nnatural
appearance of running over the water in an attitude of languid repose.

For a time nothing on earth stirred, seemingly, but the canoe, which
glided up-stream with a motion so even and smooth that it did not convey
any sense of movement. Overhead, the massed clouds appeared solid and
steady as if held there in a powerful grip, but on their uneven surface
there was a continuous and trembling glimmer, a faint reflection of the
distant lightning from the thunderstorm that had broken already on the
coast and was working its way up the river with low and angry growls.
Willems looked on, as motionless as everything round him and above him.
Only his eyes seemed to live, as they followed the canoe on its course
that carried it away from him, steadily, unhesitatingly, finally, as if
it were going, not up the great river into the momentous excitement of
Sambir, but straight into the past, into the past crowded yet empty,
like an old cemetery full of neglected graves, where lie dead hopes that
never return.

From time to time he felt on his face the passing, warm touch of an
immense breath coming from beyond the forest, like the short panting of
an oppressed world. Then the heavy air round him was pierced by a sharp
gust of wind, bringing with it the fresh, damp feel of the falling rain;
and all the innumerable tree-tops of the forests swayed to the left
and sprang back again in a tumultuous balancing of nodding branches and
shuddering leaves. A light frown ran over the river, the clouds stirred
slowly, changing their aspect but not their place, as if they had
turned ponderously over; and when the sudden movement had died out in
a quickened tremor of the slenderest twigs, there was a short period
of formidable immobility above and below, during which the voice of the
thunder was heard, speaking in a sustained, emphatic and vibrating
roll, with violent louder bursts of crashing sound, like a wrathful and
threatening discourse of an angry god. For a moment it died out, and
then another gust of wind passed, driving before it a white mist which
filled the space with a cloud of waterdust that hid suddenly from
Willems the canoe, the forests, the river itself; that woke him up from
his numbness in a forlorn shiver, that made him look round despairingly
to see nothing but the whirling drift of rain spray before the
freshening breeze, while through it the heavy big drops fell about him
with sonorous and rapid beats upon the dry e