A clear, cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,--a ghostly bridge arching the empyrean,--upreaching its measureless span from either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of air,--always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the sky-circle. And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue sweep of the world, with a wind following after. Day after day, almost at the same hour, the white arc rises, wheels, and passes ... Never a glimpse of rock on these low shores;--only long sloping beaches and bars of smooth tawny sand. Sand and sea teem with vitality;--over all the dunes there is a constant susurration, a blattering and swarming of crustacea;--through all the sea there is a ceaseless play of silver lightning,--flashing of myriad fish. Sometimes the shallows are thickened with minute, transparent, crab-like organisms,--all colorless as gelatine. There are days also when countless medusae drift in--beautiful veined creatures that throb like hearts, with perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanous envelops: some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood the shadows or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers;--others have the semblance of strange living vegetables,--great milky tubers, just beginning to sprout. But woe to the human skin grazed by those shadowy sproutings and spectral stamens!--the touch of glowing iron is not more painful... Within an hour or two after their appearance all these tremulous jellies vanish mysteriously as they came.
Perhaps, if a bold swimmer, you may venture out alone a long way--once! Not twice!--even in company. As the water deepens beneath you, and you feel those ascending wave-currents of coldness arising which bespeak profundity, you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as of groping fingers--touches of the bodies of fish, innumerable fish, fleeing towards shore. The farther you advance, the more thickly you will feel them come; and above you and around you, to right and left, others will leap and fall so swiftly as to daze the sight, like intercrossing fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you, circling with sinister squeaking cries;--perhaps for an instant your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into you also...
From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant sawfish or the ravening shark?--from the herds of the porpoises, or from the grande-ecaille,--that splendid monster whom no net may hold,--all helmed and armored in argent plate-mail?--or from the hideous devilfish of the Gulf,--gigantic, flat-bodied, black, with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a bat,--the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise--goblin shapes evolved by Nature as destroyers, as equilibrists, as counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which, unhindered, would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless ferment of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are forgotten,--numbers give courage,--one can abandon one's self, without fear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical caresses of the sea ...
