The Whale’s Song
In summer, when the sun was high and the sky was deep blue, my friends the dolphins and I played under the waves and danced above them until the sea sang in happy harmony. Then we would leap far out of the water when we heard my mother, the mighty Wanda, “Queen of Whales,” coming up the coast. She dashed the water with her great flukes, and sent up a vast cloud of steam to greet each one of us as she passed, and after that we floated by her side, my mother and I, while she sang to us her long, sad song of the sea.
Humpbacked and broad, she lay on the surface of the water, touching but never reaching the rocky shores of California; and so rich and deep her voice—a charm to sailors all; a spell to fishers who would raise the tempest of the deep. She sang all day, so mellow her tones, but never for one instant left the great current; and it was then I heard her say:
“Hark! hark to the voice of the sea!
It is a voice that we never can know;
From the rocks in its depths,
From the mists in its crest,
Ever, ever it cometh and goeth.
Always, always a singing memory,
Listen to what it saith, for I say—
When the storms of death
Rise round us on every side,
The sea will sing till the morning tide;
We shall sleep through all but its evernigh.
Through tempests shamefully,
The moans and the woes of the sea."
But once I saw the lonesome, lonely North;
The mountains jutted; over and over the crash—
Of icy barriers did they moan
And crack in the blood of the warring sea.
And the poor, sad, sighing Voice to me seemed everstronger than the icy crag or the fleecy bank of snow.”
“Wakey-wake,” called the sun one day from his golden-glorious throne, yawning, breaking in the everlasting quiet of the sea. “Wake, all of you down there!”
And we all awoke, and they all went and washed their faces in the sun.
“Wanda,” called the sun, “lift up your cornice of mist and come!”
But the Queen of Whales was asleep, so asleep that whales could not wake her when they bade her awake. But at last she slowly lifted her cornice of mist, and said, half yawning, “Good-morning, sun. Do you want me?”
“No,” laughed the sun, “only your figleaf wrat hasten over your watery palace behind me, and if, my friend, you would no longer keep the rest of the animals of the merry ocean waiting, go and chase away those ugly, patient seals, I want some of their blubbing oil for my light-house.”
Wanda humphed and bellowed, and every living creature in the great ocean, and half of those poor sailors whom the summer storms had left on the rocks in the maill-coursing sea, heard proudly moan the Queen of Whales. As she cautiously picked the thorn of the wedgelike rock from her foot, a great dentock whale beside her began to sing:
“husha-anta ‘alow-we! ‘oldu is ‘rony
du ag-en–ta hosy-mar–
ha… hos-hick-hu
a so–galier:”