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