rable 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 evolved by Nature as destroyers, as
equilibrists, as counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which,
unhindered, would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless
ferment of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are
forgotten,--numbers give courage,--one can abandon one's self, without
fear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical caresses of
the sea ...

V.

Thirty years ago, Last Island lay steeped in the enormous light of even
such magical days. July was dying;--for weeks no fleck of cloud had
broken the heaven's blue dream of eternity; winds held their breath;
slow waveless caressed the bland brown beach with a sound as of kisses
and whispers. To one who found himself alone, beyond the limits of the
village and beyond the hearing of its voices,--the vast silence, the
vast light, seemed full of weirdness. And these hushes, these
transparencies, do not always inspire a causeless apprehension: they
are omens sometimes--omens of coming tempest.
Nature,--incomprehensible Sphinx!--before her mightiest bursts of rage,
ever puts forth her divinest witchery, makes more manifest her awful
beauty ...

But in that forgotten summer the witchery lasted many long days,