He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,
at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.

Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength
is exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men,
has vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf;
he sinks, he stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under
him the monstrous billows of the invisible; he shouts.

There are no more men. Where is God?

He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.

Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.

He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef;
they are deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest
obeys only the infinite.

Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,
the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.
Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks
of the gloomy adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow.
The bottomless cold paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively;
they close, and grasp nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts,
useless stars! What is to be done? The desperate man gives up;
he is weary, he chooses the alternative of death; he resists not;
he lets himself go; he abandons his grip; and then he tosses forevermore
in the lugubrious dreary depths of engulfment.