es. All around
was absolute stillness. Not a swallow waved his wing nor an insect
hummed in that barren immensity. Nature was hushed by some deadly spell.

Yet the dread silence portended the near approach of HORRORS. She knew
what they were, for she had been in this frightful region often before,
and was familiar with its dread phenomena. They came. They were only two
little black specks--like motes in the sunbeams--scarcely visible to her
strained vision at first. She gazed upon them with the fascination of a
charmed bird on the two small jet eyes of a serpent; but with this
difference, that she knew the terrible peril that they brought. The
moment that these two motes became visible to her in that dimly lighted
mist, they commenced revolving around each other.

They revolved slowly, and increased in size as they rolled on. The
slowness of the motion and the swelling of the motes were elements of
horror. But she could not take her eyes from those two black objects
revolving like binary stars, until her breath should cease to come and
go, and her heart to beat. As the motes enlarged, their orbits widened.
And they grew and-grew, performing greater and more awful
circuits--still slowly, still noiselessly. The eternal, unbroken silence
was another element of horror. The doomed spectatress of this solemn,
maddening whirl would fain have shrieked, or even whispered, to break
the silence, but she could not. Either her powers of articulation had
disappeared in that region of universal dumbness, or the dead atmosphere
was waveless, and could vibrate to no sound. She knew, by harrowing
experience, the scene that was to come, and she prayed inwardly to God
to strengthen her for it.

The two black objects swelled and swelled in even proportions, until
they became as large as a full moon just seen above the horizon; then to
the size of two full moons, and a dozen, and a hundred, and a thousand.
Still black, still noiseless, still revolving slowly, like a tardy but
certain doom. Then a quarter of the leaden space was filled with their
gigantic bodies, and the lurid air was darker. Then a half of the
heavens was blotted out; She grew faint and sick, as she moved her head
to the right and left, and up and down, and watched the dizzy
revolutions of those vast orbs, between which she knew that she was to
be crushed at last, as by the nether and upper millstones. Her
inarticulate cries to God were unheard. It seemed as if there were