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Vast rugged columns of vapour rise up behind and over the towers of the House, hanging with threatening aspect; westward the sky is nearly clear, with some relic of the sunset glow: the river itself, black or illuminated with the electric light, imparting a silvery blue tint, crossed again with the red lamps of the steamers.
And now a great expanse of white vapour covered the land: it flowed cold and gray in the darkness, eddied in noiseless whirls round the tree-trunks and about the platform of the house, which seemed to float upon a restless and impalpable illusion of a sea.
They crept rather than walked round that fearful gallery, traversing the unknown height with the roar of waters coming up from the unseen depth, and the silent wraiths of vapour making the darkness visible as they curled upwards to disappear into the vast vault. "If I can only get safe out of this," thought Venning at each step, "I will never try to leave the valley again by this way."
About the time of our arrival in the bay, when the thermometer had fallen nearly to zero, the condensation of vapour upon the beams of the lower deck, and in the cabins near the hatchways, commenced just as it had done at a similar temperature before.
The ascending current being induced up the mountain sides of Jamaica, the air is forced in from the sea to the relatively free space. Before noon the current, aided in its speed by a certain amount of the condensation of the watery vapour before described, attains the proportions of a strong wind.
With a yet slower ascent a large part of the steam may go away, so that we may have a flow of lava welling forth from the vent, still giving forth steam, but with a vapour whose tension is so lowered that the matter is not blown apart, though it may boil violently for a time after it escapes into the air.
At its extremity, a mile or more distant, rose a light cloud of vapour, seeming close at hand in the thin mountain air. The thick, spongy soil, not more than two feet deep, rests on a solid bed of rock, the entire Hardanger Fjeld, in fact, is but a single rock, and is therefore always swampy. But at last, we approached the wreath of whirling spray, and heard the hollow roar of the Vöring-Foss.
Briareus of the hundred unoccupied hands may turn to a monstrous donkey with his hind legs aloft, or twenty thousand jabbering apes. The phantasmic groupings of the young brain are very like those we see in the skies, and equally the sport of the wind. Lady Judith blew. There was plenty of vapour in him, and it always resolved into some shape or other.
They were a little hint of what we do not see. I do not exactly know what was the language of the wreaths of vapour that robed and shrouded and then revealed the mountain, with the exquisite shiftings and changings of their gracefulness; I believe it was like, to me, the floating veil that hides God's purposes from us, yet now and then parting enough to let us see the eternal truth and unchangeableness behind it.
He thought he could see a haze of semi-smokeless powder vapour above a jagged crag up-slope where the wash twisted in a sharp bend. He fired four shots in quick succession at promising notches in the crag. Immediately after his fourth shot an arm and rifle were thrust up above the rock in a convulsive gesture, then suddenly disappeared. No more bullets came pinging down the arroyo.
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