ty of water, for Many little streams had
crossed his path. He now opened the wallet his mother had given him,
and began to eat his supper. The sun was setting. A few clouds had
gathered about the west, but there was not a single cloud anywhere else
to be seen.
Now Curdie did not know that this was a part of the country very hard
to get through. Nobody lived there, though many had tried to build in
it. Some died very soon. Some rushed out of it. Those who stayed
longest went raving mad, and died a terrible death. Such as walked
straight on, and did not spend a night there, got through well and were
nothing the worse. But those who slept even a single night in it were
sure to meet with something they could never forget, and which often
left a mark everybody could read. And that old hawthorn Might have been
enough for a warning--it looked so like a human being dried up and
distorted with age and suffering, with cares instead of loves, and
things instead of thoughts. Both it and the heath around it, which
stretched on all sides as far as he could see, were so withered that it
was impossible to say whether they were alive or not.
And while Curdie ate there came a change. Clouds had gathered over his
head, and seemed drifting about in every direction, as if not
'shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind,' but hunted in all directions
by wolfish flaws across the plains of the sky. The sun was going down
in a storm of lurid crimson, and out of the west came a wind that felt
red and hot the one moment, and cold and pale the other. And very
strangely it sang in the dreary old hawthorn tree, and very cheerily it
blew about Curdie, now making him creep close up to the tree for
shelter from its shivery cold, now fan himself with his cap, it was so
sultry and stifling. It seemed to come from the deathbed of the sun,
dying in fever and ague.
And as he gazed at the sun, now on the verge of the horizon, very large
and very red and very dull--for though the clouds had broken away a
dusty fog was spread all over the disc--Curdie saw something strange
appear against it, moving about like a fly over its burning face. This
looked as if it were coming out of the sun's furnace heart, and was a
living creature of some kind surely; but its shape was very uncertain,
because the dazzle of the light all around melted the outlines.
It was growing larger, it must be approaching! It grew so rapidly that
by the time the sun was half
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