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Landless, an angry pain tugging at his heart, kept beside her, for they were passing through a deep hollow in the wood where the gnarled and protruding roots of cypress and juniper made walking difficult, and where a strong hand was needed to push aside the wet and pendent masses of vine.
Both banks of the creek were rank with lush jungle; great, warped trees seemed to stagger, so gnarled were their trunks; while immense beards of moss depended from their hideous branches almost to the water. A sullen, ominous splash under the bank was sufficient warning against frivolous bathing.
Then silence a silence that seemed unending to the girl who waited breathlessly, one hand grasping the rough bark of the gnarled tree, and the other shading her eyes as thought to aid them in their effort to pierce the gloom.
The ancient rugged tree of Netherland liberty with its moss-grown trunk, gnarled branches, and deep-reaching roots which had been slowly growing for ages, was still full of sap, and was to deposit for centuries longer its annual rings of consolidated and concentric strength.
Towards the land was a small wood of gnarled trees, the boughs of which were all brushed smooth by the gales; looking landward there was the green flat, in which the river ran, rising into low hills; hardly a house was visible save one or two lonely farms; two or three church towers rose above the hills at a long distance away.
Before us lay the long wished-for Cape, with the Meal-sack, a queer stump of basalt, that flops up out of the sea, fifteen miles south-west of Cape Reikianess, its flat top white with guano, like the mouth of a bag of flour, five miles on our port bow; and seldom have I remembered a pleasanter four-and-twenty hours than those spent stealing up along the gnarled and crumpled lava flat that forms the western coast of Guldbrand Syssel.
An hour later, from the gnarled branches of the willow up into which Stern had fairly flung her, and where he had himself clambered with the beasts ravening at his legs the two sole survivors of the human race watched the glowering eyes that dotted the velvet gloom. "I estimate a couple of hundred, all told," judged Allan. "Odd we never ran across any of them before to-night.
We cannot express a thousandth part of the beauty of the woods and the stream; we can but dimly feel it when we see it with our eyes. Below the "pill" for we have been gazing up stream some sheep are lying under a gnarled willow on the left bank; some are nibbling at the lichen and moss on the trunk, others are standing about in pretty groups of three and four. One of them has just had a ducking.
The low sound was everywhere among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine thinly between the little stars.
There was Bresdin's Comedy of Death in which, in the fantastic landscape bristling with trees, brushwood and tufts of grass resembling phantom, demon forms, teeming with rat-headed, pod-tailed birds, on earth covered with ribs, skulls and bones, gnarled and cracked willows rear their trunks, surmounted by agitated skeletons whose arms beat the air while they intone a song of victory.
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