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You see the vast limbs, crooked with power, bound about with huge ropes and plates of muscle, and clothed in shaggy depths of fur; the vast breadth of the head, with its thick, low ears, dull, small eyes, and long up-curving snout; the roll and lunge of the gait, like the motion of a vessel plunging forward before the wind; the rounded immensity of the trunk, and the huge bluntness of the posteriors; and all these features are combined with such masterly unity of conception and plastic vigor, that the diminutive model insensibly grows mighty beneath your gaze, until you realize the monster as if he stood stupendous and grim before you.
The foliage is short and rigid, two leaves in a fascicle, arranged in comparatively long, cylindrical tassels at the ends of the tough, up-curving branchlets.
Now as I hung thus in my shame and misery, faint with my hurts and parched with cruel thirst, my gaze lighted upon a small, bony man a merry-eyed fellow with wide, up-curving mouth, who laughed and jested continually; it was as he stooped for some missile or other that his eye met mine, and in that bright eye methought I read a sudden pity. "O cull," says I hoarsely, "a mouthful o' water "
But as they stood thus, Beltane with arms yet crossed, his lips up-curving at the other's fierce amaze, the stranger grim-faced and frowning, came a shadow athwart the level glory of the sun, and, turning, Beltane beheld the hermit Ambrose, tall and spare beneath his tattered gown, bareheaded and bare of foot, whose eyes were bright and quick, despite the snow of hair and beard, and in whose gentle face and humble mien was yet a high and noble look at odds with his lowly guise and tattered vesture; at sight of whom the grim-faced stranger, of a sudden, bowed his grizzled head and sank upon his knee.
A few headlands, flat-topped and soil-covered, support clumps of cedar and pine; and up-curving tangles of chinquapin and live-oak, growing on rough earthquake taluses, girdle their bases. Small streams come cascading down between them, their foaming margins brightened with gay primulas, gilias, and mimuluses.
They were both tall and massive, of a dark mud-color, with colossal heads, no necks whatever, huge ears that flapped like wings, immensely long, up-curving tusks of gleaming yellow mighty enough to carry a bison cradled in their curve and it seemed to the astonished watchers on the ridge that from the snout of each monster grew a great snake, which reared itself into the air, and waved terribly, and pulled down the tops of trees for the monster's food.
Now, clear to the up-curving edge of the world, nothing could be seen below save the steel-gray, shining plains of water. Waves seemed not to exist. All looked smooth and polished as a mirror of bright metal. At last, something like dim veils of whiteness began to draw and shimmer on the eastern skyline the vague glare of the sun-crisped Sahara flinging its furnace ardor to the sky.
A right jovial companion, at all times, was this Cavalier, an optimist he, from the curling feather in his broad-brimmed beaver hat, to the spurs at his heels. Handsome, gay, and debonair was he, with lips up-curving to a smile beneath his moustachio, and a quizzical light in his grey eyes, very like that in Bellew's own.
So, with my gaze on this I stood leaning on my knotted, untrimmed staff, waiting him. Suddenly, chancing to turn his head, he espied me, halted in his stride, then eyeing me askance, advanced again. A small man he was, with rosy face, little, merry eyes, and a wide, up-curving mouth. "Goo' marnin' to 'ee it do have been a tur'ble bad starm las' night, master!"
"Because I had rather die solitary than live in your fellowship " "Dolt! Clod! Worm!" cried she 'twixt gnashing teeth, and then all in a moment she was gazing down at me soft and gentle-eyed, red lips up-curving and smooth cheek dimpling to a smile: "Ah, Martin," sighs she languorously, "see how you do vex me!
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