ins; and behind the
mountains, other mountains, more and more, each swathed in its own
mystery; and beyond all hung the curtain-depth of the sky-gulf.
Gibbie sat and gazed, and dreamed and gazed. The mighty city that
had been to him the universe, was dropped and lost, like a thing
that was now nobody's, in far indistinguishable distance; and he who
had lost it had climbed upon the throne of the world. The air was
still; when a breath awoke, it but touched his cheek like the down
of a feather, and the stillness was there again. The stillness grew
great, and slowly descended upon him. It deepened and deepened.
Surely it would deepen to a voice!--it was about to speak! It was
as if a great single thought was the substance of the silence, and
was all over and around him, and closer to him than his clothes,
than his body, than his hands. I am describing the indescribable,
and compelled to make it too definite for belief. In colder speech,
an experience had come to the child; a link in the chain of his
development glided over the windlass of his uplifting; a change
passed upon him. In after years, when Gibbie had the idea of God,
when he had learned to think about him, to desire his presence, to
believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the brooding hen
spreads her wings over her eggs--as often as the thought of God came
to him, it came in the shape of the silence on the top of Glashgar.

As he sat, with his eyes on the peak he had just chosen from the
rest as the loftiest of all within his sight, he saw a cloud begin
to grow upon it. The cloud grew, and gathered, and descended,
covering its sides as it went, until the whole was hidden. Then
swiftly, as he gazed, the cloud opened as it were a round window in
the heart of it, and through that he saw the peak again. The next
moment a flash of blue lightning darted across the opening, and
whether Gibbie really saw what follows, he never could be sure, but
always after, as often as the vision returned, in the flash he saw a
rock rolling down the peak. The clouds swept together, and the
window closed. The next thing which in after years he remembered
was, that the earth, mountains, meadows, and streams, had vanished;
everything was gone from his sight, except a few yards around him of
the rock upon which he sat, and the cloud that hid world and heaven.
Then again burst forth the lightning. He saw no flash, but an
intense cloud-illumination, accompanied by t