Marina grew faint and wide-eyed for terror, but they could not soothe
her by word or touch; she sat with clasped hands, gasping for breath,
listening to the low, long boom on the shores of the Lido, like muffled
thunder, ceaselessly recurring--the terrible noise of the great waves
beating against the sea-walls--beating and breaking in fury, tossing
their spray high in air and whirling it in clouds, like rain mists, far
across the lagoon. Would the barriers stand--or yield and leave them to
their doom? Were the great waters of the Adriatic uprising in vengeance
to overwhelm this city in her sin? Boom upon boom sounded through all
the voices of the storm. Santa Maria! was it this that the Tintoretto
had foretold!
A dazzling, frenzied flash of light,--a vast peal of thunder that was
like the wrath of a mighty, offended God,--then darkness, and a torrent
of rain--the waters in the shifting path of the wind leaping up to meet
the waters from the sky!
The vesper bells of Venice came sobbing through the storm, tossed and
broken by the tornado into a wraith of a dirge; and now, by some
fantastic freak of nature, as the winds rose higher, the iron tongues
from every campanile--for a brief moment of horror--came wrangling and
discordant, as if tortured by some demon of despair.
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