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Thirty feet away, in the dead leaves matted under the roots of an uptorn dead tree, something moved something moved; and then there was a sound like a long, deep, gurgling sigh, and another sound like some heavy, lengthy object settling itself down flat upon the snow and the leaves. The first faint rustle cleared Trantham's brain of the liquor fumes.
It struck us on the starboard side almost amidships. The vessel rocked as though the sea beneath it had been uptorn by a mighty volcano. We were thrown to the decks, bruised and stunned, and then above the ship, carrying with it fragments of steel and wood and dismembered human bodies, rose a column of water hundreds of feet into the air.
He walked more hastily at first than was consistent with his strength; for a sort of guilty feeling, which sometimes torments men in their most justifiable acts, caused him to seek concealment from Malvin's eyes; but after he had trodden far upon the rustling forest leaves he crept back, impelled by a wild and painful curiosity, and, sheltered by the earthy roots of an uptorn tree, gazed earnestly at the desolate man.
The freshets had uptorn from the banks the tallest trees, which in places formed a timber-floor; and the surf-boat gallantly charged, till she leaked, the huge trunks, over which she had often to be lifted. Nothing would be easier than to clear away these obstacles; a few pounds of gun-cotton would remove snags and sawyers, and dredging by boats would do the rest.
And every man and woman mentioned in this history was still living, except those whose end we know. Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending.
Just outside the village we passed the scene of the fall of an avalanche, which gave one some faint idea of the enormous forces occasionally at work among these mountains. It had taken a small village in its path, and over the place where it had stood we now took our way, among a perfect chaos of masses of rock, and uptorn earth, trees, &c.
These revolutionary ideas fell alongside of the uptorn but living roots of other and hostile political principles, and of the ramified and deep-growing prejudices of an old social order, and had forthwith to engage in a life and death struggle against tremendous odds for existence.
Now in this place, O my son, dwelleth a black giant, seventy cubits high, who fights with trees from their roots uptorn; and when my son reached his Wady, the tyrant sallied out upon him and his men and slew them all, save three braves, who escaped and brought me the news.
The date of his visit to Iceland is well authenticated by Beamish, Rafn, and other eminent writers on the early discoveries of the Northmen. Nothing could surpass the desolate grandeur of the coast as we approached the point of Reykjaness. It was of an almost infernal blackness. The whole country seemed uptorn, rifted, shattered, and scattered about in a vast chaos of ruin.
In darkness there to house unknown, Far underground, Pierced by no sound Save such as live in Fancy's ear alone, That listens for the uptorn mandrake's parting groan! I should, perhaps, be a happier at all events a more useful man if my mind were otherwise constituted.
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