# Fantastics and other Fancies/The Vision of the Dead Creole

THE VISION OF THE DEAD CREOLE
The waters of the Gulf were tepid in the warmth of the tropical night. A huge moon looked down upon me as I swam toward the palm-fringed beach; and looking back I saw the rigging of the vessel sharply cut against its bright face. There was no sound! The sea-ripples kissed the brown sands silently, as if afraid; faint breezes laden with odors of saffron and cinnamon and drowsy flowers came over the water;—the stars seemed vaster than in other nights;—the fires of the Southern Cross burned steadily without one diamond-twinkle;—I paused a moment in terror;—for it seemed I could hear the night breathe—in long, weird sighs. The fancy passed as quickly as it came. The ship's bells struck the first hour of the morning. I stood again on the shore where I had played as a child, and saw through the palms the pale houses of the quaint city beyond, whence I had fled with ​blood upon my hands twenty-seven long years before.
Was it a witch-night, that the city slumbered so deep a sleep and the sereno slept at his post as I passed? I know not, but it was well for him that he slept! I passed noiselessly as the Shadow of Death through the ancient gates, and through the shadows flung down by the projecting balconies, and along the side of the plaza unilluminated by the gaze of the tropical moon, and where the towers of the cathedral made goblin shapes of darkness on the pavement; and along narrow ways where the star-sprinkled blue of heaven above seemed but a ribbon of azure, jagged and gashed along its edges by sharp projections of balconies; and beyond again into the white moonshine, where orange trees filled the warm air with a perfume as that of a nuptial chamber; and beyond, yet farther, where ancient cypresses with roots and branches gnarled and twisted as by the tortures of a thousand years of agony, bowed weirdly over the Place of Tombs.
​ Gigantic spiders spun their webs under the moon between the walls of the tombs;—vipers glided over my feet;—the vampire hovered above under the stars; and fireflies like corpse-lights circled about the resting-places of the dead. Great vines embraced the marbles green with fungus-growths; the ivy buried its lizard feet in the stones;—lianas had woven a veil, thick as that of Isis, across the epitaphs carven above the graves. But I found her tomb! I would have reached it, as I had sworn, even in the teeth of Death and Hell!
I tore asunder the venomous plants which clung to the marble like reptiles;—but the blood poured from my hands upon her name; — and I could not find one unreddened spot to kiss. And I heard the blood from my fingers dripping with a thick, dead sound, as of molten lead, upon the leaves of the uptorn plants at my feet.
And the dead years rose from their graves of mist and stood around me! I saw the moss-green terrace where I received her first kiss that filled my veins with madness;—the marble ​urns with their carved bas-reliefs of naked dancing boys;—the dead fountain choked with water-lilies;— the monstrous flowers that opened their hearts to the moon. And she!—the sinuous outlines of that body of Corinthian bronze unconcealed by the feathery lightness of the white robe she wore;—the Creole eyes;—the pouting and passionate mouth;—and that cruel, sphinx-smile, that smile of Egypt, eternally pitiless, eternally mystical,—the smile she wore when I flung myself like a worm before her to kiss her feet, and vainly shrieked to her to trample upon me, to spit upon me! And after my fierce moment of vengeance, the smile of Egypt still remained upon her dark face, as though moulded in everlasting bronze.
There was no rustle among the lianas, no stir among the dead leaves; yet she stood again be- fore me! My heart seemed to cease its beatings; —a chill as of those nights in which I had sailed Antarctic seas passed over me! Robed in white as in the buried years, with lights like fireflies in her hair, and the same dark, elfish smile!
​And suddenly the chill passed away with a fierce cataclysm of the blood, as though each of its cells were heated by volcanic fire;—for the strange words of the Hebrew canticle came to me like a far echo,—
LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH!
I burst the fetters with which horror had chained my voice;—I spake to her; I wept,—I wept tears of blood!
And the old voice came to me, argentine and low and mockingly sweet as the voices of birds that call to each other through the fervid West Indian night,—
"I knew thou wouldst come back to me,—howsoever long thou mightst wander under other skies and over other seas.
"Didst thou dream that I was dead? Nay, I die not so quickly! I have lived through all these years. I shall live on; and thou must return hither again to visit me like a thief in the night.
"Knowest thou how I have lived? I have lived in the bitter tears thou hast wept through all these long years;—the agony of the remorse that seized thee in silent nights and ​lonesome wastes;—in the breath of thy youth and life exhaled in passionate agony when no human eyes beheld thee;—in the images that haunt thy dreams and make it a horror for thee to find thyself alone! Yet wouldst thou kiss me—"
I looked upon her again in the white light;—I saw the same weirdly beautiful face, the same smile of the sphinx;—I saw the vacant tomb yawning to its entrails;—I saw its shadow—my shadow—lying sharply upon the graves; —and I saw that the tall white figure before me cast no shadow before the moon!
And suddenly under the stars, sonorous and vibrant as far cathedral bells, the voices of the awakening watchmen chanted,—Ave Maria Purísima!—las tres de la mañana, y tiempo sereno!