"Dios!" she cried. "Dios! What is it?"

She had fallen back against the wall of the cabin and was gazing about
her with a strange and startled expression. Seagreave's eye reflected it
as he too stared about him with a look not yet of alarm but of wild,
deep wonder. For the moment, at least, all things were the same. Above
them the peaks towered whitely in the sullen, gray sky. On a level with
their eyes, the illimitable forests of bare, black trees mingling with
the denser and more compact shapes of the evergreens, stretched away
over the hillsides, casting their long blue shadows on the snow-covered
ground until they wore blurred indistinguishably in the violet haze of
distance. Unchanged, and yet so strong was the presage of some
unimagined and disastrous event, that when a long shiver ran through the
earth Pearl screamed aloud, and, stumbling toward Seagreave, reached out
gropingly for his hand.

For the second that they waited the earth, too, seemed to wait, a
solemn, awe-filled moment of incalculable change, a tense moment, as if
the unknown, mysterious forces of nature were gathering themselves
together for some mighty, unprecedented effort.

Then shiver after shiver shook the ground, the earth trembled as if in
some deep convulsion, the white peaks seemed bowing and bending--then a
roar as of many waters, the air darkened and earth and sky seemed filled
with the mass of the mountains slipping down--down to chaos.

Pearl had ceased to scream and had fallen to her knees, clinging
desperately to Seagreave. Her face was blanched white with terror, and
she was muttering incoherent prayers.