to the east of Chicago; therefore that void out
there beyond the park was the lake or, at least, the harbor. A
different air seemed to come from it; sounds... Suddenly it all was
shut off; the taxicab, swerving a little, was dashing between business
blocks; a row of buildings had risen again upon the right; they broke
abruptly to show him a wooden-walled chasm in which flowed a river full
of ice with a tug dropping its smokestack as it went below the bridge
which the cab crossed; buildings on both sides again; then, to the
right, a roaring, heaving, crashing expanse.

The sound, Alan knew, had been coming to him as an undertone for many
minutes; now it overwhelmed, swallowed all other sound. It was great,
not loud; all sound which Alan had heard before, except the soughing of
the wind over his prairies, came from one point; even the monstrous
city murmur was centered in comparison with this. Alan could see only
a few hundred yards out over the water as the taxicab ran along the
lake drive, but what was before him was the surf of a sea; that
constant, never diminishing, never increasing roar came from far beyond
the shore; the surge and rise and fall and surge again were of a sea in
motion. Floes floated, tossed up, tumbled, broke, and rose again with
the rush of the surf; spray flew up between the floes; geysers spurted
high into the air as the pressure of the water, bearing up against the
ice, burst between two great ice-cakes before the waves cracked them
and tumbled them over. And all was without wind; over the lake, as
over the land, the soft snowflakes lazily floated down, scarcely
stirred by the slightest breeze; that roar was the voice of the water,
that awful power its own.

Alan choked and gasped for breath, his pulses pounding in his throat;
he had snatched off his hat and, leaning out of the window sucked the
lake air into his lungs. There had been nothing to make him expect
this overwhelming crush of feeling. The lake--he had thought of it, of
course, as a great body of water, an interesting sight for a prairie
boy to see; that was all. No physical experience in all his memory had
affected him like this; and it was without warning; the strange thing
that had stirred within him as the car brought him to the drive
down-town was strengthened now a thousand-fold; it amazed, half
frightened, half dizzied him. Now, as the motor suddenly swung around
a corner and shut the sight of the lake from him, Alan