and would
have followed him, but felt it useless.

All at once he pounced on a spot, throwing the whole weight of his body
on his bill, and for some moments dug vigorously. Then with a flutter of
his wings he threw back his head, and something shot from his bill, cast
high in the air. That moment the sun set, and the air at once grew very
dusk, but the something opened into a soft radiance, and came pulsing
toward me like a fire-fly, but with a much larger and a yellower light.
It flew over my head. I turned and followed it.

Here I interrupt my narrative to remark that it involves a constant
struggle to say what cannot be said with even an approach to precision,
the things recorded being, in their nature and in that of the creatures
concerned in them, so inexpressibly different from any possible events
of this economy, that I can present them only by giving, in the forms
and language of life in this world, the modes in which they affected
me--not the things themselves, but the feelings they woke in me. Even
this much, however, I do with a continuous and abiding sense of
failure, finding it impossible to present more than one phase of a
multitudinously complicated significance, or one concentric sphere of a
graduated embodiment. A single thing would sometimes seem to be and mean
many things, with an uncertain identity at the heart of them, which kept
constantly altering their look. I am indeed often driven to set down
what I know to be but a clumsy and doubtful representation of the mere
feeling aimed at, none of the communicating media of this world being
fit to convey it, in its peculiar strangeness, with even an approach
to clearness or certainty. Even to one who knew the region better than
myself, I should have no assurance of transmitting the reality of
my experience in it. While without a doubt, for instance, that I was
actually regarding a scene of activity, I might be, at the same moment,
in my consciousness aware that I was perusing a metaphysical argument.

CHAPTER X. THE BAD BURROW

As the air grew black and the winter closed swiftly around me, the
fluttering fire blazed out more luminous, and arresting its flight,
hovered waiting. So soon as I came under its radiance, it flew slowly
on, lingering now and then above spots where the ground was rocky. Every
time I looked up, it seemed to have grown larger, and at length gave me
an attendant shadow. Plainly a bird-butterfly, it flew with a certain
swal