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Updated: May 10, 2025
Stern caught a glimpse of the tall forest growing up to within a hundred yards of the edge, then of smaller trees, dwindling to bushes and grasses, and strange red sand that bordered the gap sand and rocks, barren as though some up-draft from the void had killed off vegetable growth along the very brink. Then all slid back and away.
Dizzy, sick with the monstrous caroming through space, deafened by the thunderous roaring of the up-draft, Stern was still able to retain enough of his scientific curiosity to peer upward. The sun! Could he still see it? Vanished utterly was now the glorious orb!
Raging through the resinous pine branches the blaze had swept fiercely around the side of the hill. As the boy looked up he could see it suddenly break into greater vigor as the up-draft on the hill fanned it to a wilder fury and made a furnace of the place where he had been standing with Merritt and Rifle-Eye scarcely more than an hour before.
Here vast and broken ledges ran along its flanks red, yellow, black, all seared and burned and vitrified as by the fire of Hell; there huge masses, up-piled, seemed about to fall into the abyss. A quarter-mile to southward, a rivulet had found its way over a projecting ledge. Spraying and silvery it fell, till, dissipated by the up-draft from the abyss, it dissolved in mist.
Stern knew an eagle could not imitate the feat without some aid in the way of an up-draft. "And if that draft is steady and constant all the way across," thought he, "it will result in a big saving of fuel. Given a sufficient rising current, we could volplane all the way across with a very slight expenditure of alcohol. It looks now as though everything were coming on first-rate.
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