IN THE SHADOW
listen, twitch, peer, often arise and prowl when a white man will be fathoms deep in oblivion.
Dessalines lay upon his bunk and listened to the throb of the machinery. The Waccamaw was a good ship; she ran smoothly "in a groove," true as a liner. The brokers had played fair; Rosenthal had played fair; Dessalines had bought a good vessel cheaply. Her machinery held no false notes; no rough sounds.
Dessalines listened to the throb and beat and found himself adapting the time to an English evangelical hymn which had always stirred him. He began to voice the words to the thrust from the great cylinders, the click of the eccentric, the jar of the circulating pump:
"Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"
It was the only verse which he remembered, but this made no difference. With negro infatuation for monotony, he repeated it over and over with no sense of sameness. "Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"—"Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"—"Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"
The result was predestined. The Negro, the Arab, the Kanaka, all primitive races can develop a hypnotic or, better, fanatic frenzy by means of the erosion produced by the same repeated impulse on a single group of cells of the nerves of sight or hearing; a drum, a chant, revolving lights, the result is the same. Dessalines, first thinking, then humming, then murmuring these words to the rhythmic swing of the machinery, soon found himself upon the point of shouting: "Mine
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