Outside the lines, the rule of Canuangra was that you had to run everywhere. Sitting, lying, standing and especially walking, were not permitted. If you needed to stay in the one place at any time, then you had to run on the spot. It didn’t matter if you were loaded down with equipment, or carrying heavy objects, you had to run. The only relief from this regime was when you knocked off for the night, or when we were in the jungle on a tactical basis, but otherwise you ran. There were two standard punishments for anyone spotted when not running. The first was to have to run circuits of the parade ground carrying a bucket of wet sand in each hand, the number of laps being that of the number of steps you were seen to walk, or else the more basic punishment of press-ups.

Gilliatt pulled off his shoes, sprang bare-footed to the slimy weeds, and made the sloop fast to a point of rock.
    Then he advanced as far as he could along the granite cornice, reached the rock immediately beneath the wreck, looked up, and examined it.
    The Durande had been caught between the two rocks, about twenty feet above the water. It must have been a huge billow that had carried it there.
    Alone on a storm-wracked barren rock in the middle of the ocean, the hero sets out to salvage this ship from its seemingly impossible position. His herculean task, performed for the worst possible reason—to win the love of a lady—is minutely chronicled. There are dangers everywhere, from storms and giant waves, in caves and from debris poised to tumble into the abyss.
The monster was the mysterious inmate of the grotto; the terrible genius of the place; a kind of marine demon.
    The splendours of the cavern existed for it alone.
    Gilliatt had thrust his arm deep into the opening; the monster snapped at it.
    It held him fast, as a spider holds a fly.
    He was in the water up to his belt; his naked feet clutching the slippery roundness of the huge stones at the bottom; his right arm bound and rendered powerless by the flat coils of the long tentacles of the creature, and his body almost hidden under the folds and cross-folds of this horrible bandage.
    Of the eight arms of the octopus, three adhered to the rock, while five encircled Gilliatt. In this way, clinging to the granite on one side, and to its human prey on the other, it chained him to the rock. Two hundred and fifty suckers were upon him, tormenting him with agony and loathing. He was grasped by gigantic hands, each finger of which was nearly a yard long, and furnished inside with living blisters eating into his flesh…
    But our hero prevails and succeeds in getting the ship down from its perch singlehanded, re-floats it, and sails it home only to discover the lady has given herself to his rival. This being a French novel, it ends with his suicide. A minor novel by Victor Hugo? Now there’s a hard concept to get a grip on. Toilers of the Sea, written when Hugo was exiled on the Channel Islands, the ocean scenes equal Conrad, the drama equals anything Hugo wrote, it’s just the breadth of the scale and the length of the book that is small. It is gigantic in every other way.