ity of the Great Canon. The waves were in
furious movement, continual change, and almost incessant death. They
destroyed themselves and each other by their violence. Scarcely did one
become eminent before it was torn to pieces by its comrades, or perished
of its own rage. They were like barbarous hordes, exterminating one
another or falling into dissolution, while devastating everything in their
course.

There was a frantic revelry, an indescribable pandemonium of
transformations. Lofty plumes of foam fell into hoary, flattened sheets;
curling and howling cataracts became suddenly deep hollows. The indigo
slopes were marbled with white, but not one of these mottlings retained
the same shape for an instant; it was broad, deep, and creamy when the eye
first beheld it; in the next breath it was waving, shallow, and narrow; in
the next it was gone. A thousand eddies, whirls, and ebullitions of all
magnitudes appeared only to disappear. Great and little jets of froth
struggled from the agitated centres toward the surface, and never reached
it. Every one of the hundred waves which made up each billow rapidly
tossed and wallowed itself to death.

Yet there was no diminution in the spectacle, no relaxation in the combat.
In the place of what vanished there was immediately something else. Out of
the quick grave of one surge rose the white plume of another. Marbling
followed marbling, and cataract overstrode cataract. Even to their bases
the oceanic ranges and peaks were full of power, activity, and, as it
were, explosions. It seemed as if endless multitudes of transformations
boiled up through them from their abodes in sea-deep caves. There was no
exhausting this reproductiveness of form and power. At every glance a
thousand worlds of waters had perished, and a thousand worlds of waters
had been created. And all these worlds, the new even more than the old,
were full of malignity toward the wreck, and bent on its destruction.

The wind, though invisible, was not less wonderful. It surpassed the ocean
in strength, for it chased, gashed, and deformed the ocean. It inflicted
upon it countless wounds, slashing fresh ones as fast as others healed. It
not only tore off the hoary scalps of the billows and flung them through
the air, but it wrenched out and hurled large masses of water, scattering
them in rain and mist, the blood of the sea. Now and then it made all the
air dense with spray, causing the Pacific to resemble the Sahara i