Page:Rowland--In the shadow.djvu/293

 Above there were only silence and shadow, the throbbing silence of a cypress swamp. Over the flat, stale, stinking water, sanious from rotting leaves, there hung a luminous glow. It was not light, for light illumines objects near; this was simply the absence of darkness; it illumined only itself; the phosphine, fue-follet, the stuff which ghosts are made of, more repellent than the umbra the terrors of which are negative. At intervals, it concentrates in definite shape, becoming luminous and glowing in a sickly, lambent flame.

Noises there are in the swamp, having their source for the most part in the lower element of living deadness, and transmitted echoless beneath the miasmatic blanket shrouding the cypress tops; also, there come noises from above, noises droning, homophonous; doubtful noises like those emanating from the fever-stricken brain and seem now within, now without.

Light is shorter than shadow; death longer than life. A gnat lives in the sunshine and lives but a day; the worm lives in the mold and lives long. The lower the type of life the more tenacious it becomes of the little spark it holds.

The life of the swamp is so diluted with death that the line of demarcation is indistinct. The day is mostly night; the light is mixed with darkness; the heat carries a chill; motion is almost inert. Under the flat, green slime which hangs like a veil to screen the Present from the Past, lurk creatures of a properly forgotten age: baleful-eyed sauria, reptilia, ophidia, amphibia, zoölogic relics of a long-dead era, cold-blooded monsters of sluggish pulse, in the organism of which life and death so synchronously exist that at times they merge; cancerous 283