Grits

“ The wind has been blowing, and the rushes and young plants bowing and bending to it, lest it should do them harm, the cowards—and Grip—ha ha ha!—brave Grip, who cares for nothing, and when the wind rolls him over in the dust, turns manfully to bite it—Grip, bold Grip, has quarrelled with every little bowing twig—thinking, he told me, that it mocked him—and has worried it like a bulldog. ”

“ Another day, the sixth of the interminable gale. Will it never end? The wind and drift continue with unabated violence. For some three hours to-day, I pushed, and butted, and at times almost crawled on hands and knees, back and forth across the small floe on which we are camped. ”

“ The gale outside was like a living immensity, a vast soul raging with world-suffering, thousand-voiced and thousand-winged, and under its raging agony, which filled all the air above the land, the house that contained the life of them all was small as some tiny casket. ”

“ As they sat by the fire waiting, they could hear the frost cracking and snapping the tree-boughs. Now and then a crash like thunder came. It was a limb, overloaded with ice, breaking off, and falling to the ground. And by and by, among the other noises, a strange, wild voice began to mingle, making them all more fearful. ”

“ Grit and Gritty gamboled about together, playing like two puppies, for Grit, usually grave and dignified, as suited a blooded bulldog, seemed to renew his youth in the presence of the little waif from the sea. ”

“ With a view to lessening the painful effect of the constant jarring and shaking motion, a swinging bed was speedily improvised in the middle of the car, and here, surrounded by his sorrowing companions, lay Grit, enduring in silence the pains that his pale, sadly troubled face so keenly expressed. ”

“ No one can stand very near the crashing sweeps of a windmill in half a gale without a tightening of the heart—a feeling comparable to that which comes from watching the waves break over a wall in a storm. ”

“ A wild gust of wind shrieks angrily above board as the smack rises and plunges in the trough of a choppy sea. The blood-red sun has vanished, an inky darkness has set in, and the wind is rapidly increasing from a fresh breeze into a regular fierce and nasty gale. ”

“ For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man who, in a chance phrase, interprets the elemental passion of his enemy. Thus there is another gale in my memory, a thing of endless, deep, humming roar, moonlight, and a spoken sentence. ”

“ You find a quiet little hill of clay, with nothing stirring round about; you smash into it with your boot-heel or a bit of wattle, and instantly the earth is covered in every direction with a scrambling, scurrying—doubtless, if one could hear them, a screaming—crowd, all bent on knowing what has caused the disturbance. ”

“ It is not so much the sighing of the blast as that pause, as Gray expresses it, "when the gust is recollecting itself," that thrills us, and is infinitely grander than the importunate howlings of the storm. ”

“ As she came in sight of the grove she saw a fire, a small fire built to light up the "Rustlers' Roost," as the old limb was called where many a horse and maverick-thief had been stretched by the neck, and she could see the black shadows of men moving back and forth. ”

“ On the instant there came a crackling, tearing sound—a heaving roll—a splintering crash and uproar. The man aloft was seen to make a flying leap—or was it only a hurled fragment of the falling chimney?—and white dust rose in a fog once more and blotted out all the tragedy that might be enacting behind it. ”

“ The clamor oppressed the spirit, the dust fretted the nostrils and blinded the eyes, the sweltering heat baked and exhausted the body, and everything-buildings, men, pavement—seemed strained, breaking, ready to burst, losing patience, on the verge of exploding into some immense catastrophe, some outbreak, after which one would be able to breathe freely and easily in the air refreshed by it. ”

“ Sometimes the wind would cause her veil for a few moments to rear straight up above her head in a monstrous black column of woe. Sometimes, if she stopped a moment waiting to cross the street, it would whip round the body of any one who happened to be near, like a cord. ”

“ So much sickness and suffering may, we are convinced, be prevented by kindling a small fire every night and morning, that all pleasure in the beauty of fresh, pretty-colored grates and fireplaces is lost in the knowledge of the price paid for it. A well blackened grate has more attractions for us, as it speaks of dry rooms, rosy cheeks, and good health, whereas unused and spotless bricks tell of rheumatism, chills and fever, and pale, sallow faces. ”

“ Clouds of dust were driven up into the skies, and the plain became covered with banners, lances, and all kinds of arms, and with emblems of every colour and device, torn and broken, and soiled with blood and dust. ”

“ The fury of the storm increased, and flying stony particles of the rubbly soil stung our bodies like shot, as the wind took us by the scruff of the neck and thrust us along, to the whipping of drops of rain which had begun to fall. ”

“ But outside a great storm was raging, and blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his feet; houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high as church-towers and mountains, and all with crests of white foam at the top. ”

“ Heralded by the increasing fierceness of the squalls, sometimes by a faint flash of lightning like the signal of a lighted torch waved far away behind the clouds, the shift of wind comes at last, the crucial moment of the change from the brooding and veiled violence of the south-west gale to the sparkling, flashing, cutting, cleareyed anger of the King's north-westerly mood. ”

“ When the wind with its flood of rain comes toward us as we crouch by the wall we are beaten and drenched and buffeted and driven hard against that cold, blue surface. And the ragged edges of the rocks make bruises on our foreheads. ”

“ The wind had been steadily increasing in violence since the fire started and now was blowing almost a gale. It whipped the waves into foam and whistled and shrieked through the rigging. The fire, fanned by the breeze, now roared menacingly while its volume increased steadily. ”

“ I fell on my forearms and head, among thorns, and rose with a torn ear and bleeding face. I had fallen into a precipitous ravine, rocky and thorny, full of a hazy mist which drifted about me in wisps, and with a narrow streamlet from which this mist came meandering down the centre. ”

“ At one moment it bursts upon these icy fragments and buries them many feet beneath its wave, and the next, as the buoyancy of the depressed body struggles for reascendancy, the water rushes in foaming cataracts over the edges, while every individual mass, rocking and laboring in its bed, grinds against and contends with its opponent, until one is either split with the shock or upheaved upon the surface of the other. ”

“ It is a curious circumstance that sometimes in profound sleep a person seems vaguely aware of the presence of an intruder, and the feeling is frequently strong enough to disturb slumber. Grit was a sound sleeper, but, however we may account for it, whether it was the instinctive feeling I have mentioned, or the glare of the candle, he woke up, and his glance rested on the kneeling figure of his stepfather rummaging his pockets. ”

“ They're chaps without legs, with an arm gone, a hand gone, back wounds, stomach wounds, holes in the head. They start chaffing one another. There's no hint of tragedy. A gale of laughter sweeps the ward from end to end. ”

“ The gale roared above us with the peculiar tearing sound that accompanies the body of a typhoon—a sound suggestive of unearthly anger and violence, as if elemental forces were ripping up the envelope of the universe—a sound that carries its own message of latent power, of savage impulse, of unloosed destruction. ”

“ How the sparks mount and twinkle and disappear like tropical fire-flies, and all the leaves murmur, and clap their hands! Some of the sparks do not go out: we see them flaming in the sky when the flame of the fire has died down. ”

“ When at dayspring he is dappled with spots and sunk in a mist, and his orbed centre retires, mistrust thou of showers; for a gale is bearing hard from seaward, ill-ominous for trees and crops and herds. ”

“ Often have I seen, when the husbandman was marching in his reapers to the golden fields and just cutting the slim-stalked barley, how all the winds, clashing in battle, would tear right from the roots and fling high whole breadths of heavy corn; in so black a gust would the storm sweep light blade and flying straw away. Often, likewise the waters of heaven descend in infinite armies, and clouds charged from the deep thicken into foul weather black with thundershowers: the sky pours sheer down and washes away the glad crops and labours of the oxen with flooding rain ”

“ Stretch'd on his back, he dash'd against the stones
Their broken bodies, and their crackling bones:
With spouting blood the purple pavement swims,
While the dire glutton grinds the trembling limbs. ”

“ An accident always caused a feeling of sullenness in the works; this was now intensified by the gloom of the weather and the increased discomfort of the conditions; the thick and acrid smoke that would not rise, the floating particles of grime that clogged one's breathing-passages, the chill dampness, worse than wind, worse than rain, that greeted the man who went sweating from his furnace to draw a breath of air. ”

“ At the same time, the thuddings of the earth grew more severe than ever and they were accompanied by rumblings, roars, and reverberations of terrifying force and insistency. Crash after crash burst upon our ears as if from some remote storm-center—crash after crash that echoed and re-echoed eerily in that narrow corridor, until our ear-drums ached from the strain and our agitated hearts pumped with a thumping rapidity. ”

“ For a moment chaos reigned. Some enormous clouds, like huge blots of ink, swept through a host of smaller ones, which were scattered and floated like shreds of rag which the wind tore to pieces and carried off thread by thread. ”

“ Smelt sickly, till it seemed through a swift tear-flood
That dead men blossomed in the garden-close.
[23]
LIMBO
After a week spent under raining skies,
In horror, mud and sleeplessness, a week
Of bursting shells, of blood and hideous cries
And the ever-watchful sniper: where the reek
Of death offends the living ... but poor dead
Can't sleep, must lie awake with the horrid sound
That roars and whirs and rattles overhead
All day, all night, and jars and tears the ground ”

“ And oftentimes when the flesh is dissolved in the body, wind, generated within and unable to escape, is the source of quite as much pain as the air coming in from without; but the greatest pain is felt when the wind gets about the sinews and the veins of the shoulders, and swells them up, and so twists back the great tendons and the sinews which are connected with them. ”

“ It was gravel that moved underfoot with never-failing treachery, gravel made hot by the rays of the sun, and flinging up a scorching heat while it crawled and blistered underfoot. On midsummer days men had perished here, driven mad by the dancing of the air and the dread of the movement where they trod. ”

“ He stated that a man with a wound, which he explained to mean a cut, would go and stand in the well within the wall, and there he would untie the rag that had been used to tie up the wound and would wash the wound with it: then he would tie up the wound with a fresh rag and hang the old one on the tree. The more respectable people whom I questioned talked more vaguely, and only of tying a rag to the tree, except one who mentioned a pin being thrown into the well or a rag being tied to the tree. ”

“ Far off, long before the eye can catch the cause, a sound is heard like the rush of a cataract over opposing rocks, the trunks of the trees flame out with a sudden crash, the branches crackle, and the roots beneath the soil all contribute to the extraordinary uproar. ”

“ The dust stirred up fills and darkens the air. The dust clearing away, the field of battle appears like a sea of blood, in which the carcases of elephants, horses, and men, with the fragments of chariots, weapons, &c. ”

“ We were then called again to our tasks, and worked through the heat of the day; the sun flaming upon our heads like fire, and raising salt blisters in those parts which were not completely covered. Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afflicting the sufferers with great torment. ”

“ Sometimes a bough from an adjoining tree was swayed so low as to smite the roof in the manner of a gigantic hand smiting the mouth of an adversary, to be followed by a trickle of rain, as blood from the wound. To all this weather Giles must be more or less exposed ”

“ The gale increases—blast pursuing blast, roaring and sweeping round the walls and over the roofs of the houses with the frantic violence of a typhoon. There is a horror in the sound, and then the prospect from the windows! ”

“ The drift.—The drift consists of a body of clay, sand, gravel and bowlders, spread out as a cover of unequal thickness over the rock formations beneath. These various classes of material may be confusedly commingled, or they may be more or less distinctly separated from one another. When commingled, all may be in approximately equal proportions, or any one may predominate over any or all the others to any extent. ”

“ On one side was a rock, forming a wall rugged and projecting above; at the bottom of the rock was a rift, somewhat resembling a coffin in shape, and not much larger in dimensious: this rift terminated on the opposite side of the rock in an opening that was too small for the body of a man to pass: the distance between each entrance was twice the length of a man. ”