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The ravine rocked with the plunging monsters, and reëchoed to the crash of six-hundred guns and a thunderous tread. Firing was at close range. In a moment there was a battle royal between dexterous savages, swift as tigers, and these leviathans of the prairie with their brute strength.
The vapor jetted forth was far more radiant than any portion of the sea; ascribable perhaps to the originally luminous fluid contracting still more brilliancy from its passage through the spouting canal of the whales. We were in great fear, lest without any vicious intention the Leviathans might destroy us, by coming into close contact with our boat.
Up from the city there comes the hum of life, now somewhat fallen with the traffic of the day as though Nature already practiced the tune for sending her creatures off to sleep. You light a fire. The baskets disgorge their secrets. Ants and other leviathans think evidently that a circus has come or that bears are in the town. The chops and bacon achieve their appointed destiny.
From the Grand Canal they came out into the great Canal of San Marco, the beginning of the lagoon. Here Kitty forgot for the moment her troubles; her dream-Venice had returned. There were private yachts, Adriatic liners, all brilliant with illumination, and hundreds of gondolas, bobbing, bobbing, like captive leviathans, bunched round the gaily-lanterned barges of the serenaders.
In the same way the Dean would go on: "I was voyaging on one of those magnificent leviathans of the water, I refer to the boats of the Northern Navigation Company, and was standing beside the forward rail talking with a dear brother in the faith who was journeying westward also I may say he was a commercial traveller, and beside us was a dear sister in the spirit seated in a deck chair, while near us were two other dear souls in grace engaged in Christian pastime on the deck, I allude more particularly to the game of deck billiards."
Yet even then the waters were seething and boiling in never-ended tumult about those hideous sunken rocks; and the ocean all around was hoary as with the neesings of a thousand leviathans floundering in its monstrous depths.
For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle. Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable.
Whether this whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet.
Many years ago, in the days of the first Rainham and of wooden ships, it had been no doubt a flourishing ship-yard; and, indeed, models of wooden leviathans of the period, which had been turned out, not a few, in those palmy days, were still dusty ornaments of its somewhat antique office.
They differed strikingly from those on the leviathans of recent travel and were little, if any, superior to those on the packet ships, the active rivals at that date of the steamers. Then there were none of the comfortable smoking rooms, well-filled libraries, drawing rooms, electric lights, and other modern improvements.
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