"
The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common
stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the
low indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley along
that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left rose
into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night
atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood
massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me and
grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power
of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of
slower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift,
almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planet
through space. Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing
tread of the hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence was about
us,--unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the
time of temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. If I stretched
out my hand I should touch it like the ground.
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