By its light, between the Island of Lemaire and Cape Croiselle, a quarter of a league distant, Dantes saw a fishing-boat driven rapidly like a spectre before the power of winds and
waves. A second after, he saw it again, approaching with frightful rapidity.
Then a rushing sound was heard, and a
wave swept the flute off the bank, and soon the head of the hunter appeared and rose up higher and higher till he was half out of the water.
Around and over it whirled, this way and that, and a few moments later the chicken-coop dropped far away into the sea, where the big
waves caught it and slid it up-hill to a foaming crest and then down-hill into a deep valley, as if it were nothing more than a plaything to keep them amused.
And I had hardly moved before the boat, giving up at once her gentle dancing movement, ran straight down a slope of water so steep that it made me giddy, and struck her nose, with a spout of spray, deep into the side of the next
wave.
'This will come to no good, it is too much to ask; the fish will be tired at last, and then we shall be sorry for what we have done.' He soon came to the seashore; and the water was quite black and muddy, and a mighty whirlwind blew over the
waves and rolled them about, but he went as near as he could to the water's brink, and said:
The stars of the north arise over the rolling of Erin's
waves: they shew their heads of fire, through the flying mist of heaven.
I found the poor creature sitting all alone astride of a keel, for Jove had struck his ship with lightning and sunk it in mid ocean, so that all his crew were drowned, while he himself was driven by wind and
waves on to my island.
Besides, our vessel only mounted to the surface of the
waves at night to renew its stock of air; it was steered entirely by the compass and the log.
On came the fairy boat, till it reached a moss-grown rock; and here it stopped, while the Fairies rested beneath the violet-leaves, and sang with the dancing
waves.
But when it was observed that even inside the harbor the boats were tossed to and fro, and that beyond the jetty the
waves rose mountains high, dashing upon the shore with a terrible uproar, it will readily be believed that not one of those frail boats would be able with safety to reach a fourth part of the distance between the shore and the vessels at anchor.
And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the
waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling
waves but made so by their restlessness.
This alone I know -- That,
wave on
wave, the Kiang seeks the sea, And not a
wave returns.
