Ten thousand chariots
at their speed could not have equalled the rumbling that succeeded, when
the winds came booming over the lake. As if too eager to permit anything
within their fangs to escape, they brought with them a wild, dull light,
which filled while it clouded the atmosphere, and which, it was scarcely
fanciful to imagine, had been hurried down, in their vortex, from those
chill glaciers, where they had so long been condensing their forces for
the present descent. The waves were not increased, but depressed by the
pressure of this atmospheric column, though it took up hogshead, of water
from their crests, scattering it in fine penetrating spray, till the
entire space between the heavens and the earth seemed saturated with its
particles.
The Winkelried received the shock at a moment when the lee-side of her
broad deck was wallowing in the trough, and its weather was protruded on
the summit of a swell. The wind howled when it struck the pent limits, as
if angered at being thwarted, and there was a roar under the wide
gangways, resembling that of lions.
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