CHAPTER VII.
SUPERHUMAN HORRORS.
On their part it was with wild jubilee and delight that those on boardthe hooker saw the hostile land recede and lessen behind them. Bydegrees the dark ring of ocean rose higher, dwarfing in twilightPortland, Purbeck, Tineham, Kimmeridge, the Matravers, the long streaksof dim cliffs, and the coast dotted with lighthouses.
England disappeared. The fugitives had now nothing round them but thesea.
All at once night grew awful.
There was no longer extent nor space; the sky became blackness, andclosed in round the vessel. The snow began to fall slowly; a few flakesappeared. They might have been ghosts. Nothing else was visible in thecourse of the wind. They felt as if yielded up. A snare lurked in everypossibility.
It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the Polarwaterspout makes its appearance.
A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over ocean, andin places its lividity adhered to the waves. Some of these adherencesresembled pouches with holes, pumping the sea, disgorging vapour, andrefilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew upcones of foam on the sea.
The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meetit. The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other.
In the first mad shock not a sail was clewed up, not a jib lowered, nota reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked and bentback as if in fear.
Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in thesame direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which issometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely atthe mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were outin moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping herhead on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoidbeing pooped or caught broadside on. This semi-prudence would haveavailed her nothing in case of the wind's shifting and taking her aback.
A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance. The roar of the abyss,nothing can be compared to it. It is the great brutish howl of theuniverse. What we call matter, that unsearchable organism, thatamalgamation of incommensurable energies, in which can occasionally bedetected an almost imperceptible degree of intention which makes usshudder, that blind, benighted cosmos, that enigmatical Pan, has a cry,a strange cry, prolonged, obstinate, and continuous, which is less thanspeech and more than thunder. That cry is the hurricane. Other voices,songs, melodies, clamours, tones, proceed from nests, from broods, frompairings, from nuptials, from homes. This one, a trumpet, comes out ofthe Naught, which is All. Other voices express the soul of the universe;this one expresses the monster. It is the howl of the formless. It isthe inarticulate finding utterance in the indefinite. A thing it is fullof pathos and terror. Those clamours converse above and beyond man. Theyrise, fall, undulate, determine waves of sound, form all sorts of wildsurprises for the mind, now burst close to the ear with the importunityof a peal of trumpets, now assail us with the rumbling hoarseness ofdistance. Giddy uproar which resembles a language, and which, in fact,is a language. It is the effort which the world makes to speak. It isthe lisping of the wonderful. In this wail is manifested vaguely allthat the vast dark palpitation endures, suffers, accepts, rejects. Forthe most part it talks nonsense; it is like an access of chronicsickness, and rather an epilepsy diffused than a force employed; wefancy that we are witnessing the descent of supreme evil into theinfinite. At moments we seem to discern a reclamation of the elements,some vain effort of chaos to reassert itself over creation. At times itis a complaint. The void bewails and justifies itself. It is as thepleading of the world's cause. We can fancy that the universe is engagedin a lawsuit; we listen--we try to grasp the reasons given, theredoubtable for and against. Such a moaning of the shadows has thetenacity of a syllogism. Here is a vast trouble for thought. Here is the_raison d'etre_ of mythologies and polytheisms. To the terror of thosegreat murmurs are added superhuman outlines melting away as theyappear--Eumenides which are almost distinct, throats of Furies shaped inthe clouds, Plutonian chimeras almost defined. No horrors equal thosesobs, those laughs, those tricks of tumult, those inscrutable questionsand answers, those appeals to unknown aid. Man knows not what to becomein the presence of that awful incantation. He bows under the enigma ofthose Draconian intonations. What latent meaning have they? What do theysignify? What do they threaten? What do they implore? It would seem asthough all bonds were loosened. Vociferations from precipice toprecipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from the rainto the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from the stars to thefoam--the abyss unmuzzled--such is that tumult, complicated by somemysterious strife with evil consciences.
The loquacity of night is not less lugubrious than its silence. Onefeels 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. Inthe 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, thecrumbling, the fatal; one feels earth no longer, one feels the otherreality.
In the shadow, infinite and indefinite, lives something or some one; butthat which lives there forms part of our death. After our earthlypassage, when that shadow shall be light for us, the life which isbeyond our life shall seize us. Meanwhile it appears to touch and tryus. Obscurity is a pressure. Night is, as it were, a hand placed on oursoul. At certain hideous and solemn hours we feel that which is beyondthe wall of the tomb encroaching on us.
Never does this proximity of the unknown seem more imminent than instorms at sea. The horrible combines with the fantastic. The possibleinterrupter of human actions, the old Cloud compeller, has it in hispower to mould, in whatsoever shape he chooses, the inconsistentelement, the limitless incoherence, the force diffused and undecided ofaim. That mystery the tempest every instant accepts and executes someunknown changes of will, apparent or real.
Poets have, in all ages, called this the caprice of the waves. But thereis no such thing as caprice. The disconcerting enigmas which in naturewe call caprice, and in human life chance, are splinters of a lawrevealed to us in glimpses.