IN THE SHADOW
great being was plastic as the sea driven by the rush of the gale.
Then as the night deepened the sea began to swarm with life. Dessalines leaned lower and watched the fiery trails of the sea folk as they tore apart the solid water beneath the flaming crests of the billows. Schools of porpoises swept past, lashing the sea into a maelstrom of lambent fire; far in the depths mammoth hydrozoa glowed pale and diaphanous with each expansion of their pendulous disks. Strange monsters plunged beneath the keel, leaving the trails of comets; and the wash of the sea across the sloping decks poured from the scuppers in a spray of bluish flame.
And then the heavens began to answer the conflagrations of the deep. Back rolled the soggy rain clouds, to leave the sky as clear and deep as a sapphire with the stars aquiver as seen through the rushing wind. It was the month of meteors, and as the Haytian's eyes, giddied by the swirl of water, turned aloft, a bolide drifted across the course and exploded with the brilliance of a costern light. Down came the meteors in showers, now here, now there, crossing and recrossing and seaming the clear sky with trails of fire.
The negro at his elbow was muttering to himself. Dessalines did not hear him; into his brain there rushed the grand, inspiring words of the nineteenth psalm. He raised his face, the features working, writhing, his soul filled with an agony of exaltation; an exaltation born of the pale fires in the sea and the blazing night as it roared across the Gulf Stream. He threw out both great arms, wrists bent, palms turned upward; the tremendous voice burst with a roar from the heaving chest:
206
