“Burn the yellow written prayers.
Light the incense tapers.
Invite the Gods and Genii from all the Grottoes.
The Gods will come forth from their caverns.
The Genii will come out of the mountains——”
Thus this sea surged, rolled, grumbled, tossed, debated. All howled at once, all talked at once, and at intervals silence came simultaneously over them all. This still stillness resembled that strange quiet that often comes in the midst of battle or storm; it might be called the scowl of decision, ominous, portentous.
Fortunately for the Mission, this mob-thought, this contemplation of that turbulent flood, never lasted long enough to decide; some noise would disturb it, a whisper perhaps, but something, and tumultuous it wasted its force in surfy din.
Suddenly there burst above all its noise a deep boom from the river, followed by another and another. Like rockets or even meteors the cannon’s spittle traced its fire over the waters.
The French gunboats had opened fire.
The man-flood that filled the open field and that murmured and howled or was silent, whose wave-crests of flame surged and eddied around the Mission walls, suddenly became a maelstrom of darkness and wild cries. Shell after shell fell into this maelstrom, which, contrary to other whirlpools, was not concentric, but might be called multiple; wherever a shell exploded a minor whirlpool was formed, the outer circles of which were made up of the living, the inner of the wounded, the centre of the dead, the torn. Thus the whole open space was filled with frightful eddies; eddies that bumped into one another, contended, merged. Medusa-like they scattered themselves into a dozen whirlpools, then devouring one another formed a huge indistinguishable mass; struggling, shrinking, climbing, crawling, wriggling. Here and there blown asunder; torn, mutilated, sighing.