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Instantly ahead of me they whirled again' and before I could think, off across the path was another rush and whirl then stirless silence. I knew what it meant. These were not the sudden, startled leaps of three animals, but the lightning movements of one. I had crossed the path of a swamp black-snake, and judging from the speed and whirl, it was a snake of uncommon size.
The pickets of the foe flew homeward before us, shaking their javelins, and their mocking laughter reached us in hollow echoes. Now we saw the vast array, posted rank on rank with silken banners drooping in that stirless air, flanked and screened by glittering regiments of horse. An embassy approached us, and at the signal of Ayesha's uplifted arm we halted.
A figure which had lost its energy a face stamped with the lines and pallor of a dejection almost guilty with something of the fallen grace and beauty of poor Margaret, as we see her with her forehead leaning on her slender hand, by the stirless spinning-wheel the image of a strange and ineffaceable sorrow, sat Rachel Lake.
The vapour had broken up and lay in masses round about us long, white twisted folds of it, like powder smoke after a great battle; and to the top of those heaps of thickness the sky sloped in a sort of grey shadow, with a little pencilling here and there of some small livid ring of mist, which looked stirless as though what air there was blew low.
It was a pleasant thing to see the moon come up from among the trees that formed a dark outline to the lake away off to the east, and travel up into the sky; to see how faithfully it was given back from down in the stirless waters, and how the stars twinkled and glowed around it in the depths below, as they did in the depths above.
His heavy boots clogged with snow; the pain exhausted even his thick lungs, they breathed heavily; he climbed the narrow ridge of ground that ran parallel with the road, and hurried on. Half an hour more, and he would save them! A cold, stirless air: Gaunt panted in it. Was there ever night so silent? Following his lead, came the long column, a dark, even-moving mass, shirred with steel.
Evidently it was a low quarter of the town and a malodourous quarter, for the canals, spanned by picturesque and high-arched bridges, were everywhere, and at this summer season the water in them was low, rotten, and almost stirless. At length Red Bow halted and knocked upon a small recessed door, which instantly was opened by a man who bore no light.
It was only by painful effort of mind that he kept recalling himself to himself why he was here; what it all meant; that this was indeed actuality. Yet, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark. He glanced around him in the clear, black, stirless air.
It was splendid weather! with four inches of ice on the little pond behind the ridge, glare ice, black as you looked across it, but like a pane of plate glass as you peered into it at the stirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched by the wing of the wind or by even the circling runner of the skater-snow. Another day and night like this and the solid square-edged blocks could come in.
On and on they hurry down and down, to a cold stirless solidity, where wind blows not, water flows not, where the seas are not merely tideless and beat no shores, but frozen cleave with frozen roots to their gulfy basin. All things are on the steep-sloping path to final evanishment, uncreation, non-existence.
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