ed the
forces gathering pent in the barred passage. As the bridled torrent
seethed and climbed, hissing, behind that barrier, the great stone
tottered and swayed, and before the first foam-crest could overpeer it,
yielded to the weight of waters leaned against it, and rocks and flood,
thunderously roaring, rushed down together.

The sound of it, dulled into a moan, came through Rosbride bridge, and
Thady, who had grown very drowsy, thought to himself that the wind was
getting up, and that they couldn't have done better than stop where they
were, instead of to be setting off tramping on such a dirty wild night.
God knew where they might have got to.

The flood that broke away, with wave tumbled over wave, out of the
whirling pool, had not far to race down its stony stairs before it
reached a place with a turbulent floor, where the white mouths of other
two streams foamed into it through rock-rifts, loud-throated on either
hand. Thenceforward the water which had threaded the large boulders in
heavy strands coiled like monstrous braids of snaky locks, rose up and
drew together above their tallest heads into a single obliterating fold,
as it slid on smoothly with only now and then a quiver puckering its
surface, as if it had rolled over some live creature that writhed. Its
mounded solidity made its rapid motion look strange and terrible. Where
circles of thin froth swam round on it slowly, it was as black and white
as a bit of the bog in a snowstorm or under a drift of summer daisies.
At the turn of the ravine's last winding above the bridge, it plucked
away as it passed a small company of fir-trees, that long had dropped
their cones and needles into the river from a coign of vantage on a
jutting crag, and a minute after, anybody who had looked up from beneath
the arch would have seen the glimmering points of foam extinguished like
lights, further and nearer, lost amid the shadowy onsweeping of
something that set all the darkness astir as if it were one vast wing
unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading
fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos,
which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell.
But as it happened nobody was keeping a watch there.

What wakened Thady was the clang of his cluster of tinware, which the
wave dashed against the wall behind him. But before he knew this, it had
gathered him up and swung him across with it over to t