"The moon looks like beaten egg," Paula said with a slight shiver. "They must be suffering down in the city. You're the expert on Pelée, Mr. Stock, please tell me more about him."
He had been regarding the new moon, low and to the left of the Carbet peaks. It had none of the sharpness of outline peculiar to the tropics, but was blurred and of an orange hue, instead of silvery. "It's the ash-fog in the air which has the effect of a fine wire screen," he explained. "We'll have a white world to-morrow, if it doesn't rain."
They turned to the north where a low rumbling was heard. It was like distant thunder, but the horizon beyond Pelée was unscathed by lightning.
"Are you really worried, Mr. Stock?"
"Why, it's as I said. The fact that Pelée is acting out of the ordinary is quite enough to make any one skeptical regarding his intentions."
He discussed familiarly certain of the man-eaters among the mountains of the world—Krakatoa, Bandaisan, Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, Ætna, calling them chronic old ruffians, whom Time doesn't tame.
"A thousand years is nothing to them," he added. "They wait, still as crocodiles, until seers have built their temples in the high rifts and cities have formed on their flanks. They have tasted blood, you see, and the madness comes back. Twenty years is only a siesta. Pelée is a suspect."
"I think I should prefer to hear you tell the treachery of volcanoes outside of the fire-zone," she declared. "It's like listening to ghost stories in a haunted house."
Pelée rumbled again, and Paula's fingers involuntarily started toward his sleeve. The heavy wooden shutters of the great house rattled in the windless night; the ground upon which they stood seemed to wince at the Monster's pain. She was conscious of the fragrance of roses and magnolia blooms above the acrid taint of the air. Some strange freak of the atmosphere exerted a pressure upon the flowers, forcing a sudden expulsion of perfume. The young moon was a formless blotch now in the fouled sky. A sigh like the whimpering of many sick children was audible from the servants' cabins behind the hotel.... Later, from her own room, she saw the double chain of lights out in the harbor—the Saragossa pulling at her moorings among the lesser craft, like a bright empress in the midst of dusky maid-servants; and in the north was Vulcan struggling to contain the fury of his fluids. She was a little afraid of Pelée.
Very early abroad, Paula set out on her first pilgrimage to Notre Dame des Lourdes. Rain had not fallen in the night, and she regarded a white world, as Stock had promised, and the source of the phenomenon with the pastelle tints of early morning upon his huge eastern slope. She had slept little and with her face turned to the north. A cortege had passed before her in dream—all the destroyers of history, each with a vivid individuality, like the types of faces of all nations—the story of each and the desolation it had made among men and the works of men.