ich is everywhere, and which none
can bind. The gentle breath becomes a gale, smites with the force of a
war-club, and then becomes gentle again. The winds attack with a
terrible crash, and defend themselves by fading into nothingness. He who
would encounter them must use artifice. Their varying tactics, their
swift redoubled blows, confuse. They fly as often as they attack. They
are tenacious and impalpable. Who can circumvent them? The prow of the
_Argo_, cut from an oak of Dodona's grove, that mysterious pilot of the
bark, spoke to them, and they insulted that pilot-goddess. Columbus,
beholding their approach at _La Pinta_, mounted upon the poop, and
addressed them with the first verses of St. John's Gospel. Surcouf
defied them: "Here come the gang," he used to say. Napier greeted them
with cannon-balls. They assume the dictatorship of chaos.

Chaos is theirs, in which to wreak their mysterious vengeance: the den
of the winds is more monstrous than that of lions. How many corpses lie
in its deep recesses, where the howling gusts sweep without pity over
that obscure and ghastly mass! The winds are heard wheresoever they go,
but they give ear to none. Their acts resemble crimes. None know on whom
they cast their hoary surf; with what ferocity they hover over
shipwrecks, looking at times as if they flung their impious foam-flakes
in the face of heaven. They are the tyrants of unknown regions. "_Luoghi
spaventosi_," murmured the Venetian mariners.

The trembling fields of space are subjected to their fierce assaults.
Things unspeakable come to pass in those deserted regions. Some horseman
rides in the gloom; the air is full of a forest sound; nothing is
visible; but the tramp of cavalcades is heard. The noonday is overcast
with sudden night; a tornado passes. Or it is midnight, which suddenly
becomes bright as day; the polar lights are in the heavens. Whirlwinds
pass in opposite ways, and in a sort of hideous dance, a stamping of the
storms upon the waters. A cloud overburdened opens and falls to earth.
Other clouds, filled with red light, flash and roar; then frown again
ominously. Emptied of their lightnings, they are but as spent brands.
Pent-up rains dissolve in mists. Yonder sea appears a fiery furnace in
which the rains are falling: flames seem to issue from the waves. The
white gleam of the ocean under the shower is reflected to marvellous
distances. The different masses transform themselves into uncouth
shapes.