Chita: A Memory of Last Island | Page 6

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 incredible purple 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 colossal phantom 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 vanish 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