read, I looked up to the
austere summit of the Sentinel. Scarred and haggard with time it caught
the sun. I thought of how long it had stood there just so, under the
intermittent flashing of moon and sun and star, since first its flinty
peak had pricked through the hot spume of prehistoric seas.

Fantastic reptiles, winged and finned and fanged, had basked upon
it--grotesque, tentative vehicles of the Flame of Life! And then these
flashed out, and the wild sea fell, and the land arose--hideous and
naked, a steaming ooze fetid with gasping life. And all the while this
scarred Sentinel stared unmoved. And then a riot of giant vegetation all
about it--divinely extravagant, many-colored as fire. And this too
flashed out--like the impossible dream of a god too young. And the Great
Change came, and the paradox of frost was in the world, stripping life
down to the lean essentials till only the sane, capable things might
live. And still the Titan stared as in the beginning. And then, men were
in the land--gaunt, terrible, wolf-like men, loving and hating. And La
Verendrye forged past it; and Lewis and Clark toiled under it through
these waters of awful quiet. And then the bull boats and the mackinaws
and the packets. And all these flashed out; and still it stood unmoved.
And I came--and I too would flash out, and all men after me and all
life.

I viewed the colossal watcher with something like terror--the aspect of
death about its base and that cynical glimmer of sunlight at its top. I
flung the throttle open, and we leaped forward through the river hush.
I wanted to get away from this thing that had seen so much of life and
cared so little. It depressed me strangely; it thrust bitter questions
within the charmed circle of my ego. It gave me an almost morbid desire
for speed, as though there were some place I should reach before the
terrible question should be answered against me.

We fled down five or six miles of depressingly quiet waters. Once again
the wall rocks closed about us. We seemed to be going at a tediously
slow pace, yet the two thin streams of water rushed hissing from prow to
stern. A strange mood was upon me. Once when I was a boy and far from
home, I awoke in the night with a bed of railroad ties under me, and the
chill black blanket of the darkness about me. I wanted to get up and run
through that damned night--anywhere, just so I went fast
enough--stopping only when exhaustion should drag me down. And yet