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A dense white steam came from the creek bed within the arroyo. The surges beat on the shore louder than the ordinary, and the foam, even in these day hours, seemed to throw up a faint phosphorescence. Frequent earthquakes oscillated the landscape. We watched, I do not know for what, our eyes straining into the murk of the island. Nobody thought of the chest, which lay on the cabin table aft.
Desire of mine and of the unhuman Thing, did we grasp at Eve or Lilith? At the fire on the hearth or the cold phosphorescence of swamp and marsh? A drift of fragrance was afloat on the air. A delicate stir of movement passed by me. I raised my head from my hands, expectant. "I am here," her familiar voice told me. "Desire, you had to come, tonight."
Under the starlight you may look not only among the low growing foliage to see the fireflies, which float there like clouds of phosphorescence, but now and again one will glow, diamond-like, in the black hair of the fair señoritas, where they are ingeniously fastened to produce this effect. It is strictly a Spanish idea, which the author has often seen in Havana.
Her crew were, of course, keenly on the alert, and as I came driving down toward them, only visible in consequence of the phosphorescence of the water, they flung me a lifebuoy bent on to the end of a line, and so hauled me aboard.
How the light flashed on its shimmering folds like the rippling phosphorescence on southern seas! ... as green and clear and brilliant as rays reflected from thousands and thousands of glistening emeralds! ... And that haunting, sorrowful, weird music! ... How it seemed to eat into his heart and there waken a bitter remorse combined with an equally bitter despair!
Those that ventured to look out of the windows saw, in the blue brilliancy of the quick-following jets of lightning, the lake at the foot of the rock, ordinarily so still and so dark, lighted up, not on the surface only, but down to half its depth; so that, as it tossed in the wind, like a tortured sea of writhing flames, or incandescent half-molten serpents of brass, they could not tell whether a strong phosphorescence did not issue from the transparent body of the waters, as if earth and sky lightened together, one consenting source of flaming utterance.
This tube may be mounted on a stand at a height convenient for manipulation. The phosphorescence screen is usually a plate covered with some platino-cyanide and mounted in the end of a box of convenient size, the opposite end of which is so shaped that it fits the contour of the face, shutting out the light and allowing the eyes of the observer to focalize on the screen at the end.
"What's that, those little spots on her tongue and throat? They glow. It is the corpse light!" Surely enough, there were little luminous spots in her mouth. I had heard somewhere that there is a phosphorescence appearing during decay of organic substances which once gave rise to the ancient superstition of "corpse lights" and the will-o'-the-wisp. It was really due, I knew, to living bacteria.
"The ship broke up beneath our feet, and I found myself swimming, I knew not where, in the midst of a quantity of floating wreck, to a piece of which I clung. I was surrounded on every side by breakers; but not far from me I could perceive, by the absence of the phosphorescence, that the water was smooth.
Often it is noticed in graveyards in the country, and is believed to be induced by a condition of the atmosphere, causing something like phosphorescence. You know what a firefly or lightning bug is like, don't you, Horatio? Yes, and a glow-worm also?
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