Chita-A Memory of Last Island [3]
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 eternal tropical 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 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
... 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 eternal tropical 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 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