II

Night at sea. We have been discussing our destinies. The night is clear; the Orion is sailing between two islands. The moon lights the cliffs. Blue sharks have come into view: the night watch called attention to them and to some dolphins; they were playing in the moonlight; near the sharks, they submerged and did not reappear; blue rocks glow dimly beneath the waves. Luminous jellyfish rise slowly from the deep and blossom in the night air, tossed by the waves like sea-flowers. The stars are dreaming. Leaning over the bow of the ship, near the cordage and above the waves, we turn our backs to the crew, to our companions, to all that is being done, and we look at the waves, the constellations and the islands. “We are watching the isles passing by,” say the crewmen, who are somewhat contemptuous of us, as they forget while looking at each other that they are moving while these things are motionless and unaffected by our passing.

Changing aspects of massive cliffs, elongated promontories that vanish from sight! Precipitous banks! Metamorphoses of mountains! We know now that you remain; we look upon you as transient because we are moving; your aspect changes in spite of your constancy as we sail by. The night watchman calls attention to ships. We, leaning over the waves from dusk to dawn, learn to distinguish transient things from the eternal isles.*

That night we talked about the past; none of us knew how he had managed to come to the ship, but no one regretted the bitter night of meditation.

“From what obscure sleep have I awakened?” asked Alain. “From what tomb? I never stopped thinking and I am still sick. O becalmed, oriental night, will you at last bring relief to a tired brain obsessed by thoughts of God?”

“I was tormented by a desire for conquest,” said Paride; “I paced my room, valiant but sad, and more exhausted by dreams of heroic acts than by their performance. What conquests lie before us now? what noble deeds? where are we going? Tell me! Do you know where this ship is taking us?” Not one of us knew, but all of us trembled on sensing our courage.

“What are we doing here,” he continued, “and what just what is this life if the other one was our sleep?”

“Perhaps we are living our dream as we sleep in our rooms,” said Nathanael.

“Or perhaps we’re searching for regions to satisfy our souls,” said Mélian.

But Tradelineau shouted: “Without a doubt, the fallacy of using vain logic and believing that you can do a thing well only if its causes are known, still enslaves you and motivates this pointless discussion. Why try to imbue our presence on the Orion with highly mysterious motives? We left our books because they bored us, because an unconscious remembrance of the sea and the real sky destroyed our faith in study; something else existed; and when warm, balsamic breezes came to stir the curtains on our windows, we descended willy-nilly toward the plain and began our journey. We were tired of thought, we wanted action; did you see how our souls turned joyous when, taking from the rowers their heavy oars, we felt the liquid blue resist! Oh, the Orion will surely carry us to distant shores. The spasms of courage that we experience will of themselves elicit feats of valor; let’s hope for the best as we wait for our glorious destinies to unfold.”*

That night we also spoke of the tumultuous town where we had embarked, of its fairs and of the crowd.

“Why keep thinking about those people whose eyes saw only things and who were not even astounded?” said Angleval. “I liked the way Bohordin was sobbing during the circus acts; everything should be done as a rite; those people were watching the performances unceremoniously.”

“What do you think of all this, Urien?” Angaire asked me.

And I replied: “One must always represent.”*

Then, since the discussion was becoming unbearable for all of us and since thinking exhausted us, we promised not to speak further of the past or argue about things. Morning was approaching; we parted to sleep.

We had lost sight of the coasts and had been sailing on the open sea for three days when we came upon these beautiful floating islands that a mysterious current had been moving toward us for a long time. And our parallel flight in the midst of the incessantly agitated waves at first made us think the Orion motionless, stranded perhaps on the sand, but our illusion vanished when we examined the islands more closely. A boat brought us down to one of them; they were all almost identical and equally spaced. Their regular shape made us think that they were madrepores; they would undoubtedly have been quite flat without the luxuriant and magnificent vegetation that covered them; toward the front the slightly uneven coral reefs, wherever their roots were exposed, were as gray as volcanic stones; toward the rear they floatedlike tresses, their roots reddened by the sea. Trees of unknown species, exotic trees bent under the weight of heavy bindweeds, and delicate orchids blended their flowers with the leafage. These were sea-gardens; flights of insects followed them; pollen trailed along on the waves.

The impenetrable underbrush forced us to walk along the edge of the shore, and often, when branches overhung the water, to crawl between them, clutching roots and vines.

We wanted to remain to the rear for a while and watch the huge insects fly, but the stifling perfumes that arose from the whole island and were carried to us on the wind, the perfumes that were already making our heads swim, would have killed us, I believe. They were so dense that we could see the aromatic dust spiraling upward.

We made our way to the other shore; startled pink flamingos and ibises took flight. We sat down on a coral rock; wind from the sea wafted the perfumes away from us.

The island must not have been very thick, for beneath it, in the deep sea, under the shadow that it cast, we could again see the light. And we thought that each such island must have become detached, like a ripened fruit from its stem; and when they were no longer held fast to the natal rock by anything, then, like insincere actions, they were at the mercy of the waves, borne along by every current.

On the fifth day, to our regret, we lost sight of them.

As soon as the sun had set, we bathed in water that was pink and green; and, since it reflected the sky, it soon became reddish brown. The warm, pacific billows were soft but penetrating. The oarsmen were awaiting us. We climbed back into the boat just as the moon was rising; there was a slight breeze; tacking our sails, we forced the boat into the wind. And sometimes we saw clouds, mauve-colored still, and sometimes the moon. In the silver wake that it left on the calm sea, the oars dug eddies of light; before us, in the wake of the moon, the Orion moved along, mysterious. The moon appeared first behind a mast, then alone—then by morning it had again fallen into the sea.*

* “My kingdom is not of this world,” is the Gospel statement that most impressed Gide. He could never manage to believe completely in the real world which always seemed “somewhat fantastic” to him, nor in eternal life. He did believe “in another facet of this life, which escapes our senses.”

* Two previous works (Narcissus and André Walter) reveal Gide’s views on art and the relation of art to the two other poles which alternately attracted and repelled him—sexuality and religion. In the present work he effectively combines the three elements deemed essential for any work of art—sensuality, sexuality and pride.

* According to the Symbolists a man is born to make manifest an Idea. Gide wanted to represent, to manifest to others his truth which was his inmost self. His task was complicated by his inability to conciliate morality with sincerity in his own life.

* Gide’s early works, written under the influence of the Symbolist movement, reflect not only his acute sensitivity but his belief in the supremacy of art over other means of cognition or expression. The Symbolists stressed the fusion of sensations and the use of concrete phenomena to suggest Ideas. From his earliest writings we learn that Gide in his solitary walks felt that “The landscape was but a projected emanation of myself … I created it step by step as I became aware of its harmonies … and I marveled as I walked through my dream-garden.”