on each side of him. He looked far down
the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness
was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical shape was
desolation.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate
world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,
opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low
relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and
turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early
crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their
lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It
was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had
ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.

The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never
in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless slaty
layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name. Zoophytes,
mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest developments of those ancient
dates. The immense lapses of time each formation represented had known
nothing of the dignity of man. They were grand times, but they were mean
times too, and mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in
his death.

Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful
juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the
varied scenes that had had their day between this creature's epoch and
his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such
imaginings as these.

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity
of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate
centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts,
and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears,
rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth.
They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts--perhaps in caves of the
neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there.
Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir,
antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon--all, for
the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these,
were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large a