precipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from the rain
to the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from the stars to the
foam--the abyss unmuzzled--such is that tumult, complicated by some
mysterious strife with evil consciences.

The loquacity of night is not less lugubrious than its silence. One
feels in it the anger of the unknown.

Night is a presence. Presence of what?

For that matter we must distinguish between night and the shadows. In
the night there is the absolute; in the darkness the multiple. Grammar,
logic as it is, admits of no singular for the shadows. The night is one,
the shadows are many.[5]

This mist of nocturnal mystery is the scattered, the fugitive, the
crumbling, the fatal; one feels earth no longer, one feels the other
reality.

In the shadow, infinite and indefinite, lives something or some one; but
that which lives there forms part of our death. After our earthly
passage, when that shadow shall be light for us, the life which is
beyond our life shall seize us. Meanwhile it appears to touch and try
us. Obscurity is a pressure. Night is, as it were, a hand placed on our
soul. At certain hideous and solemn hours we feel that which is beyond
the wall of the tomb encroaching on us.

Never does this proximity of the unknown seem more imminent than in
storms at sea. The horrible combines with the fantastic. The possible
interrupter of human actions, the old Cloud compeller, has it in his