e weed forests that
grow below the storms in the dusk on the floor of the sea; but at
last I caught and tamed him. For there I lurk upon the ocean's
floor, midway between the knees of either cliff, to guard the
passage of the Straits from all the ships that seek the Further
Seas; and whenever the white sails of the tall ships come swelling
round the corner of the crag out of the sunlit spaces of the Known
Sea and into the dark of the Straits, then standing firm upon the
ocean's floor, with my knees a little bent, I take the waters of the
Straits in both my hands and whirl them round my head. But the ship
comes gliding on with the sound of the sailors singing on her decks,
all singing songs of the islands and carrying the rumour of their
cities to the lonely seas, till they see me suddenly astride athwart
their course, and are caught in the waters as I whirl them round my
head. Then I draw in the waters of the Straits towards me and
downwards, nearer and nearer to my terrible feet, and hear in my
ears above the roar of my waters the ultimate cry of the ship; for
just before I drag them to the floor of ocean and stamp them asunder
with my wrecking feet, ships utter their ultimate cry, and with it
go the lives of all the sailors and passes the soul of the ship. And
in the ultimate cry of ships are the songs the sailors sing, and
their hopes and all their loves, and the song of the wind among the
masts and timbers when they stood in the forest long ago, and the
whisper of the rain that made them grow, and the soul of the tall
pine-tree or the oak. All this a ship gives up in one cry which she
makes at the last. And at that moment I would pity the tall ship if
I might; but a man may feel pity who sits in comfort by his fireside
telling tales in the winter--no pity are they permitted ever to
feel who do the work of the gods; and so when I have brought her
circling from round my shoulders to my waist and thence, with her
masts all sloping inwards, to my knees, and lower still and
downwards till her topmast pennants flutter against my ankles, then
I, Nooz Wana, Whelmer of Ships, lift up my feet and trample her
beams asunder, and there go up again to the surface of the Straits
only a few broken timbers and the memories of the sailors and of
their early loves to drift for ever down the empty seas.

'Once in every hundred years, for one day only, I go to rest myself
along the shore and to sun my limbs on the sand, that the