Fiction > Book editions > New York, 1885 - Dynamiter

28 THE DESTROYING ANGEL.
country was exceedingly intricate and difficult,
heaped witli bowlders, and dotted lieie and
there with a few pines, which seemed to indi-
cate the neighborhood of water. Here, then,
he picketed his horse, and relying on his trusty
rifle, advanced alone into that wilderness.
Presently, in the great silence that reigned,
he was aware of the sound of running water to
his right ; and leaning in that direction, was
rewarded by a scene of natural wonder and
human pathos strangely intermixed. The
stream ran at the bottom of a narrow and wind-
ing passage, whose wall-like sides of rock were
sometimes for miles together unscalable by man.
The water, when the stream was swelled with
rains, must have filled it from side to side ; the
sun' s rays only plumbed it in the hour of noon ;
the wind, in that narrow and damp funnel, blew
tempestuously. And yet, in the bottom of this
den, immediately below my father's eyes as he
leaned over the margin of the cliff, a party of
some half a hundred men, women and children
lay scattered uneasily among the rocks. They
lay some upon their backs, some prone, and
not one stirring ; their upturned faces seemed
all of an extraordinary paleness and emaciation ;
and from time to time, above the washing of the
stream, a faint sound of moaning mounted to
my father's ears.
Whilo he thus looked, an old man got stag-