Still worse, the fury of the Tempest, by a desperate effort, loosened one of the hinges of a shutter, which still remained closed, but from that moment shook, creaked, shrieked, in the most dismal fashion that you can imagine. To make it fast I had to open the window, and that moment that I did so, though sheltered by the shutter, I felt myself in the very centre of the whirlwind, half-deafened by the frightful force of a sound equal to that of a cannon fired close to one's ear. Through the cracks of the shutter I perceived what gave me a clear notion of the tremendous power that was raging landward, skyward, seaward, horizontally, upward, and downward. The waves, meeting and battling, smote each other so fiercely that they could not descend again. Gust after gust from beneath them, carried them landward; mighty and vast as they were, they were borne landward as though so many feathers, by the upheaving force of those mighty blasts.
How would it have been, if, shutters and windows being driven in, our poor room had shipped one of those vast billows which the storm-wind thus hurled upon the adjacent heaths? We were, in fact, exposed to the strange chance of being shipwrecked on the land. Our house, so close to the shore, might at any moment have its roof or even its upper story carried right away by wind and wave. The villagers often told us that that was, in fact, their nightly thought and their nightly terror, and they advised us to seek a more inland shelter. But we still comforted ourselves with the thought that the longer this tempest had lasted, the sooner it must come to an end; and, to the undoubtedly reasonable advice thus given to us, our reply was, still, "To-morrow, to-morrow."
The overland news that came to us, told of nothing but wrecks, still wrecks. Close by us, on the 30th of October, a vessel from the South Sea, with a crew of thirty hands, foundered, with a loss of all hands and her rich cargo—and this at the very entrance of the roadstead. After having passed through so many storms and calms, after having safely weathered so many rocks and shoals, she had arrived within sight, within hail, almost within touch of a little beach of fine sand, the fine-weather bathing place of delicate and timid women. Well! That seemingly gentle little sandy beach, upheaved into a huge and impassable sandbar—was the grave of the good ship, which ran upon it with frightful force, and was crushed, shivered into small pieces—converted from a "thing of life," into a mutilated corpse. What became of the crew? Not a trace of them has ever been found; they were probably swept, vainly struggling, from the deck, and swallowed up by the sands.
This tragical event very naturally led us to suspect that many similar ones had occurred, elsewhere, and nothing was thought of or talked of but probable calamities. But the sea seemed by no means at the end of her work. We on shore had had quite enough of it. Not so our enraged sea. I saw our pilots, sheltering themselves behind a rocky wall from south-west, keep an anxious look-out seaward, and shake their heads in ominous doubt of what was even yet to come. Happily for them, no craft made her appearance in the offing—or they were there to risk, most probably to lose, their lives. And I, also, looked anxiously out upon that sea, on which I looked no less in hate than in anxiety. True, I was in no real danger, but for that very reason I was all the more despairingly the victim of ennui. That sea had a look at once hideous and terrible; her vagaries were as absurd as her strength was irresistible. Nothing there reminded one of the fanciful descriptions of the poets. By a strange contrast, the more I felt myself depressed, and as it were, lifeless, the more vigorously and vehemently did she seem to feel and manifest her life; as though, galvanized by her own furious motion, she had become animated by some strange, fantastic soul. In the general rage, each wave seemed animated by its own special and sentient rage; in the whole uniformity, (paradoxical as it may seem, it, yet, is quite true) there was, as it were some diabolical swarming. Was all this attributable to my worn brain and wearied eyes? Or were the reality and the impression alike true? Those waves reminded me of some terrible mob, some horrid rabblement, not of men, but of howling dogs, a myriad of howling and eager dogs, wolves—maddened and furious dogs and wolves. Dogs and wolves, do I say? Let me rather say, a dread concourse of nameless, and detestable, and spectral beasts, eyeless and earless, but with hugely yawning jaws, foaming and eager for blood, blood, still more blood!
Monsters! what more do ye require? Are ye not surfeited with wrecked ships and slain men? Do we not from all sides hear of your horrid triumphs? What more, I ask, do ye demand? And the horrid phantoms answer—"Thy death, universal Death, the destruction of the Earth, a return to black Night and ancient Chaos."
THE BEACONS.
Impetuous is the channel where her strait receives the full rush of the North sea, and very turbulent is the sea of Brittany, rushing over basaltic shoals in swift and furious rapids. But the gulf of Gascony, from Cordouan to Biarritz, is just one long maritime contradiction, one enigma of mighty strifes. As she goes to the southward, she suddenly becomes extraordinarily deep, as though her waters sank, on the instant into some vast and fathomless abyss. Passing over that sudden and immense depth, the onward wave under the impulse of the terrible pressure leaps upward to a height and onward with a velocity unequalled by any other of our seas. The great surge from the north-west is the motive-power of this huge liquid machinery; from a little more north it threatens to crush Saint-Jean-de-Luz; farther west it repels the Gironde, and crowns with her terrible billows the luckless Cordouan.