four o'clock
And the field of death stretched away indefinitely , an immense , tragic cemetery , such as the earth had never known , with endless lines of graves , tombstones and funeral monuments . To the right and left there was nothing , nothing but a dense fog rising from the water , hiding the horizon as completely as the veils of night and making it impossible for Simon to see more than a hundred yards in front of him . But from this fog new land-formations continued to emerge ; and this seemed to him to fall so strictly within the domain of the fabulous and the incredible that he easily imagined them to be rising from the depths on his approach and assuming form and substance to offer him a passage . A little after four o'clock there was a return of the gale , an offensive of ugly clouds emitting volleys of rain and hail . The wind made a gap in the clouds , which it drove north and south , and then , on Simon 's right , parallel with a belt of rosy light which divided the waves from the black sky , the coast-line became visible . It was a vaguely defined line which might have been taken for a fine streak of motionless clouds ; but he knew its general appearance so well that he did not hesitate for a moment . It was the cliffs of the Seine-Inférieurs and the Somme , between Le Tréport and Cayeux .