and their trunks bent
earthwards as though they would fain reeve up their roots, and betake
them whither the mountains stood veiled in a toga of heavy, dark mist.

Over the sea the clouds were hurrying towards the land as ever and anon
they rent themselves into strips, and revealed fathomless abysses of
blue wherein the autumn sun burned uneasily, and sent cloud-shadows
gliding over the puckered waste of waters, until, the shore reached,
the wind further harried the masses of vapour towards the sharp flanks
of the mountains, and, after drawing them up and down the slopes,
relegated them to clefts, and left them steaming there.

There was about the whole scene a louring appearance, an appearance as
though everything were contending with everything, as now all things
turned sullenly dark, and now all things emitted a dull sheen which
almost blinded the eyes. Along the narrow road, a road protected from
the sea by a line of wave-washed dykes, some withered leaves of oak and
wild cherry were scudding in mutual chase of one another; with the
general result that the combined sounds of splashing and rustling and
howling came to merge themselves into a single din which issued as a
song with a rhythm marked by the measured blows of the waves as they
struck the rocks.

"Zmiulan, the King of the Ocean, is abroad!" shouted my fellow
traveller in my ear. He was a tall, round-shouldered man of childishly
chubby features and boyishly bright, transparent eyes.

"WHO do you say is abroad?" I queried.

"King Zmiulan."

Never having heard of the monarch, I made no reply.

The extent to which the wind buffeted us might have led one to suppose
that its primary objective was to deflect our steps, and turn them in
the direction of the mountains. Indeed, at times its pressure was so
strong that we had no choice but to halt, to turn our backs to the sea,
and, with feet planted apart, to prise ourselves against our sticks,
and so remain, poised on three legs, until we were past any risk of
being overwhelmed with the soft incubus of the tempest, and having our
coats torn from our shoulders.

At intervals such gasps would come from my companion that he might well
have been standing on the drying-board of a bath. Nor, as they did so,
was his appearance aught but comical, seeing that his ears, appendages
large and shaggy like a dog's, and indifferently shielded with a shabby
old cap, kept being pushed forward by the wind until his small hea