And from its centre, true north,
there grew out a monstrous human arm, reaching higher and higher, up to
the zenith, blotting the stars behind it. It looked at first--in texture
and rigid outline--as the stream of straw looks that flows from the
blower of a threshing machine when you stand straight in its line and
behind it. But, of course, it did not curve down. It seemed to stretch
and to rise, growing more and more like an arm with a clumsy fist at its
end, held unconceivably straight and unbending. This cloud, I have no
doubt, was forming right then by condensation. And it stretched and
lengthened till it obscured the moon.

Just then I reached the end of my run to the west. I was nearing a block
of dense poplar bush in which somewhere two farmsteads lay embedded. The
road turned to the north. I was now exactly south of and in line with
that long, twenty-mile trail where I had startled horses, rabbit, and
partridge on the last described drive. I believe I was just twenty-five
miles from the northern correction line. At this corner where I turned I
had to devote all my attention to the negotiating of a few bad drifts.

When I looked up again, I was driving along the bottom of a wide road
gap formed by tall and stately poplars on both sides--trees which stood
uncannily still. The light of the moon became less dim, and I raised my
eyes. That band of cloud--for it had turned into a band now, thus losing
its threatening aspect--had widened out and loosened up. It was a strip
of flocculent, sheepy-looking, little cloudlets that suggested curliness
and innocence. And the moon stood in between like a goodnatured shepherd
in the stories of old.

For a while I kept my eyes on the sky. The going was good indeed on this
closed-in road. And so I watched that insensible, silent, and yet swift
shifting of things in the heavens that seemed so orderly, pre-ordained,
and as if regulated by silent signals. The clouds lost their sheeplike
look again; they became more massive; they took on more substance and
spine, more manliness, as it were; and they arranged themselves in
distinct lines. Soldiers suggested themselves, not soldiers engaged in
war, but soldiers drilling in times of peace, to be reviewed, maybe, by
some great general. That central point from which the arm had sprung and
which had been due north had sidled over to the northwest; the low-flung
line along the horizon had taken on the shape of a long wedge pointing
east; f