THE MARVEL OF A TIDE 309 



awakening, a gargantuan breathing of the whole ocean, or a 

 monstrous wave running the circuit of the earth extending 

 from pole to pole. It is a swelling giant that sends millions of 

 creeping fingers into the hollows of the land, bringing life to 

 those hollows and as regularly withdrawing it again. A tide 

 is the pulsing bosom of our planet. The Norsemen grasped the 

 idea better than we when they believed it to be the breathing 

 of the earth-serpent, lormungander, a monster so enormous 

 that it encircled the globe and held its tail in its mouth to make 

 room for that appendage. 



"Beneath the lashings of his tail 

 Seas, mountain high, swelled on the land." 



It was a tide that wrecked me on Inagua when I thought all 

 danger from the ocean was past, and it was to the tide that I 

 turned for one of the most entertaining days I spent on that 

 island. Near Mathewtown, toward the south and in the direc- 

 tion of the opening of the Windward Passage, the coast of 

 Inagua makes a last turn before sweeping away in a long spit 

 toward the desolate frozen sand dunes of the weather side of 

 the island. At the last point of the turn the rock cliffs by the 

 settlement crumble away, and a little beyond, the interminable 

 arcs of the barrier reef take up their existence and fling away 

 toward the infinite horizon. Here the full force of the tide, 

 sweeping in twice a day from the wastes of the Atlantic Ocean 

 and from the turbulent deeps of the blue Caribbean, meets in 

 a boiling mass of currents and counter-currents. When all the 

 remainder of the coast was calm and smooth this point was 

 flecked with foam and with the peculiar lapping waves of 

 tide-rips. This was the final meeting place of east and west 

 where the debris and flotsam of two oceans mingled before 

 being swept into the blue depths or piled on the high white 

 beach which was already littered with the fragments of a hun- 



