SUPERHUMAN HORRORS.
On their part it was with wild jubilee and delight that those on board
the hooker saw the hostile land recede and lessen behind them. By
degrees the dark ring of ocean rose higher, dwarfing in twilight
Portland, Purbeck, Tineham, Kimmeridge, the Matravers, the long streaks
of dim cliffs, and the coast dotted with lighthouses.
England disappeared. The fugitives had now nothing round them but the
sea.
All at once night grew awful.
There was no longer extent nor space; the sky became blackness, and
closed in round the vessel. The snow began to fall slowly; a few flakes
appeared. They might have been ghosts. Nothing else was visible in the
course of the wind. They felt as if yielded up. A snare lurked in every
possibility.
It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the Polar
waterspout makes its appearance.
A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over ocean, and
in places its lividity adhered to the waves. Some of these adherences
resembled pouches with holes, pumping the sea, disgorging vapour, and
refilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew up
cones of foam on the sea.
The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meet
it. 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, not
a reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked and bent
back as if in fear.
Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in the
same direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which is
sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely at
the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were out
in moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her
head on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoid
being pooped or caught broadside on. This semi-prudence would have
availed 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 the
universe. What we call matter, that unsearchable organism, that
amalgamation of incommensurable energies, in which can occasionally be
detected an almost imperceptible degree of intention which makes us
shudder, that blind, benighted cosmos, that enigmatical Pan, has a cry,
a strange cry, prolonged, obstinate, and continuous, which is less than
speech and more than thunder. That cry is the hurricane. Other voices,
songs, melodies, clamours, tones, proceed from nests, from broods, from
pairings, from nuptials, from homes. This one, a trumpet, comes out of
the 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 is
the inarticulate finding utterance in the indefinite. A thing it is full
of pathos and terror. Those clamours converse above and beyond man. They
rise, fall, undulate, determine waves of sound, form all sorts of wild
surprises for the mind, now burst close to the ear with the importunity
of a peal of trumpets, now assail us with the rumbling hoarseness of
distance. Giddy uproar which resembles a language, and which, in fact,
is a language. It is the effort which the world makes to speak. It is
the lisping of the wonderful. In this wail is manifested vaguely all
that the vast dark palpitation endures, suffers, accepts, rejects. For
the most part it talks nonsense; it is like an access of chronic
sickness, and rather an epilepsy diffused than a force employed; we
fancy that we are witnessing the descent of supreme evil into the
infinite. At moments we seem to discern a reclamation of the elements,
some vain effort of chaos to reassert itself over creation. At times it
is a complaint. The void bewails and justifies itself. It is as the
pleading of the world’s cause. We can fancy that the universe is engaged
in a lawsuit; we listen--we try to grasp the reasons given, the
redoubtable for and against. Such a moaning of the shadows has the
tenacity of a syllogism. Here is a vast trouble for thought. Here is the
_raison d’être_ of mythologies and polytheisms. To the terror of those
great murmurs are added superhuman outlines melting away as they
appear--Eumenides which are almost distinct, throats of Furies shaped in
the clouds, Plutonian chimeras almost defined. No horrors equal those
sobs, those laughs, those tricks of tumult, those inscrutable questions
and answers, those appeals to unknown aid. Man knows not what to become
in the presence of that awful incantation. He bows under the enigma of
those Draconian intonations. What latent meaning have they? What do they
signify? What do they threaten? What do they implore? It would seem as
though all bonds were loosened. Vociferations from precipice to
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
power to mould, in whatsoever shape he chooses, the inconsistent
element, the limitless incoherence, the force diffused and undecided of
aim. That mystery the tempest every instant accepts and executes some
unknown changes of will, apparent or real.
Poets have, in all ages, called this the caprice of the waves. But there
is no such thing as caprice. The disconcerting enigmas which in nature
we call caprice, and in human life chance, are splinters of a law
revealed to us in glimpses.