but warm, sultry, strangely sultry; more and more sultry blew the everlasting cyclone.
The sea-monsters kept back; they dived again below; the sea sank with them, the shades swayed to and fro in storm-flood, waterfall—storm-flood, waterfall, and many-headed hydras came sinuously up. The sea no longer shone with phosphorescent glow, but was quite black, pitch black, black as boiling pitch, without foam and without light, and kept sending up a discharge of miry, vaporous matter. In the boiling pitch, the hydras, with their thousand snaky heads, kept diving up, tortoise-scaled; swayed to and fro, to and fro the pale faces of the shades, but ever sounded the plaintive viol, and ever rang forth the same note, the unchangeable answer to Psyche’s shrill question:
“Hydras of the sea of pain, spirits in the sea of pain, where shall I find the Jewel for Emeralda . . . .??”
“Vanity, vanity . . . .!”
The pitch seethed and hissed and steamed.
It was no longer a sea of water, no longer a sea of pitch;
It was a sea of nothing but flame, pitch-black flame, a sea of jet-black fire, fire and flame, that waved from the horizon, where a
