Behind him was the sea; in front the land; above, the sky—­but a sky without stars; an opaque mist masked the zenith.

On reaching the summit of the rocky wall he found himself turned towards the land, and looked at it attentively.  It lay before him as far as the sky-line, flat, frozen, and covered with snow.  Some tufts of heather shivered in the wind.  No roads were visible—­nothing, not even a shepherd’s cot.  Here and there pale spiral vortices might be seen, which were whirls of fine snow, snatched from the ground by the wind and blown away.  Successive undulations of ground, become suddenly misty, rolled themselves into the horizon.  The great dull plains were lost under the white fog.  Deep silence.  It spread like infinity, and was hush as the tomb.

The child turned again towards the sea.

The sea, like the land, was white—­the one with snow, the other with foam.  There is nothing so melancholy as the light produced by this double whiteness.

Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea was like steel, the cliff like ebony.  From the height where the child was the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale, in a semicircle of hills.  There was something dreamlike in that nocturnal landscape—­a wan disc belted by a dark crescent.  The moon sometimes has a similar appearance.  From cape to cape, along the whole coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen.  As in heaven, so on earth—­no light.  Not a lamp below, not a star above.  Here and there came sudden risings in the great expanse of waters in the gulf, as the wind disarranged and wrinkled the vast sheet.  The hooker was still visible in the bay as she fled.

It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.

Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous clear-obscure of immensity.  The Matutina was making quick way.  She seemed to grow smaller every minute.  Nothing appears so rapid as the flight of a vessel melting into the distance of ocean.

Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow.  Probably the darkness falling round her made those on board uneasy, and the pilot thought it necessary to throw light on the waves.  This luminous point, a spark seen from afar, clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form.  You would have said it was a shroud raised up and moving in the middle of the sea, under which some one wandered with a star in his hand.

A storm threatened in the air; the child took no account of it, but a sailor would have trembled.  It was that moment of preliminary anxiety when it seems as though the elements are changing into persons, and one is about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into the wind-god.  The sea becomes Ocean:  its power reveals itself as Will:  that which one takes for a thing is a soul.  It will become visible; hence the terror.  The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of nature.