's hope strikes
its root in the soil of the soul's despair.

This learned, all is learned. The great trust and the great distrust
alike are mastered. Courage and Humbleness have kissed each other, and
the man steers between, safe in their companionship whatever seas may
roar.

The faith grew, but it was not clear, nor destined to be clear, until
the divine hour of its true dawning was appointed, and that hour was not
long delayed.

Paul Armstrong had tracked memory from its earliest dawn till now. The
pictured image of himself he had so long followed in fancy drew closer,
until he and it merged into each other, and the shade and he were one.

He had listened all day for the accustomed clangour of the trains, and
had heard nothing. The brown-red smoke-fog had grown denser and more
dense, and now it stung throat and eyes with its acrid and pungent
atoms. The air was thick and hot, and objects only a score of yards away
were but just visible. The runnel at the tent-door had barely a voice
of its own. Paul guessed rightly that its course lay through a tract of
forest fire, and that the greater part of its volume had evaporated in
the heat. The river in the gorge plunged and thundered. The night
came down, and a blind glare of dull red seemed to show itself above,
revealing nothing else. For the first time since the forest fires had
begun to smoulder, the dead air took a sense of motion. It stirred with
a long, sluggish heave, and brought with it a dreadful heat, and a noise
altogether disproportionate to the pace at which it moved--the sound of
a mighty tempest. It breathed fitfully, heavily, and as if with labour;
but at every breath it blew a fervent heat along, and at every breath
there rose the same threatening roar of sound. There was something
massive and ponderous in this strange noise. It was as if a sea in
unmeasured storm were billowing nearer and nearer. And surely that red
glow was brightening. The trunks of giant trees were silhouetted on it.

Then with one slow heave, beginning like a sigh, but gathering in pace,
the wind awoke, and in one minute it blew a hurricane. And with it came
a voice--the voice of league on league of smouldering forest leaping
into a roar of flame. The air burned with a sudden crimson. The
monstrous noise of the torrent was drowned, and went unheard. The wind,
with a sudden access of its force, was sucked along the valley by the
amazing indraught of the fire, and it raged past him