She saw that behind her step, the seas immediately closed till they became one single sea of ink; she saw that the only path for her stretched across the seas, that behind her it immediately sank away.
She could not go back, she must go on.
And she buoyed up her sinking soul; she went on, and in a high soprano voice repeated again and again her question:
“Spirits in the sea of pain, where shall I find the Jewel for Emeralda?”
“Vanity, vanity!”
The plaintive viol kept trembling, and the same sound sounded ever, the unchangeable answer. The hurricane was no longer chill, but warm, sultry, strangely sultry; more and more sultry blew the everlasting cyclone.
The sea-monsters kept back; they dived again below; the sea sank with them, the shades swayed to and fro in storm-flood, waterfall—storm-flood, waterfall, and many-headed hydras came sinuously up. The sea no longer shone with phosphorescent glow, but was quite black, pitch black, black as boiling pitch, without foam and without light, and kept sending up a discharge of miry, vaporous matter. In the boiling pitch, the hydras, with their thousand snaky heads, kept diving up, tortoise-scaled; swayed to and fro, to and fro the pale faces of the shades, but ever sounded the plaintive viol, and ever rang forth the same note, the unchangeable answer to Psyche’s shrill question:
“Hydras of the sea of pain, spirits in the sea of pain, where shall I find the Jewel for Emeralda...??”
“Vanity, vanity...!”
The pitch seethed and hissed and steamed.