With the sweat running from his face he crept out from under the tent and stood beneath the trees.
Nothing. The new moon had risen and was floating like a little silver boat amidst the stars; the starlight flooded the sea and brimmed over on to the foam. So solid was the sky with stars that the palm fronds cut their silhouettes on it sharply and distinctly. Never was there a more lovely southern night.
As he stood and listened, again, from very far away this time, came the sound.
Boom! As though the drummer had stridden away leagues across the sea to beat his drum around the world before dawn.
Had Gaspard known these waters the sound would have had less terror for him. It was the sound of great devil-fish, sea-bats that rise from the water, quiver for a moment in the air, and then fall, smashing the waves to foam, with a noise that reverberates for miles. But he knew nothing of the sea-bats, and he stood pursuing in his mind the drummer who had beaten this strange réveil and with his eyes fixed on the horizon to eastward where the sky was stained by the dawn.
It came, killing the stars, clear and cold in tint, beneath a sky shifting in colour from smoke-grey to aquamarine and icy blue. Then it bloomed into warmth and kindness of tone. Just as children hold buttercups to one another’s faces to see the yellow reflection, so one might suppose some hand beneath the horizon was holding a vast buttercup to the dawn’s pallid face.
A thread of living gold stole along the sea-line, became a fiery, moving caterpillar, and, at a stroke, the last stars were washed away, dissolving in blueness and infinite distance, the sun was peeping across the water and then suddenly, as though he had taken a leap elbow-high and elbow resting on the sea-line, he leaned forward and struck the world in the face with his great golden hand.
Had you been watching Gaspard, as he stood with the dawn wind blowing his hair, you would have seen the stroke of the sun’s hand on his face, on the palms behind him, on the sea before him, suddenly given as a blow.
The same hand was striking the Bahamas, and in a hundred blue harbours from Cape Sable to Port of Spain ships’ topmasts were catching the light. Martinique, Guadeloupe, Grenada, peak, morne, and valley, were already flaming to it like green torches in the dawn wind. Key West would be stricken in a moment and the gulf to Galveston and Tampico be turned from a lake of stars to a living sapphire, the Caribbean would leap alive from Grand Cayman to Darien, from San Juan to La Guaira, alive and burning and blue. The wind that was blowing in Gaspard’s face, a wind that came over the blue and laughter of the morning sea like a wind from the golden age and the youth of the world, held freshness for the orange groves and the gardens of all these Western islands where the night jessamines were closing, the night insects ceasing their songs, and the fireflies preparing to put out their lamps.
Gaspard knew nothing of that tremendous poem in colour which the dawn shows to God each time she lifts the darkness from the tropics; just now he did not even see the sunrise and its splendour, he had, for a moment, forgotten even his fears; his eyes were fixed on an object about a mile away to the southeast, something round and black that bobbed in the sparkle and glitter of the water.