This tragical event very naturally led us to suspect that many similar ones had occurred, elsewhere, and nothing was thought of or talked of but probable calamities. But the sea seemed by no means at the end of her work. We on shore had had quite enough of it. Not so our enraged sea. I saw our pilots, sheltering themselves behind a rocky wall from south-west, keep an anxious look-out seaward, and shake their heads in ominous doubt of what was even yet to come. Happily for them, no craft made her appearance in the offing--or they were there to risk, most probably to lose, their lives. And I, also, looked anxiously out upon that sea, on which I looked no less in hate than in anxiety. True, I was in no real danger, but for that very reason I was all the more despairingly the victim of _ennui_. That sea had a look at once hideous and terrible; her vagaries were as absurd as her strength was irresistible. Nothing there reminded one of the fanciful descriptions of the poets. By a strange contrast, the more I felt myself depressed, and as it were, lifeless, the more vigorously and vehemently did she seem to feel and manifest her life; as though, galvanized by her own furious motion, she had become animated by some strange, fantastic soul. In the general rage, each wave seemed animated by its own special and sentient rage; in the whole uniformity, (paradoxical as it may seem, it, yet, is quite true) there was, as it were some diabolical swarming. Was all this attributable to my worn brain and wearied eyes? Or were the reality and the impression alike true? Those waves reminded me of some terrible _mob_, some horrid rabblement, not of men, but of howling dogs, a myriad of howling and eager dogs, wolves--maddened and furious dogs and wolves. Dogs and wolves, do I say? Let me rather say, a dread concourse of nameless, and detestable, and spectral beasts, eyeless and earless, but with hugely yawning jaws, foaming and eager for blood, blood, still more blood! Monsters! what more do ye require? Are ye not surfeited with wrecked ships and slain men? Do we not from all sides hear of your horrid triumphs? What more, I ask, do ye demand? And the horrid phantoms answer--"Thy death, universal Death, the destruction of the Earth, a return to black Night and ancient Chaos." CHAPTER IX. THE BEACONS.