milk-white claws;--while in the green sedges beyond there is a
perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind beating among reeds:

a marvellous creeping of "fiddlers," which the inexperienced
visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles, as

they run about sideways, each with his huge single claw folded
upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip

of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks,
shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last

standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging with naked, dead feet
to the sliding beach, lean more and more out of the

perpendicular. As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep;
their intertwisted masses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to

writhe,--like the reaching arms of cephalopods....
... Grande Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will

before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is
going,--slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into

her meadowed land. Last Island has gone! How it went I first
heard from the lips of a veteran pilot, while we sat one evening

together on the trunk of a drifted cypress which some high tide
had pressed deeply into the Grande Isle beach. The day had been

tropically warm; we had sought the shore for a breath of living
air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderous heat lifted,--a

sudden breeze blew,--lightnings flickered in the darkening
horizon,--wind and water began to strive together,--and soon all

the low coast boomed. Then my companion began his story; perhaps
the coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened

to him, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there
flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that

the Voice of the Sea is never one voice, but a tumult of many
voices--voices of drowned men,--the muttering of multitudinous

dead,--the moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage
against the living, at the great Witch call of storms....

IV.
The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is

something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely,
in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity:

those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a
West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress

of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,--a
spirituality, as of eternaltropical spring. It must have been

to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when
he vowed the Infinite Blue was God;--it was indeed under such a

sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern
havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a

something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels
awe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic:

and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is
not the Pneuma indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the

great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the
calm,--save the low land under your feet, which you almost

forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the
liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly,

the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and
Space you begin to dream with open eyes,--to drift into delicious

oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, the
substantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that

infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to
melt utterly away forever....

And this day-magic of azure endures sometimes for months
together. Cloudlessly the dawn reddens up through a violet east:

there is no speck upon the blossoming of its Mystical
Rose,--unless it be the silhouette of some passing gull, whirling

his sickle-wings against the crimsoning. Ever, as the sun floats
higher, the flood shifts its color. Sometimes smooth and gray,

yet flickering with the morning gold, it is the vision of
John,--the apocalyptic Sea of Glass mixed with fire;--again, with

the growing breeze, it takes that incrediblepurple tint familiar
mostly to painters of West Indian scenery;--once more, under the

blaze of noon, it changes to a waste of broken emerald. With
evening, the horizon assumes tints of inexpressible

sweetness,--pearl-lights, opaline colors of milk and fire; and in
the west are topaz-glowings and wondrous flushings as of nacre.

Then, if the sea sleeps, it dreams of all these,--faintly,
weirdly,--shadowing them even to the verge of heaven.

Beautiful, too, are those white phantasmagoria which, at the
approach of equinoctial days, mark the coming of the winds. Over

the rim of the sea a bright cloud gently pushes up its head. It
rises; and others rise with it, to right and left--slowly at

first; then more swiftly. All are brilliantly white and
flocculent, like loose new cotton. Gradually they mount in

enormous line high above the Gulf, rolling and wreathing into an
arch that expands and advances,--bending from horizon to horizon.

A clear, cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the
zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,--a ghostly bridge

arching the empyrean,--upreaching its measureless span from
either underside of the world. Then the colossalphantom begins

to turn, as on a pivot of air,--always preserving its curvilinear
symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the

sky-circle. And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue
sweep of the world, with a wind following after. Day after day,

almost at the same hour, the white arc rises, wheels, and passes
...

... Never a glimpse of rock on these low shores;--only long
sloping beaches and bars of smooth tawny sand. Sand and sea teem

with vitality;--over all the dunes there is a constant
susurration, a blattering and swarming of crustacea;--through all

the sea there is a ceaseless play of silver lightning,--flashing
of myriad fish. Sometimes the shallows are thickened with

minute, transparent, crab-like organisms,--all colorless as
gelatine. There are days also when countless medusae drift

in--beautiful veined creatures that throb like hearts, with
perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanous envelops:

some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood the shadows
or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers;--others have the semblance

of strange living vegetables,--great milky tubers, just beginning
to sprout. But woe to the human skin grazed by those shadowy

sproutings and spectral stamens!--the touch of glowing iron is
not more painful... Within an hour or two after their appearance

all these tremulous jellies vanishmysteriously" target="_blank" title="ad.神秘地；故弄玄虚地">mysteriously as they came.
Perhaps, if a bold swimmer, you may venture out alone a long

way--once! Not twice!--even in company. As the water deepens
beneath you, and you feel those ascending wave-currents of

coldness arising which bespeak profundity, you will also begin to
feel innumerable touches, as of groping fingers--touches of the

bodies of fish, innumerable fish, fleeing towards shore. The
farther you advance, the more thickly you will feel them come;

and above you and around you, to right and left, others will leap
and fall so swiftly as to daze the sight, like intercrossing

fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you,
circling with sinister squeaking cries;--perhaps for an instant

your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that
rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss,

the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you;
the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee

glimmering by will enter into you also...
From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant

sawfish or the ravening shark?--from the herds of the porpoises,
or from the grande-ecaille,--that splendid monster whom no net

may hold,--all helmed and armored in argent plate-mail?--or from
the hideous devilfish of the Gulf,--gigantic, flat-bodied, black,

with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a
bat,--the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all

these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise--goblin shapes