...of a deserted island

The island was completely deserted; Dan Yack had explored all over it several times.
Nothing ever happened.
There was nothing but the vast unfolding of nature, with its storms, its blustery winds and, in calm weather, the palpable ebb and flow that washed the floating ice, the flotilla of ice-floes, the squadron of icebergs away from the shore and back in again. Everything moved to and fro in perpetual motion: the great continental clouds, like a ship’s crew in seaman’s jerseys, worked their way across a sky that was concave, a deserted sports drome; the humped backs of the hollowed-out waves; the punctual sun that turned and turned, silent as a gramophone record on which nothing had been recorded, dumb as a virgin disc.
There were no animals on the island. Only a little snow petrel that flew over at regular intervals, quite low, gliding round in a circle, describing figures of eight, while its head and its lidless eye swivelled in all directions, before it flew out to sea again with long, melancholy strokes of the wing, strong, rhythmical strokes, returning whence it came without so much as a cry.

[Dan Yack, Cendras, B.]