Dreams and visions of home haunted his brain; in the hot darkness, beloved or horrible faces bent over him; he was in a never-ending hallucination, through which floated apparitions of Brittany and Iceland.  In the morning was called in the priest, and the old man, who was used to seeing sailors die, was astonished to find so pure a soul in so strong and manly a body.

He cried out for air, air! but there was none anywhere; the ventilators no long gave any; the attendant, who was fanning him with a Chinese fan, only moved unhealthy vapours over him of sickening staleness, which revolted all lungs.  Sometimes fierce, desperate fits came over him; he wished to tear himself away from that bed, where he felt death would come to seize him, and rush above into the full fresh wind and try to live again.  Oh! to be like those others, scrambling about among the rigging, and living among the masts.  But his extreme effort only ended in the feeble lifting of his weakened head; something like the incompleted movement of a sleeper.  He could not manage it, but fell back in the hollow of his crumpled bed, partly chained there by death; and each time, after the fatigue of a like shock, he lost all consciousness.

To please him they opened a port at last, although it was dangerous, the sea being very rough.  It was going on for six in the evening.  When the disk was swung back, a red light entered, glorious and radiant.  The dying sun appeared upon the horizon in dazzling splendour, through a torn rift in a gloomy sky; its blinding light glanced over the waves, and lit up the floating hospital, like a waving torch.

But no air rushed in; the little there was outside, was powerless to enter and drive before it the fevered atmosphere.  Over all sides of that boundless equatorial sea, floated a warm and heavy moisture, unfit for respiration.  No air on any side, not even for the poor gasping fellows on their deathbeds.

One vision disturbed him greatly; it was of his old grandmother, walking quickly along a road, with a heartrending look of alarm; from low-lying funereal clouds above her, fell the drizzling rain; she was on her way to Paimpol, summoned thither to be informed of his death.

He was struggling now, with the death-rattle in his throat.  From the corners of his mouth they sponged away the water and blood, which had welled up in quantities from his chest in writhing agony.  Still the grand, glorious sun lit up all, like a conflagration of the whole world, with blood-laden clouds; through the aperture of the port-hole, a wide streak of crimson fire blazed in, and, spreading over Sylvestre’s bed, formed a halo around him.

At that very moment that same sun was to be seen in Brittany, where midday was about to strike.  It was, indeed, the same sun, beheld at the precise moment of its never-ending round; but here it kept quite another hue.  Higher up in the bluish sky, it kept shedding a soft white light on grandmother Yvonne, sitting out at her door, sewing.