over the bed of the watercourse, scaled the slopes of the banks. Snorting
and bellowing, they plunged their blind way to the mountains. One cry
alone, more wild than their own savage blare, pierced the reek through
which the Brute Hurricane swept. At that cry of wrath and despair I
struggled to rise, again dashed to earth by the hoofs and the horns. But
was it the dream-like deceit of my reeling senses, or did I see that giant
Foot stride past through the close-serried ranks of the maddening herds?
Did I hear, distinct through all the huge uproar of animal terror, the
roll of low thunder which followed the stride of that Foot?




CHAPTER LXXXVIII.

When my sense had recovered its shock, and my eyes looked dizzily round,
the charge of the beasts had swept by; and of all the wild tribes which
had invaded the magical circle, the only lingerer was the brown
Death-adder, coiled close by the spot where my head had rested. Beside
the extinguished lamps which the hoofs had confusedly scattered, the
fire, arrested by the watercourse, had consumed the grasses that fed it,
and there the plains stretched, black and desert as the Phlegroean Field
of the Poet's Hell. But the fire still raged in the forest beyond,--white
flames, soaring up from the trunks of the tallest trees, and forming,
through the sullen dark of the smoke-reek, innumerable pillars of fire,
like the halls in the City of fiends.

Gathering myself up, I turned my eyes from the terrible pomp of the lurid
forest, and looked fearfully down on the hoof-trampled sward for my two
companions.