Her voice grew hollow. With a hesitating hand, which seemed afraid of the half-completed gesture, she pointed to some reefs which stood up in powerful masses of different shapes, crouching animals, crenellated keeps, colossal needles, sphynx-heads, jagged pyramids, all in black granite stained with red, as though soaked in blood.
"Oh, as to those, they have been guarding the island for centuries and centuries, but like wild beasts that only care for doing harm and killing. They . . . they . . . no, it's better never to speak about them or even think of them. They are the thirty wild beasts. Yes, thirty, Madame Véronique, there are thirty of them . . . ."
She made the sign of the cross and continued, more calmly:
"There are thirty of them. Your father says that Sarek is called the island of the thirty coffins because the people instinctively ended in this case by confusing the two words _écueils_ and _cercueils_.[1] Perhaps . . . . It's very likely . . . . But, all the same, they are thirty real coffins, Madame Véronique; and, if we could open them, we should be sure to find them full of bones and bones and bones. M. d'Hergemont himself says that Sarek comes from the word Sarcophagus, which, according to him, is the learned way of saying coffin. Besides, there's more than that . . . ."
[Footnote 1: "Reefs" and "coffins."--_Translator's Note._]
Honorine broke off, as though she wanted to think of something else, and, pointing to a reef of rocks, said:
"Look, Madame Véronique, past that big one right in our way there, you will see, through an opening, our little harbour and, on the quay, François in his red cap."
Véronique had been listening absent-mindedly to Honorine's explanations. She leant her body farther out of the boat, in order to catch sight the sooner of her son, while the Breton woman, once more a victim to her obsession, continued, in spite of herself:
"There's more than that. The Isle of Sarek--and that is why your father came to live here--contains a collection of dolmens which have nothing remarkable about them, but which are peculiar for one reason, that they are all nearly alike. Well, how many of them do you think there are? Thirty! Thirty, like the principal reefs. And those thirty are distributed round the islands, on the cliffs, exactly opposite the thirty reefs; and each of them bears the same name as the reef that corresponds to it: Dol-er-H'roeck, Dol-Kerlitu and so on. What do you say to that?"