood, seemed
inaccessible.
He beheld again, near the pointed arch, those low and obscure
grottoes, a sort of caverns within the cavern, which he had already
observed from a distance. Now he was close to them.
The one
nearest to him was dry and easily accessible.
Still nearer than that opening he noticed a horizontal fissure
in the granite above the level of the water. The crab was prob-
ably there. He thrust in his hand as far as he could and began
to grope in this hole of shadows.
All at once he felt himself seized by the arm.
What he felt at that moment was indescribable horror.
Something thin, rough, flat, slimy, adhesive, and living, had
just wound itself round his bare arm in the dark.
It crept up
towards his breast. It was like the pressure of a leather thong
and the thrust of a gimlet. In less than a second an indescrib-
able spiral form had passed around his wrist and his elbow,
and reached to his shoulder. The point burrowed under his arm-
pit.
Gilliatt threw himself backwards, but could hardly move. He
was as though nailed to the spot; with his left hand, which
remained free, he took his knife, which he held between his
teeth, and holding the knife with his hand he braced himself
against the rock, in a desperate effort to withdraw his arm. He
only succeeded in disturbing the ligature a little, which resumed
its pressure. It was as supple as leather, as solid as steel, as
cold as night.
## p. 7760 (#578) ###########################################
7760
VICTOR HUGO
A second thong, narrow and pointed, issued from the crevice
of the rock. It was like a tongue from the jaws of a monster.
It licked Gilliatt's naked form in a terrible fashion, and suddenly
stretching out, immensely long and thin, it applied itself to his
skin and surrounded his whole body. At the same time, unheard-
of suffering, which was comparable to nothing he had previously
known, swelled Gilliatt's contracted muscles. He felt in his skin
round and horrible perforations; it seemed to him that innumer-
able lips were fastened to his flesh and were seeking to drink his
blood.
A third thong undulated outside the rock, felt of Gilliatt, and
lashed his sides like a cord. It fixed itself there.
Anguish is mute when at its highest point. Gilliatt did not
utter a cry.
There was light enough for him to see the repuls-
ive forms adhering to him.
A fourth ligature, this one as swift as a dart, leaped towards
his belly and rolled itself around there.
Impossible either to tear or to cut away these shiny thongs
which adhered closely to Gilliatt's body, and by a number of
points.
Each one of those points was the seat of frightful and
peculiar pain. It was what would be experienced if one were
being swallowed simultaneously by a throng of mouths which
were too small.
A fifth prolongation leaped from the hole. It superimposed
itself upon the others, and folded over Gilliatt's chest. Compres-
sion was added to horror; Gilliatt could hardly breathe.
These thongs, pointed at their extremity, spread out gradually
like the blades of swords towards the hilt. All five evidently
belonged to the same centre. They crept and crawled over Gill-
iatt. He felt these strange points of pressure, which seemed to
him to be mouths, changing their places.
Suddenly a large, round, flat, slimy mass emerged from the
lower part of the crevice.
It was the centre; the five thongs were attached to it like
spokes to a hub; on the opposite side of this foul disk could be
distinguished the beginnings of three other tentacles, which re-
mained under the slope of the rock. In the middle of this
sliminess there were two eyes gazing.
The eyes were fixed on Gilliatt.
Gilliatt recognized the octopus (devil-fish).
## p. 7761 (#579) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7761
II
TO BELIEVE in the octopus, one must have seen it.
Compared with it, the hydras of old are laughable.
At certain moments one is tempted to think that the intan-
gible forms which float through our vision encounter in the
realm of the possible, certain magnetic centres to which their
lineaments cling, and that from these obscure fixations of the
living dream, beings spring forth. The unknown has the mar-
velous at its disposal, and it makes use of it to compose the
monster. Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod were only able to make
the Chimæra: God made the octopus.
When God wills it, he excels in the execrable.
All ideals being admitted, if terror be an object, the octopus
is a masterpiece.
The whale has enormous size, the octopus is small; the hip-
popotamus has a cuirass, the octopus is naked; the jararoca
hisses, the octopus is dumb; the rhinoceros has a horn, the octo-
pus has no horn; the scorpion has a sting, the octopus has no
sting; the buthus has claws, the octopus has no claws; the ape
has a prehensile tail, the octopus has no tail; the shark has sharp
fins, the octopus has no fins; the vespertilio vampire has wings
armed with barbs, the octopus has no barbs; the hedgehog has
quills, the octopus has no quills; the sword-fish has a sword, the
octopus has no sword; the torpedo-fish has an electric shock,
the octopus has none; the toad has a virus, the octopus has no
virus; the viper has a venom, the octopus has no venom; the lion
has claws, the octopus has no claws; the hawk has a beak, the
octopus has no beak; the crocodile has jaws, the octopus has no
teeth.
The octopus has no muscular organization, no menacing cry,
no breastplate, no horn, no dart, no pincers, no prehensile or
bruising tail, no cutting pectoral fins, no barbed wings, no quills,
no sword, no electric discharge, no virus, no venom, no claws, no
beak, no teeth. Of all creatures, the octopus is the most formida-
bly armed.
What then is the octopus? It is the cupping-glass.
In open sea reefs, where the water displays and hides all its
splendors, in the hollows of unvisited rocks, in the unknown caves
where vegetations, crustaceans, and shell-fish abound, beneath the
deep portals of the ocean,- the swimmer who hazards himself
XIII-486
## p. 7762 (#580) ###########################################
7762
VICTOR HUGO
there, led on by the beauty of the place, runs the risk of an
encounter. If you have this encounter, be not curious but fly.
One enters there dazzled, one emerges from thence terrified.
This is the nature of the encounter always possible among
rocks in the open sea.
A grayish form undulates in the water: it is as thick as a
man's arm, and about half an ell long; it is a rag; its form re-
sembles a closed umbrella without a handle. This rag gradually
advances towards you, suddenly it opens: eight radii spread out
abruptly around a face which has two eyes; these radii are
alive; there is something of the flame in their undulation; it is
a sort of wheel; unfolded, it is four or five feet in diameter.
Frightful expansion. This flings itself upon you.
The hydra harpoons its victim.
This creature applies itself to its prey; covers it, and knots its
long bands about it. Underneath, it is yellowish; on top, earth-
colored: nothing can represent this inexplicable hue of dust; one
would pronounce it a creature made of ashes, living in the water.
In form it is spider-like, and like a chameleon in its coloring.
When irritated it becomes violet in hue. Its most terrible qual-
ity is its softness.
Its folds strangle; its contact paralyzes.
It has an aspect of scurvy and gangrene. It is disease em-
bodied in monstrosity.
It is not to be torn away. It adheres closely to its prey.
How? By a vacuum. Its eight antennæ, large at the root,
gradually taper off and end in needles. Underneath each one
of them are arranged two rows of decreasing pustules, the largest
near the head, the smallest ones at the tip. Each row consists
of twenty-five; there are fifty pustules to each antenna, and the
whole creature has four hundred of them. These pustules are
cupping-glasses.
These cupping-glasses are cylindrical, horny, livid cartilages.
On the large species they gradually diminish from the diameter
of a five-franc piece to the size of a lentil. These fragments of
tubes are thrust out from the animal and retire into it. They
can be inserted into the prey for more than an inch.
This sucking apparatus has all the delicacy of a key-board.
It rises, then retreats. It obeys the slightest wish of the animal.
The most exquisite sensibilities cannot equal the contractibility
of these suckers, always proportioned to the internal movements
## p. 7763 (#581) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7763
of the creature and to the external circumstances.
is like a sensitive-plant.
This dragon
This is the monster which mariners call the poulp, which
science calls the cephalopod, and which legend calls the kraken.
English sailors call it the "devil-fish. " They also call it the
"blood-sucker. " In the Channel Islands it is called the pieuvre.
It is very rare in Guernsey, very small in Jersey, very large
and quite frequent in Sark.
A print from Sonnini's edition of Buffon represents an octo-
pus crushing a frigate. Denis Montfort thinks that the octopus
of the high latitudes is really strong enough to sink a ship.
Bory Saint Vincent denies this, but admits that in our latitudes
it does attack man. Go to Sark and they will show you, near
Brecq-Hou, the hollow in the rock where, a few years ago, an
octopus seized and drowned a lobster-fisher.
Péron and Lamarck are mistaken when they doubt whether
the octopus can swim, since it has no fins.
He who writes these lines has seen with his own eyes at
Sark, in the cave called the Shops, an octopus swimming and
chasing a bather. When killed and measured it was found to
be four English feet in spread, and four hundred suckers could
be counted. The dying monster thrust them out convulsively.
According to Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose
strong gift of intuition causes them to descend or to ascend
even to magianism, the octopus has almost the passions of a
man; the octopus hates. In fact, in the absolute, to be hideous
is to hate.
The misshapen struggles under a necessity of elimination, and
this consequently renders it hostile.
THE Octopus when swimming remains, so to speak, in its
sheath. It swims with all its folds held close. Let the reader
picture to himself a sewed-up sleeve with a closed fist inside of
it. This fist, which is the head, pushes through the water, and
advances with a vague, undulating movement.
Its two eyes,
though large, are not very distinct, being the color of the water.
The octopus on the chase or lying in wait, hides; it contracts,
it condenses itself; it reduces itself to the simplest possible ex-
pression. It confounds itself with the shadow. It looks like a
ripple of the waves. It resembles everything except something
living.
## p. 7764 (#582) ###########################################
7764
VICTOR HUGO
When one pays no heed to it,
suddenly it opens.
A glutinous mass possessed of a will-what more frightful?
Glue filled with hatred.
It is in the most beautiful azure of the limpid water that this
hideous, voracious star of the sea arises.
The octopus is a hypocrite.
It gives no warning of its approach, which renders it more
terrible. Almost always, when one sees it, one is already caught.
At night, however, and in breeding season, it is phosphores
cent. This terror has its passions. It awaits the nuptial hour.
It adorns itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; and from the
summit of a rock one can see it beneath, in the shadowy depths,
spread out in a pallid irradiation,- a spectre sun.
It has no bones, it has no blood, it has no flesh. It is flabby.
There is nothing in it. It is a skin. One can turn its eight
tentacles wrong side out, like the fingers of a glove.
It has a single orifice in the centre of its radiation. Is this
one hole the vent? Is it the mouth? It is both.
The same aperture fulfills both functions.
The entrance is the
exit.
The whole creature is cold.
The carnarius of the Mediterranean is repulsive. An odious
contact has this animated gelatine, which envelops the swimmer,
into which the hands sink, where the nails scratch, which one
rends without killing and tears off without pulling away, a sort
of flowing and tenacious being which slips between one's fingers;
but no horror equals the sudden appearance of the octopus,-
Medusa served by eight serpents.
No grasp equals the embrace of the cephalopod.
It is the pneumatic machine attacking you. You have to
deal with a vacuum furnished with paws. Neither scratches nor
bites; an indescribable scarification. A bite is formidable, but
less so than a suction. A claw is nothing beside the cupping-
glass. The claw means the beast entering into your flesh; the
cupping-glass means yourself entering into the beast.
Your muscles swell, your fibres writhe, your skin cracks
under the foul weight, your blood spurts forth and mingles
frightfully with the lymph of the mollusk. The creature super-
imposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incor-
porates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with
the hydra.
You form but one. This dream is upon you. The
## p. 7765 (#583) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7765
tiger can only devour you; the octopus, oh horror! breathes you
in. It draws you to it, and into it; and bound, ensnared, power-
less, you feel yourself slowly emptied into that frightful pond,
which is the monster itself.
Beyond the terrible, being devoured alive, is the inexpressi-
ble, being drunk alive.
SUCH was the creature in whose power Gilliatt had been for
several moments.
This monster was the inhabitant of that grotto. It was the
frightful genius of the place. A sort of sombre demon of the
water.
All these magnificences had horror for their centre.
A month previously, on the day when for the first time Gill-
iatt had made his way into the grotto, the dark outline, of which
he had caught a glimpse in the ripples of the water, was this
octopus.
This was its home.
When Gilliatt, entering that cave for the second time in pur-
suit of the crab, had perceived the crevices in which he thought
the crab had taken refuge, the octopus was lying in wait in that
hole.
Can the reader picture that lying in wait?
Not a bird would dare to brood, not an egg would dare to
hatch, not a flower would dare to open, not a breast would dare
to give suck, not a heart would dare to love, not a spirit would
dare to take flight, if one meditated on the sinister shapes pa-
tiently lying in ambush in the abyss.
Gilliatt had thrust his arm into the hole; the octopus had
seized it.
It held it.
He was the fly for this spider.
Gilliatt stood in water to his waist, his feet clinging to the
slippery roundness of the stones, his right arm grasped and sub-
dued by the flat coils of the octopus's thongs, and his body
almost hidden by the folds and crossings of that horrible band-
age. Of the eight arms of the octopus, three adhered to the
rock while five adhered to Gilliatt. In this manner, clamped cn
one side to the granite, on the other to the man, it chained
Gilliatt to the rock. Gilliatt had two hundred and fifty suckers
## p. 7766 (#584) ###########################################
7766
VICTOR HUGO
upon him.
A combination of anguish and disgust. To be
crushed in a gigantic fist, whose elastic fingers, nearly a metre
in length, are inwardly full of living pustules which ransack
your flesh.
As we have said, one cannot tear one's self away from the
octopus. If one attempts it, one is but the more surely bound.
It only clings the closer. Its efforts increase in proportion to
yours. A greater struggle produces a greater constriction.
Gilliatt had but one resource,- his knife.
He had only his left hand free; but as the reader knows, he
could make powerful use of it. It might have been said of him
that he had two right hands.
His open knife was in his hand.
The tentacles of an octopus cannot be cut off; it is leathery
and difficult to sever, it slips away from under the blade. More-
over, the superposition is such that a cut into these thongs would
attack your own flesh.
The octopus is formidable; nevertheless there is a way of
getting away from it. The fishermen of Sark are acquainted
with it; any one who has seen them executing abrupt move-
ments at sea knows it. Porpoises also know it: they have a
way of biting the cuttlefish which cuts off its head. Hence all
the headless squids and cuttlefish which are met with on the
open sea.
The octopus is in fact vulnerable only in the head.
Gilliatt was not ignorant of this fact.
He had never seen an octopus of this size. He found himself
seized at the outset by one of the larger species. Any other
man would have been terrified.
In the case of the octopus as in that of the bull, there is
a certain moment at which to seize it: it is the instant when
the bull lowers his neck, it is the instant when the octopus
thrusts forward its head - a sudden movement. He who misses
that juncture is lost.
All that we have related lasted but a few minutes. But
Gilliatt felt the suction of the two hundred and fifty cupping-
glasses increasing.
The octopus is cunning. It tries to stupefy its prey in the
first place. It seizes, then waits as long as it can.
Gilliatt held his knife. The suction increased.
He gazed at the octopus, which stared at him.
## p. 7767 (#585) ###########################################
VICTOR HUGO
7767
All at once the creature detached its sixth tentacle from the
rock, and launching it at him, attempted to seize his left arm.
At the same time it thrust its head forward swiftly. A second
more and its mouth would have been applied to Gilliatt's breast.
Gilliatt, wounded in the flank and with both arms pinioned,
would have been a dead man.
But Gilliatt was on his guard. Being watched, he watched.
He avoided the tentacle, and at the moment when the creat-
ure was about to bite his breast, his armed fist descended on the
monster.
Two convulsions in opposite directions ensued: that of Gilliatt
and that of the octopus.
It was like the conflict of two flashes of lightning.
Gilliatt plunged the point of his knife into the flat, viscous
mass, and with a twisting movement, similar to the flourish of a
whip, describing a circle around the two eyes, he tore out the
head as one wrenches out a tooth.
It was finished.
The whole creature dropped.
It resembled a sheet detaching itself. The air-pump destroyed,
the vacuum no longer existed. The four hundred suckers released
their hold, simultaneously, of the rock and the man.
It sank to the bottom.
Gilliatt, panting with the combat, could perceive on the rocks
at his feet two shapeless, gelatinous masses, the head on one
side, the rest on the other. We say "the rest," because one
could not say the body.
Gilliatt, however, fearing some convulsive return of agony,
retreated beyond the reach of the tentacles.
But the monster was really dead.
Gilliatt closed his knife.
IT WAS time that Gilliatt killed the octopus. He was almost
strangled; his right arm and his body were violet in hue; more
than two hundred swellings were outlined upon them; the blood
spurted from some of them here and there. The remedy for
these wounds is salt water: Gilliatt plunged into it. At the same
time he rubbed himself with the palm of his hand. The swell-
ings subsided under this friction.
## p. 7768 (#586) ###########################################
7768
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
(1769-1859)
B
ARON Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, better
known as Alexander von Humboldt, the scientist and au-
thor, was one of those rare scholars who, while devoting
themselves to the pursuit of exact knowledge, and leaving works of
moment in the advance of human thought, possess a general culture
and a gift of expression which give their work distinct value to the
student of literature.
Humboldt was born in Berlin, September 14th, 1769. His father
was an officer of high rank in the Seven Years' War, and afterwards
a court chamberlain. The son first received private instruction, with
his elder brother Wilhelm, the celebrated scholar and statesman, and
then studied philology, history, and other branches, at Frankfort
and Göttingen, making occasional trips to the Hartz Mountains or on
the Rhine, a result of these jaunts being a monograph on a geo-
logical subject. In 1790 came travel in Holland, Belgium, England,
and France, an experience which first suggested further travels in
far-lying tropic lands; then came more study at a trades-school in
Hamburg and at the well-known Mining School at Freiburg. His
work won for him in 1792 the position of mining engineer; and tours
in Switzerland and the Tyrol gave him material for several volumes in
geological or chemical fields. The year 1799 marked a turning-point
in his career; for he resigned his post in order to give himself unre-
servedly to the study of science. Some months were spent in Jena,
where he enjoyed the society of Goethe and Schiller; starting in 1797,
in company with Bonpland, the distinguished French botanist, upon
a series of wanderings in Spain, Switzerland, Italy, and France. In
1799, still with his fellow scientist, he set out for South America, and
spent five years in that country and in Mexico, engaged in various
investigations; his adventures including the climbing of Chimborazo
to an altitude higher than had hitherto been attained. Except for
occasional visits to Berlin and other cities, he resided by permission
of the German king in Paris, pursuing his researches, writing and
preparing for the press his many treatises: but finally came back to
Berlin for good and all in 1827, to begin his famous lectures at the
University upon physical geography; holding too the position of court.
chamberlain, like his father before him. His natal city was his home
until his death more than thirty years later.
## p. 7769 (#587) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7769
In 1829, at the instigation of the Russian Emperor Nicholas, he
undertook with other scientists a journey to Siberia and the Caspian
Sea. During the next decade he executed several government mis-
sions in Paris; was instrumental in organizing observation stations,
which led to the fine system of meteorological stations now obtain-
ing in Germany; and completed the editing of one of his greatest
works, the 'Critical Examination of the History of Geography of the
New Continent,' written in the French tongue. With the exception
of brief journeys to England and Denmark in 1841 and 1845, Hum-
boldt remained in Germany, and with the zeal and enthusiasm of
a young man carried on his labors as teacher and scholar in Berlin;
the richest fruits of which are seen in his master work 'Cosmos: A
Sketch of a Physical Cosmography (1845-1858). This comprehensive
study of the physical universe exhibits the rare union of qualities
which makes Humboldt truly a genius in science. Of encyclopædic
knowledge, a specialist pursuing technical analyses to their minutest
details, the founder of meteorology and physical geography, a discov-
erer on the subjects of sea and plant life, a thinker who did original
work in geology, astronomy, zoölogy, botany, and mineralogy,― he
yet had the synthetic grasp, the insatiable desire for an all-embracing
conception of the world of matter. He used his wonderful acquire-
ments as a foundation upon which to rear a lofty structure whence
all nature might be viewed and a sense of her as a living whole be
gained. The 'Cosmos,' because of this broad outlook and nobility of
spirit, is a unique work in scientific literature. Its general scheme
embraces a fine introduction,- from which the selections below are
chosen, in which the author's views on Nature as a vast organic
unity are set forth with eloquence; a grand review of natural phe-
nomena, sidereal and terrestrial, and including the study of man as
an inhabitant of the planet; followed by a consideration of the incite-
ments to nature's study found in the literature of many lands; and
concluded by a sweeping survey of the progress among mankind of
natural conceptions with regard to the universe. There is nothing
dry or repellently technical about the treatment, which is broad, pro-
foundly ethical, and aglow with elevated feeling.
Humboldt, moreover, showed himself be a man of wide human
sympathy by presenting his theories and discoveries in lectures and
popular articles, simply and plainly, so that those who ran could
read and understand. It was natural that one who had this catholic
sympathy, this feeling for the ideal significance of the natural world,
this wish to put it before his fellow-men in the way of literature
rather than of science, should have done writing of artistic worth.
A list of Humboldt's works would be very long, and is necessa-
rily omitted. He died May 6th, 1859, at the great age of ninety. He
## p. 7770 (#588) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7770
was, as a German critic remarks, the Nestor of scientific investigators
in his own land, and indeed in Europe. As his statue is one of
the proud ornaments of the stately entrance of Berlin University, so
he himself is one of the proud intellectual adornments of his race,
a race conspicuous in the accomplishments of learning and genius.
THE BEAUTY AND UNITY OF NATURE
From 'Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe'
-
IN
N ATTEMPTING, after a long absence from my native country,
to develop the physical phenomena of the globe and the
simultaneous action of the forces that pervade the regions
of space, I experience a twofold cause of anxiety. The subject
before me is so inexhaustible and so varied, that I fear either
to fall into the superficiality of the encyclopædist, or to weary
the mind of my reader by aphorisms consisting of mere gener
alities clothed in dry and dogmatical forms. Undue conciseness
often checks the flow of expression, whilst diffuseness is detri-
mental to a clear and precise exposition of our ideas. Nature is
a free domain; and the profound conceptions and enjoyments
she awakens within us can only be vividly delineated by thought
clothed in exalted forms of speech, worthy of bearing witness to
the majesty and greatness of the creation.
In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely
in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general
influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its
noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain
of connection by which all natural forces are linked together and
made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the per-
ception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our
enjoyments. Such a result, however, can only be reaped as the
fruit of observation and intellect, combined with the spirit of
the age, in which are reflected all the varied phases of thought.
He who can trace, through bygone times, the stream of our
knowledge to its primitive source, will learn from history how for
thousands of years man has labored, amid the ever recurring
changes of form, to recognize the invariability of natural laws,
and has thus by the force of mind gradually subdued a great
portion of the physical world to his dominion. In interrogating
the history of the past, we trace the mysterious course of ideas
## p. 7771 (#589) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7771
yielding the first glimmering perception of the same image of a
Cosmos, or harmoniously ordered whole, which, dimly shadowed
forth to the human mind in the primitive ages of the world, is
now fully revealed to the maturer intellect of mankind as the
result of long and laborious observation.
Each of those epochs of the contemplation of the external
world - the earliest dawn of thought, and the advanced stage of
civilization has its own source of enjoyment. In the former,
this enjoyment, in accordance with the simplicity of the primi-
tive ages, flowed from an intuitive feeling of the order that was
proclaimed by the invariable and successive reappearance of the
heavenly bodies, and by the progressive development of organized
beings; whilst in the latter, this sense of enjoyment springs from
a definite knowledge of the phenomena of nature. When man
began to interrogate nature, and not content with observing,
learnt to evoke phenomena under definite conditions; when once.
he sought to collect and record facts, in order that the fruit of
his labors might aid investigation after his own brief existence.
had passed away,-the philosophy of Nature cast aside the vague
and poetic garb in which she had been enveloped from her ori-
gin; and having assumed a severer aspect, she now weighs the
value of observations, and substitutes induction and reasoning for
conjecture and assumption. The dogmas of former ages survive
now only in the superstitions of the people and the prejudices of
the ignorant, or are perpetuated in a few systems, which, con-
scious of their weakness, shroud themselves in a veil of mystery.
We may also trace the same primitive intuitions in languages
exuberant in figurative expressions; and a few of the best chosen
symbols engendered by the happy inspiration of the earliest ages,
having by degrees lost their vagueness through a better mode of
interpretation, are still preserved amongst our scientific terms.
Nature considered rationally-that is to say, submitted to
the process of thought-is a unity in diversity of phenomena;
a harmony, blending together all created things, however dis-
similar in form and attributes; one great whole (rò a) animated
by the breath of life. The most important result of a rational
inquiry into nature is therefore to establish the unity and har-
mony of this stupendous mass of force and matter, to determine
with impartial justice what is due to the discoveries of the past
and to those of the present, and to analyze the individual parts
of natural phenomena without succumbing beneath the weight of
-
## p. 7772 (#590) ###########################################
7772
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
the whole. Thus, and thus alone, is it permitted to man, while
mindful of the high destiny of his race, to comprehend nature,
to lift the veil that shrouds her phenomena, and as it were, sub-
mit the results of observation to the test of reason and intellect.
In reflecting upon the different degrees of enjoyment presented
to us in the contemplation of nature, we find that the first place
must be assigned to a sensation which is wholly independent
of an intimate acquaintance with the physical phenomena pre-
sented to our view, or of the peculiar character of the region
surrounding us. In the uniform plain bounded only by a distant
horizon, where the lowly heather, the cistus, or waving grasses
deck the soil; on the ocean shore, where the waves softly rip-
pling over the beach leave a track green with the weeds of the
sea: everywhere the mind is penetrated by the same sense of
the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul
by a mysterious inspiration the existence of laws that regulate
the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere
contact with the free air, exercises a soothing yet strengthening
influence on the wearied spirit, calms the storm of passion, and
softens the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths.
Everywhere, in every region of the globe, in every stage of intel-
lectual culture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouch-
safed to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by
a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment
of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and
from the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our
own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side;
whether we look upwards to the starry vault of heaven, scan the
far-stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim horizon
across the vast expanse of ocean.
The contemplation of the individual characteristics of the
landscape, and of the conformation of the land in any definite
region of the earth, gives rise to a different source of enjoyment,
awakening impressions that are more vivid, better defined, and
more congenial to certain phases of the mind than those of which
we have already spoken. At one time the heart is stirred by a
sense of the grandeur of the face of nature, by the strife of the
elements, or as in Northern Asia, by the aspect of the dreary
barrenness of the far-stretching steppes; at another time softer
emotions are excited by the contemplation of rich harvest wrested
by the hand of man from the wild fertility of nature, or by the
## p. 7773 (#591) ###########################################
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
7773
sight of human habitations raised beside some wild and foaming
torrent. Here I regard less the degree of intensity, than the dif-
ference existing in the various sensations that derive their charm.
and permanence from the peculiar character of the scene.
If I might be allowed to abandon myself to the recollections
of my own distant travels, I would instance among the most
striking scenes of nature the calm sublimity of a tropical night,
when the stars, not sparkling as in our northern skies, shed
their soft and planetary light over the gently heaving ocean; or I
would recall the deep valleys of the Cordilleras, where the tall
and slender palms pierce the leafy veil around them, and waving
on high their feathery and arrow-like branches, form, as it were,
«< a forest above a forest"; or I would describe the summit of the
Peak of Teneriffe, when a horizontal layer of clouds, dazzling
in whiteness, has separated the cone of cinders from the plain
below, and suddenly the ascending current pierces the cloudy
veil, so that the eye of the traveler may range from the brink
of the crater, along the vine-clad slopes of Orotava, to the orange
gardens and banana groves that skirt the shore. In scenes like
these, it is not the peaceful charm uniformly spread over the
face of nature that moves the heart, but rather the peculiar
physiognomy and conformation of the land, the features of the
landscape, the ever-varying outline of the clouds, and their blend-
ing with the horizon of the sea, whether it lies spread before us
like a smooth and shining mirror, or is dimly seen through the
morning mist. All that the senses can but imperfectly compre-
hend, all that is most awful in such romantic scenes of nature,
may become a source of enjoyment to man by opening a wide
field to the creative powers of his imagination. Impressions
change with the varying movements of the mind, and we are led
by a happy illusion to believe that we receive from the external
world that with which we have ourselves invested it.
*
When, far from our native country, after a long voyage, we
tread for the first time the soil of a tropical land, we experi-
ence a certain feeling of surprise and gratification in recognizing
in the rocks that surround us the same inclined schistose strata,
and the same columnar basalt covered with cellular amygdaloids,
that we had left in Europe, and whose identity of character in
latitudes so widely different reminds us that the solidification of
the earth's crust is altogether independent of climatic influences.
But these rocky masses of schist and of basalt are covered with
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ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
vegetation of a character with which we are unacquainted, and of
a physiognomy wholly unknown to us; and it is then, amid the
colossal and majestic forms of an exotic flora, that we feel how
wonderfully the flexibility of our nature fits us to receive new
impressions, linked together by a certain secret analogy.
