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 and wondrous flushings as of
nacre. Then, if the sea sleeps, it dreams of all these,--faintly,
weirdly,--shadowing them even to the verge of heaven.
Beautiful, too, are those white phantasmagoria which, at the approach
of equinoctial days, mark the coming of the winds. Over the rim of the
sea a bright cloud gently pushes up its head. It rises; and others
rise with it, to right and left--slowly at first; then more swiftly.
All are brilliantly white and flocculent, like loose new cotton.
Gradually they mount in enormous line high above the Gulf, rolling and
wreathing into an arch that expands and advances,--bending from horizon
to horizon.
A clear, cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, it
seems there to hang poised awhile,--a ghostly bridge arching the
empyrean,--upreaching its measureless span from either underside of the
world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of
air,--always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen
ends beyond and below the sky-circle. And at last it floats away
unbroken beyond the blue sweep of the world, with a wind following
after. Day after day, almost at the same hour, the white arc rises,
wheels, and passes...
... Never a glimpse of rock on these low shores;--only long sloping
beaches and bars of smooth tawny sand. Sand and sea teem with
vitality;--over all the dunes there is a constant susurration, a
blattering and swarming of crustacea;--through all the sea there is a
ceaseless play of silver lightning,--flashing of myriad fish.
Sometimes the shallows are thickened with minute, transparent,
crab-like organisms,--all colorless as gelatine. There are days also
when countless medusae drift in--beautiful veined creatures that throb
like hearts, with perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanous
envelops: some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood the
shadows or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers;--others have the
semblance of strange living vegetables,--great milky tubers, just
beginning to sprout. But woe to the human skin grazed by those shadowy
sproutings and spectral stamens!--the touch of glowing iron is not more
painful... Within an hour or two after their appearance all these
tremulous jellies vanish mysteriously as they came.
Perhaps, if a bold swimmer, you may venture out alone a long way--once!
Not twice!--even in company. As the water deepens beneath you, and you
feel those ascending wave-currents of coldness arising which bespeak
profundity, you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as of
groping fingers--touches of the bodies of fish, innumerable fish,
fleeing towards shore. The farther you advance, the more thickly you
will feel them come; and above you and around you, to right and left,
others will leap and fall so swiftly as to daze the sight, like
intercrossing fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about
you, circling with sinister squeaking cries;--perhaps for an instant
your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that rushes
past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and
voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; 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 ...