sailors know, but which no silence has yet explained.

In such an influence of expectation and of presage--an influence having
in it that quality which seemed to the ancients only Fate, but to us
moderns a something evil--in the strained attention for necessary and
immovable things that cannot hear and cannot pity--the hour came for me
to reascend the valley to my home. Already upon the far and confused
horizon two or three motionless sails that had been invisible began to
show white against a rising cloud. This cloud had not the definition of
sudden conquering storms, proper to the summer, and leaving a blessing
behind their fury. The edge of it against the misty and brooding sky had
all the vagueness of smoke, and as it rose up out of the sea its growth
was so methodical and regular as to disconnect it wholly in one's mind
from the little fainting breeze that still blew, from rain, or from any
daily thing. It advanced with the fall of the evening till it held half
the sky. There it seemed halted for a while, and lent by contrast an
unnatural brightness to the parched hills beneath it; for now the sun
having set, we had come north of the gap, and were looking southward
upon that spectacle as upon the climax of a tragedy. But there was
nothing of movement or of sound. No lightning, no thunder; and soon the
hot breath of the afternoon had itself disappeared before the advance of
this silent pall. The night of June to the north was brighter than
twilight, and still southward, a deliberate spectacle, stood this great
range of vague and menacing cloud, shutting off the sky and towering
above the downs, so that it seemed permissible to ascribe to those
protecting gods of our valley a burden of fear.

Just when all that scene had been arranged to an adjustment that no art
could have attained, the first great fire blazed out miles and miles to
the west, somewhere above Midhurst: I think near No Man's Land. Then we
saw, miles to the east again, a glare over Mount Harry, the signal of
Lewes, and one after another all the heights took it up in a
chain--above Bramber, above Poynings, above Wiston, on Amberley Mount (I
think), certainly on the noble sweep of Bury. Even in those greater
distances which the horizon concealed they were burning and answering
each other into Hampshire: perhaps on the beaten grass of the high forts
above Portsmouth, and to the left away to the flat Rye level, and to
the eastern Rother; for we saw the li