The Man Who Laughs
VICTOR HUGO
BOOK 2
CHAPTER 8

Nix et Nox

The characteristic of the snowstorm is its blackness. Nature's habitual aspect
during a storm, the earth or sea black and the sky pale, is reversed; the sky is black,
the ocean white, foam below, darkness above; a horizon walled in with smoke; a
zenith roofed with crape. The tempest resembles a cathedral hung with mourning,
but no light in that cathedral: no phantom lights on the crests of the waves, no
spark, no phosphorescence, naught but a huge shadow. The polar cyclone differs
from the tropical cyclone, inasmuch as the one sets fire to every light, and the other
extinguishes them all. The world is suddenly converted into the arched vault of a
cave. Out of the night falls a dust of pale spots, which hesitate between sky and
sea. These spots, which are flakes of snow, slip, wander, and flow. It is like the
tears of a winding-sheet putting themselves into lifelike motion. A mad wind
mingles with this dissemination. Blackness crumbling into whiteness, the furious
into the obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind
under a catafalque such is the snowstorm. Underneath trembles the ocean,
forming and re-forming over portentous unknown depths.
In the polar wind, which is electrical, the flakes turn suddenly into hailstones, and
the air becomes filled with projectiles; the water crackles, shot with grape.
No thunderstrokes: the lightning of boreal storms is silent. What is sometimes said
of the cat, "it swears," may be applied to this lightning. It is a menace proceeding
from a mouth half open and strangely inexorable. The snowstorm is a storm blind
and dumb; when it has passed, the ships also are often blind and the sailors dumb.
To escape from such an abyss is difficult.
It would be wrong, however, to believe shipwreck to be absolutely inevitable. The
Danish fishermen of Disco and the Balesin; the seekers of black whales; Hearn

roll of the vessel the hawse-holes, now to starboard, now to larboard, became as so
many open mouths vomiting back the foam into the sea. The women had taken
refuge in the cabin, but the men remained on deck; the blinding snow eddied
round, the spitting surge mingled with it. All was fury.
At that moment the chief of the band, standing abaft on the stern frames, holding
on with one hand to the shrouds, and with the other taking off the kerchief he wore
round his head and waving it in the light of the lantern, gay and arrogant, with
pride in his face, and his hair in wild disorder, intoxicated by all the darkness, cried
out,
"We are free!"
"Free, free, free," echoed the fugitives, and the band, seizing hold of the rigging,
rose up on deck.
"Hurrah!" shouted the chief.
And the band shouted in the storm,
"Hurrah!"
Just as this clamour was dying away in the tempest, a loud solemn voice rose from
the other end of the vessel, saying,
"Silence!"
All turned their heads. The darkness was thick, and the doctor was leaning against
the mast so that he seemed part of it, and they could not see him.
The voice spoke again,
"Listen!"
All were silent.
Then did they distinctly hear through the darkness the toll of a bell.