unded, too, with architectural and
mechanical details, that they partook of the triple character of animals,
houses and machines. Legs they had, that an army of elephants could have
marched among; bodies that ships might have sailed beneath; heads about
which eagles might have delighted to soar, and ears--they were singularly
well gifted with ears. But wheels also they were endowed with, and vast
sides of blank wall; the wheels as large as the ring of a circus, the
walls white and high as cliffs of chalk along an English coast. Among
them, on them, beneath, in and a part of them, were figures and fragments
of figures of gigantic men. All were inextricably interblended and
superposed--a man's head and shoulders blazoned on the side of an animal;
a wheel with legs for spokes rolling along the creature's back; a vast
section of wall, having no contact with the earth, but (with a tail
hanging from its rear, like a note of admiration) moving along the line,
obscuring here an anatomical horror and disclosing there a mechanical
nightmare. In short, this appalling procession, which was crossing our
road with astonishing rapidity, seemed made up of unassigned and
unassorted units, out of which some imaginative god might be about to
create a world of giants, ready supplied with some of the appliances of a
high civilization. Yet the whole apparition had so shadowy and spectral a
look that the terror it inspired was itself vague and indefinite, like the
terror of a dream. It affected our horses as well as ourselves; they
extended their necks and threw forward their ears. For some moments we sat
in our saddles surveying the hideous and extravagant spectacle without a
word, and our tongues were loosened only when it began rapidly to diminish
and recede, and at last was resolved into a train of mules and wagons,
barely visible on the horizon. They were miles away and outlined against
the blue sky.

I then remembered what my astonishment had not permitted me closely to
note--that this pageant had appeared to move along parallel to the foot of
a slope extending upward and backward to an immense height, intersected
with rivers and presenting all the features of a prairie landscape. The
mirage had in effect contracted the entire space between us and the train
to a pistol-shot in breadth, and had made a background for its horrible
picture by lifting into view Heaven knows how great an extent of country
below our horizon. Does refraction acc