with such violence
as to bring him to his knees. The smoke, which had hung without form
through so many days, was ripped and twisted and dragged and beaten into
a thousand writhing and tormented shapes. They went hurling down the
wind as if that unspeakable voice of the parent fire had called them,
and there were nothing for it but this mad answer to the appeal.

It seemed impossible that the roaring noise should augment itself, and
yet it grew and grew and grew--Niagara twenty-fold, Niagara fifty-fold,
Niagara a hundred-fold. The eye discerned more and more as the wind
cleared the air, and at last the panorama stood revealed in horrid
splendour. On either side the canon the lower hills were all aflame.
They tossed aloft pyramids of brightness; they burned dull-red in
sheltered hollows; they flared fantastically on open heights;
they brightened and darkened with mile-long undulations, and swift
shudderings from blind black to blinding white, and then from that
supreme of light to black again. These changes were wrought with
dazzling swiftness. A flame which writhed over many acres flapped like
the loosened end of a sail and vanished in the twinkling of an eye,
and before the watcher could have cried out that it was gone, flaunted
itself again at the sky, which overhung it like an inverted bowl of
red-hot copper.

The fire displayed a myriad inequalities in the landscape which were
unseen in open day. It scaled ridge after ridge, and each in turn stood
out against the blackness of the mountain on which an instant before it
had seemed to nestle closely. It charged each acclivity with appalling
strength, but there were times when the assaulting line wavered,-and
retired as if the walls of darkness held a living force which had
at times the power to beat it down. Then with a rush the height was
carried; hell's victorious banner floated over one more conquered
citadel, and the roar of triumph deepened.

At times the fire seemed to carve the darkness like a knife wielded
swiftly by some invisible giant hand. At times, catching the face of
some lofty wooded cliff, it soared up like a rocket and left a trailing
line which faded wholly as if the night had been triumphant there and
had won back a portion of its invaded ground.

For hours there did not seem a moment at which the watcher's life was
worth purchase at a pin's fee, but the wind flawed madly here and there,
and as if by constantly recurring miracle he stood safe.