But the Avenger of Blood is behind; for the Spider had now cleared the harbour's mouth, and was in hot pursuit. The felucca with her sails—a whole constellation of shot-holes in them—double reefed, tearing and plunging through it; her sharp stem flashing up the water into smoke, in a vain attempt to weather the sandy point.—"Won't do, my boy; you cannot, carry to it as you will, clear the land as you are standing; you must tack soon, unless you mean to jump the little beauty over it." As I spoke, she hove about and stood across the schooner, exchanging broadsides gallantly. "Well done, little one." The Spider tacked also, and stood after her—a gun!—another!—both replied to by the felucca; the musketry peppering away all the while from each vessel; the tiny white puffs instantly obliterated by the foam-drift—and now neither fired a shot.
The gale at this moment came down in thunder; all above as black as night, all below as white as wool. The Spider shortens sail just in time—the Midge not a pistol-shot ahead on the weatherbow. See, the squall strikes her—her tall lateen sail shines through the more than twilight darkness and the driving rain and spray, like a sea-bird's wing. Mercy! how she lies over! She sinks in the trough of the sea!—Now she rises again, and breasts it gallantly!—There! that's over her bodily; her sails are dark, and sea-washed three parts up. Look! how the clear green water, as she lurches, pours out of the afterleech of the sail like a cascade! Now! she is buried again; no! buoyant as cork—she dances over it like a wild-duck. See! how she tips up her round stern, and slides down the liquid hollow; once more she catches the breeze on the opposite rise of the sea; her sails tearing her along up the watery acclivity, as if they would drag the spars out of her. Now she rushes on the curl of the wave, with her bows and a third of her keel hove out into the air, as if she were going to shoot across, like a flying fish, into the swelling bosom of the next sea. Once more she is hove on her beam-ends, and hid by an intervening billow—Ha!—what a blinding flash, as the blue forked lightning glances from sky to sea, right over where I saw her last!—hark! the splitting crash and stunning reverberations of the shaking thunder, rolling through the empyrean loud as an archangel's voice, until earth and air tremble again. She rights!—she rights!—there! the narrow shred of white canvass gleams again through the mist in the very fiercest of the squall—yes, there!—no!—God of my fathers!
IT IS BUT A BREAKING WAVE!
CHAPTER XII.
THE END OF THE YARN.
"For now I stand as one upon a rock,
Environed with a wilderness of sea;
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will in his brinish bowels swallow him."
Titus Andronicus.
It was half-past nine in the morning—De Walden and I were seated on the cliff where I had been shot at the day before. The only indications of the spent storm were a line of froth, intermixed with large quantities of wreck and drift-wood, on the beach, far above high water-mark; branches of trees strewed here and there, with their yesterday bright green leaves, now sun-withered and as red and sere as if they had lain a winter on the ground; and overhead, a clear, cool, luxurious air and sky. The hillsides had even become perceptibly greener in one night's time—in short, Dame Nature had got her face well washed, and every thing was clean, and fresh, and shining. The sea-breeze was roughening the water in the offing, but in the cove, on which we looked down, all was as yet as smooth as glass. The undulations flowing towards the harbour's mouth, occasioned by what I would call the echo of the ground swell, or the reverberation of the send of the sea from the rocky beach, were scarcely perceptible; except from the varying shadows of the banks, and grey clouds, as the plane from which they were reflected was gently bent by the rise and fall of the water. The whole creek was sprinkled throughout its calm surface, by masses of floating wreck from the Mosca, that sparkled with the motion of the water, slight as it was, in the slanting rays of the morning sun; while out to windward, near the entrance, there was a blue ripple on the sea right in his wake, that prevented us seeing distinctly what it was, but which I guessed to proceed from the rushing of fish, at some object on which they were feeding. As the sun rose, the dazzle hauled further off, and we then could plainly see three immense green skinned sharks, tearing at the floating body of a seaman; every now and then one of them would seize a limb, and drag the carcass a fathom or so under water—when the second would make a rush, and seize another limb, and there would the dead body appear suspended between them, as if it had been standing on its feet and alive; the jaugle of the water giving the limbs the appearance of struggling. Then again the third shark, like a dog walking off with a bone from two others who were quarrelling about it, would seize the trunk, and back-backing, forcibly drag it away from the others, and make sail with it across his jaws into the silvery glare, pursued by his mates, when the whole would once more disappear.
Their whereabouts, however, was still distinctly marked by the wheeling of half a dozen pelicans; an individual bird dropping every now and then into the water with a splash; while the lighter gulls and sea-mews were glancing about in all directions, whistling shrill, and twinkling with their light wings in the distance like silver butterflies, as they pounced on the fragments that were disengaged by the teeth of the monsters in the water.
Several vultures, the large carrion crows formerly described, were perched on the neighbouring trees, or stalking along the beach, on the look-out for any waifs that might be cast ashore, as their perquisites.