Chita: A Memory of Last Island | Page 7

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,--days
born in rose-light, buried in gold. It was the height of the season. The
long myrtle-shadowed village was thronged with its summer

population;--the big hotel could hardly accommodate all its guests;--the
bathing-houses were too few for the crowds who flocked to the water
morning and evening. There were diversions for all,--hunting and
fishing parties, yachting excursions, rides, music, games, promenades.
Carriage wheels whirled flickering along the beach, seaming its
smoothness noiselessly, as if muffled. Love wrote its dreams upon the
sand ...
... Then one great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn
over the world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched
the quicksilver smoothness of the waters--the swaying shadow of a vast
motion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to rise up bodily at the sky;
the horizon-curve lifted to a straight line; the line darkened and
approached,--a monstrous wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green
water, moving swift as a cloud-shadow pursued by sunlight. But it had
looked formidable only by startling contrast with the previous placidity
of the open: it was scarcely two feet high;--it curled slowly as it neared
the beach, and combed itself out in sheets of woolly foam with a low,
rich roll of whispered thunder. Swift in pursuit another followed--a
third--a feebler fourth; then the sea only swayed a little, and stilled
again. Minutes passed, and the immeasurable heaving
recommenced--one, two, three, four ... seven long swells this time;--and
the Gulf smoothed itself once more. Irregularly the phenomenon
continued to repeat itself, each time with heavier billowing and briefer
intervals of quiet--until at last the whole sea grew restless and shifted
color and flickered green;--the swells became shorter and changed form.
Then from horizon to shore ran one uninterrupted heaving--one vast
green swarming of snaky shapes, rolling in to hiss and flatten upon the
sand. Yet no single cirrus-speck revealed itself through all the violet
heights: there was no wind!--you might have fancied the sea had been
upheaved from beneath ...
And indeed the fancy of a seismic origin for a windless surge would
not appear in these latitudes to be utterly without foundation. On the
fairest days a southeast breeze may bear you an odor singular enough to
startle you from sleep,--a strong, sharp smell as of fish-oil; and gazing
at the sea you might be still more startled at the sudden apparition of

great oleaginous patches spreading over the water, sheeting over the
swells. That is, if you had never heard of the mysterious submarine
oil-wells, the volcanic fountains, unexplored, that well up with the
eternal pulsing of the Gulf-Stream ...
But the pleasure-seekers of Last Island knew there must have been a
"great blow" somewhere that day. Still the sea swelled; and a splendid
surf made the evening bath delightful. Then, just at sundown, a
beautiful cloud-bridge grew