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The rock-walled chamber was atremble; they heard a sullen, distant roaring, and as Aldous caught Joanne's hand and sprang toward the tunnel the roar grew into a deafening crash, and a gale of wind rushed into their faces, blowing out the lantern, and leaving them in darkness. The mountain seemed crumbling about them, and above the sound of it rang out a wild, despairing cry from Joanne's lips.
For though even Father Francis looked angered at her because he thought she was stubborn, and hid some truth and some shame from him at confession, yet she went resolutely and oftener than ever to kneel in the dusty, dusky, crumbling old church, for it was all she could do for him who was absent so she thought and she did not feel quite so far away from him when she was beseeching Christ to have care of his soul and of his body.
And the fierce warrior felt his blood kindle within him, that not only death but something still more mysterious and incomprehensible should separate him from the one he loved. He turned sadly away and passed on to the interior of the hut. As he gazed on the crumbling relics of humanity around him, the wonted look of command came back to his brow.
Sorely trying to stranger nerves at best of times was that wonderful narrow bone of a neck which joins Little Sercq to Sercq, six hundred feet long, three hundred feet high, four feet wide at its widest at that time, and in places less, and with nothing between the crumbling edges of the path and the growling death below but ragged falls of rock, almost sheer on the one side and little better on the other.
The old stones that are no longer visited, on which no fresh-gathered flower is ever laid, which mark the last resting-places of the men and women who were once the leading members of the little rustic community, and are now forgotten for ever, whose bones for a century past have been crumbling to dust.
Sampson got up from the table and peered round the room. Just at that instant I felt an almost inappreciable movement of the adobe wall which supported me. I could scarcely credit my senses. But the rattle inside Sampson's room was mingling with little dull thuds of falling dirt. The adobe wall, merely dried mud was crumbling. I distinctly felt a tremor pass through it.
It was all many years ago, but never hath my love for her dimmed, and it shall live after Jamestown is again in ashes, when the sea-birds are calling over the sunset-waste, when the reeds are tall in the gardens, when even the tombs are crumbling, and maybe hers and mine among them, when the sea-gates are down and the water washing over the sites of the homes of the cavaliers.
While so ran the sleeper's drowsy remonstrances Erwin secured the searchlight, and an instant later was sending its white rays upward. A minute later the black shadow of a huge bi plane hovered in a circle over the wide expanse of what once had been a trim lawn, but was now a desert of dirt, ashes, and crumbling masonry loosened from the walls.
The earthquakes began and grew until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one day it reached the sea.
But as for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality.
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