They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such
overpowering numbers.
Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its
bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion
began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the
wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of
disquietude, almost of alarm.
A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous; many of
the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by
the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense
of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions
of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to do with
the power of the driving wind--this shouting hurricane that might almost
carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much
chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing
rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing
its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel
emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of
distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source
and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do
with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained
power of the elements about me.
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