s of Furies shaped in
the clouds, Plutonian chimeras almost defined. No horrors equal those
sobs, those laughs, those tricks of tumult, those inscrutable questions
and answers, those appeals to unknown aid. Man knows not what to become
in the presence of that awful incantation. He bows under the enigma of
those Draconian intonations. What latent meaning have they? What do they
signify? What do they threaten? What do they implore? It would seem as
though all bonds were loosened. Vociferations from precipice to
precipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from the rain
to the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from the stars to the
foam--the abyss unmuzzled--such is that tumult, complicated by some
mysterious strife with evil consciences.

The loquacity of night is not less lugubrious than its silence. One
feels in it the anger of the unknown.

Night is a presence. Presence of what?

For that matter we must distinguish between night and the shadows. In
the night there is the absolute; in the darkness the multiple. Grammar,
logic as it is, admits of no singular for the shadows. The night is one,
the shadows are many.[5]

This mist of nocturnal mystery is the scattered, the fugitive, the
crumbling, the fatal; one feels earth no longer, one feels the other
reality.

In the shadow, infinite and indefinite, lives something or some one; but
that which lives there forms part of our death. After our earthly
passage, when that shadow shall be light for us, the life which is
beyond our life shall seize us. Meanwhile it appears to touch and try
us. Obscurity is a pressure. Night is, as it were, a hand placed on our
soul. At certain hideous and solemn hours we feel that which is beyond
the wall of the tomb encroaching on us.

Never does this proximity of the unknown seem more imminent than in
storms at sea. The horrible combines with the fantastic. The possible
interrupter of human actions, the old Cloud compeller, has it in his
power to mould, in whatsoever shape he chooses, the inconsistent
element, the limitless incoherence, the force diffused and undecided of
aim. That mystery the tempest every instant accepts and executes some
unknown changes of will, apparent or real.

Poets have, in all ages, called this the caprice of the waves. But there
is no such thing as caprice. The disconcerting enigmas which in nature
we call caprice, and in human life chance, are splinters of a law
revealed to us in glimpses.