sounds of the elements. It was not of earth or of life. It
was the grief and agony of the gale. A knell of all upon which it blew!

Black night enfolded the valley. Venters could not see his companion,
and knew of her presence only through the tightening hold of her hand
on his arm. He felt the dogs huddle closer to him. Suddenly the dense,
black vault overhead split asunder to a blue-white, dazzling streak of
lightning. The whole valley lay vividly clear and luminously bright in
his sight. Upreared, vast and magnificent, the stone bridge glimmered
like some grand god of storm in the lightning's fire. Then all flashed
black again--blacker than pitch--a thick, impenetrable coal-blackness.
And there came a ripping, crashing report. Instantly an echo resounded
with clapping crash. The initial report was nothing to the echo. It was
a terrible, living, reverberating, detonating crash. The wall threw the
sound across, and could have made no greater roar if it had slipped
in avalanche. From cliff to cliff the echo went in crashing retort and
banged in lessening power, and boomed in thinner volume, and clapped
weaker and weaker till a final clap could not reach across the waiting
cliff.

In the pitchy darkness Venters led Bess, and, groping his way, by feel
of hand found the entrance to her cave and lifted her up. On the instant
a blinding flash of lightning illumined the cave and all about him. He
saw Bess's face white now with dark, frightened eyes. He saw the dogs
leap up, and he followed suit. The golden glare vanished; all was black;
then came the splitting crack and the infernal din of echoes.

Bess shrank closer to him and closer, found his hands, and pressed them
tightly over her ears, and dropped her face upon his shoulder, and hid
her eyes.

Then the storm burst with a succession of ropes and streaks and shafts
of lightning, playing continuously, filling the valley with a broken
radiance; and the cracking shots followed each other swiftly till the
echoes blended in one fearful, deafening crash.

Venters looked out upon the beautiful valley--beautiful now as never
before--mystic in its transparent, luminous gloom, weird in the
quivering, golden haze of lightning. The dark spruces were tipped with
glimmering lights; the aspens bent low in the winds, as waves in a
tempest at sea; the forest of oaks tossed wildly and shone with gleams
of fire. Across the valley the huge cavern of the cliff-dwellers yawned
in the gla