He cannot see them, as he strains his eyes over the wall into
the blank depth,--nothing but a confused welter and quiver of mingled
air, and rain, and spray, as if the very atmosphere were writhing in
the clutches of the gale: but he can hear,--what can he not hear? It
would have needed a less vivid brain than Elsley's to fancy another
Badajos beneath. There it all is:--the rush of columns to the breach,
officers cheering them on,--pauses, breaks, wild retreats, upbraiding
calls, whispering consultations,--fresh rush on rush, now here, now
there,--fierce shouts above, below, behind,--shrieks of agony, choked
groans and gasps of dying men,--scaling-ladders hurled down with all
their rattling freight,--dull mine-explosions, ringing cannon-thunder,
as the old fortress blasts back its besiegers pell-mell into the deep.
It is all there: truly enough there, at least, to madden yet more
Elsley's wild angry brain, till he tries to add his shouts to the
great battle-cries of land and sea, and finds them as little audible
as an infant's wail.
Suddenly, far below him, a bright glimmer;--and, in a moment, a
blue-light reveals the whole scene, in ghastly hues,--blue leaping
breakers, blue weltering sheets of foam, blue rocks, crowded with blue
figures, like ghosts, flitting to and fro upon the brink of that blue
seething Phlegethon, and rushing up towards him through the air, a
thousand flying blue foam-sponges, which dive over the brow of the
hill and vanish, like delicate fairies fleeing before the wrath of the
gale:--but where is the wreck? The blue-light cannot pierce the grey
veil of mingled mist and spray which hangs to seaward; and her guns
have been silent for half an hour and more.
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