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With every step, he felt that he would miss secure footing and be swallowed in that clinging sea of blackness. In dumb agony he plunged forward, clinging to the posts and trees until he had finished restringing and testing the wire. He had consumed much time. Night closed in. The Limberlost stirred gently, then shook herself, growled, and awoke around him.
Abruptly the light faded from all, and on the same instant the four walls of blackness vanished, revealing on two sides the lovely, unfamiliar garden through the guarding rows of pillars; at our backs soft draperies hid what lay beyond; before us, flanked by flowered screens, was the corridor through which we had entered, crowded now by the green dwarfs of the great hall. The dwarfs advanced.
It kills the grass and tramples it underfoot. It takes the most beautiful architecture in the world and makes a pile of dust and dirt of it. It takes a beautiful face and makes it horrible with the scars of bayonet and burning gases. But on this morning God seemed to be covering up all of that ugliness and dirt and mud and blackness.
All the nations of the world had met in that imperial ballroom; not only mortals, but fairies, sylphides, and heathen gods and goddesses. It was a bewildering scene, that crowd of fantastic revellers, whose faces were every one hidden by velvet masks, through which dark eyes glittered, like stars upon the blackness of the night. The imperial family alone appeared without masks.
His uneasiness concerning the young woman of the cross-roads increased as he peered at the wall of blackness looming up beyond the circle of light. He could not see the towering hills, but memory pictured them as they were revealed to him in the gathering darkness before the storm.
In the raven masses of her hair there was not the least ornament, nor did any flower enhance the rich blackness of its silken coils. It would be impossible to imagine greater simplicity than Corona showed in her dress, but it would be hard to conceive of any woman who possessed by virtue of severe beauty a more indubitable right to dispense with ornament. The theatre was crowded.
The result was apparent at once. The gap between them became a gulf. The flag flying so proudly on the topmast of the sloop was gone in the dusk. Her spars and sails faded away, she showed only a dim, low hulk on the water from which her guns flashed. The schooner tacked again. A new bank of blackness poured down over the sea, and the sloop was gone.
The room was dark though it was summer, and although it had two windows, one to the street, and one to the garden behind: both ceiling and floor were of a dark brown, for the beams and boards of the one were old and interpenetrated with smoke, and the other was of hard-beaten clay, into which also was wrought much smoke and an undefinable blackness, while the windows were occupied with different plants favoured of Grannie, so that little light could get in, and that little was half-swallowed by the general brownness.
One of the starpools was blotted out in blackness at the instant he turned to look over the rail. The boy's heart seemed to be beating against the roof of his mouth. Thoughts of alligators crossed his mind, for he had heard of them from the pirates who had plied in southern waters.
Around him lighted lanterns were flitting or standing stationary in the depths of the gloom. He was sitting on one side of a broad street which he did not recognise; it stretched far away into the blackness of the night. He could make out nothing plainly, excepting the stock of which he had been left in charge. All around him along the market footways rose similar piles of goods.
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