They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their
beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal
dream.
The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon
were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to
industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden
every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums
of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their
contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each
insist upon the last word to say:
"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you
didn't!" "You did, you did!"
Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born,
had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night,
till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan
disputing for her soul.
As this idea increased upon her fancy she heard the very words these
warring powers hurled to and fro, as now the myriads of the angels
cheered together, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" and, like an army of
spiders, assembled in the swamp, a deep refrain of "Hell, hell, hell!"
groaned back.
"Hallelujah!" "Hell!" "Hallelujah!"
She found herself crying, as she stumbled on, "Hallelujah! hallelujah!"
The swamp increased in depth and solemnity as they drew near the rushing
sluices of the Pocomoke, and kept along them, the trail being now a mere
ditch and chain of floating logs where no vehicle could pass, and the
man himself seemed frightened as he led the way from trunk to float and
puddle to corduroy, sometimes balancing himself on a revolving log, or
again plunging nearly to his waist in vegetable muck; but the
light-footed girl behind had the footstep of a bird, and hopped as if
from twig to twig, and seemed to slide where he would sink; and the man
often turned in terror, when he had fallen headlong from some
treacherous perch, to see her slender feet, in crescent sandals, play in
the moonlit jungle like hands upon a harp.
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