When at last I roused, it was with a start at the altered scene. It seemed as if my thought--Buddha-powerful--had actually wrought the magic of widespread change. The alabaster breaker was there, but oxidized, dulled; the cobalt had become gray-black, and by the same alchemy the emerald shallows were reset with a mosaic of age-dimmed jade. Most of all was the island changed. From strand to cloud-capped peak, the tone was purple. In high lights it hued to dull silver-gray, in the shadows it deadened to utter black. Rugged and sheer Mont Pelee drew upwards, its head in cloud, its feet in the sea--the shadow-gray sea. My eye strove to penetrate the cloud and picked from its heart a thread of black among the gray lava, which, dropping downward, enlarged to a ribbon and then to a gully. In ugly angles and sharp, unreasonable bends it zigzagged down the shoulder of the great cinderous mountain. Before I realized it my gully became a gorge and ended at the edge of the dark waters, as black and as mysterious as it had begun. Idly, I lay and watched the silver shuttle of coral-shattered foam weaving the warp and woof of the rising tide along the whole length of shore. This seemed the only bit of land in the whole world. Was it the first--or the last--to appear above the waters? It might have been either, until, suddenly I saw a movement among what I had taken for huge, crater-spewed boulders, but which I now knew for the weathered remains of a city. From between two walls of this city of the dead came slowly into view the last human being in the world--or so the surroundings suggested. Yet a second glance belied this, for her mission was fraught with hope. Even at this distance I could discern her stately carriage, swinging and free, her black countenance and her heavy burden. At the very edge of the water she stopped, lifted down the basket piled with black volcanic débris and emptied it. She stood up, looked steadily out at the passing steamer and vanished among the shadows of the ruins. It was startlingly like the first grain of sand which an ant brings out after a passing heel has crushed its nest. But however vivid the simile, the dominant thought was hope. At least one ant had faith in a new ant-nest of the future, and the somber picture of the negress, her basket of black lava poured into the equally black waters, was suddenly framed in high relief by the thought of a new St. Pierre. The great mountain still rumbled and smoked. One at least believed in a home in its very shadows. But the end was not yet. The island had been for me unhappily visited; its passing had been a sudden, wonderfully dynamic vision. And now I shut my eyes again to strive to interpret and to fix indelibly in mind this vision and all the network of thoughts it wove. Again the roar from below and the gentle rise and forward surge calmed and rested me. And the thought of the unhappy morning was become dim and carried no resentment.