ock.

In truth, some one was there.

That which had been indistinct on the top of the eminence was now
visible. It was something like a great arm thrust straight out of the
ground; at the upper extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger,
supported from beneath, by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; the
arm, the thumb, and the forefinger drew a square against the sky. At the
point of juncture of this peculiar finger and this peculiar thumb there
was a line, from which hung something black and shapeless. The line
moving in the wind sounded like a chain. This was the noise the child
had heard. Seen closely the line was that which the noise indicated, a
chain--a single chain cable.

By that mysterious law of amalgamation which throughout nature causes
appearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, the
mournful sea, the cloudy turmoils on the distant horizon, added to the
effect of this figure, and made it seem enormous.

The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance of a scabbard. It
was swaddled like a child and long like a man. There was a round thing
at its summit, about which the end of the chain was rolled. The scabbard
was riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung out between
the rents.

A feeble breeze stirred the chain, and that which hung to it swayed
gently. The passive mass obeyed the vague motions of space. It was an
object to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions
everything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape. It was a
condensation of darkness, which had a defined form. Night was above and
within the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration. Twilight and
moonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the
clouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into the
composition of this visible nothing. The species of log hanging in the
wind partook of the impersonality diffused far over sea and sky, and the
darkness completed this phase of the _thing_ which had once been a man.

It was that which is no longer.

To be naught but a remainder! Such a thing is beyond the power of
language to express. To exist no more, yet to persist; to be in the
abyss, yet out of it; to reappear above death as if indissoluble--there
is a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such reality. Thence
comes the inexpressible. This being--was it a being? This black witness
was a remainder, and an awful remainder--a r