Never once did she expose
herself broadside; her hind-legs were really doing most of the fight;
and right gratefully did Lionel clap the neck of this wise beast when he
found himself on solid land. The ford farther up was much less
dangerous; and so once again the reunited party held on its way.
Then here was the Geinig--no longer the pretty and picturesque river
that he knew, but a boiling and surging torrent sweeping in red wrath
down its narrow and rocky channel. The farther heights, too, that now
came into view, had lost their wonted pale and ethereal hues: there were
no soft cloud-stains on the purple slopes of heather--a darkness dwelt
over the land. As he gradually got up into that wilder country, the
gloom grew more intense, the desolation more awful. The roar of the
Geinig was lost now in this dreadful silence. He seemed to have left
behind him all human sympathies and associations--to have forsaken his
kindred and his kind--to have entered a strange world peopled only with
dark phantoms and moving shadows and ghosts. A voiceless solitude, too,
save for the moaning of the wind that came sweeping in bitter blasts
down from the rainy hills.
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