The affectation common to seamen¹ of never being surprised at anything that sea or land can produce had become in Peyrol a second nature. Having learned from childhood to suppress every sign of wonder before all extraordinary sights and events, all strange people, all strange customs, and the most alarming phenomena² of nature (as manifested, for instance, in the violence of volcanoes or the fury of human beings), he had really become indifferent — or only perhaps utterly³ inexpressive. He had seen so much that was bizarre or atrocious, and had heard so many astounding⁴ tales, that his usual mental reaction before a new experience was generally formulated⁵ in the words, “J'en ai vu bien d'autres.” The last thing which had touched him with the panic of the supernatural had been the death under a heap of rags of that gaunt, fierce woman, his mother; and the last thing that had nearly overwhelmed him at the age of twelve with another kind of terror was the riot of sound and the multitude of mankind on the quays⁶ in Marseilles, something perfectly⁷ inconceivable from which he had instantly taken refuge behind a stack of wheat sacks after having been chased ashore⁸ from the tartane. He had remained there quaking till a man in a cocked hat and with a sabre at his side (the boy had never seen either such a hat or such a sabre in his life) had seized him by the arm close to the armpit and had hauled him out from there; a man who might have been an ogre (only Peyrol had never heard of an ogre) but at any rate in his own way was alarming and wonderful beyond anything he could have imagined — if the faculty⁹ of imagination had been developed in him then. No doubt all this was enough to make one die of fright, but that possibility never occurred to him. Neither did he go mad; but being only a child, he had simply adapted himself, by means of passive

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