ibly moving. It passed above the house, with an extraordinary sailing
kind of motion. As the window came into shadow, I saw another
extraordinary thing. The fine-weather clouds were not passing, easily,
across the sky--they were scampering, as though a hundred-mile-an-hour
wind blew. As they passed, they changed their shapes a thousand times a
minute, as though writhing with a strange life; and so were gone. And,
presently, others came, and whisked away likewise.

To the West, I saw the sun, drop with an incredible, smooth, swift
motion. Eastward, the shadows of every seen thing crept toward the
coming greyness. And the movement of the shadows was visible to me--a
stealthy, writhing creep of the shadows of the wind-stirred trees. It
was a strange sight.

Quickly, the room began to darken. The sun slid down to the horizon,
and seemed, as it were, to disappear from my sight, almost with a jerk.
Through the greyness of the swift evening, I saw the silver crescent of
the moon, falling out of the Southern sky, toward the West. The evening
seemed to merge into an almost instant night. Above me, the many
constellations passed in a strange, 'noiseless' circling, Westward. The
moon fell through that last thousand fathoms of the night-gulf, and
there was only the starlight....

About this time, the buzzing in the corner ceased; telling me that the
clock had run down. A few minutes passed, and I saw the Eastward sky
lighten. A grey, sullen morning spread through all the darkness, and hid
the march of the stars. Overhead, there moved, with a heavy, everlasting
rolling, a vast, seamless sky of grey clouds--a cloud-sky that would
have seemed motionless, through all the length of an ordinary earth-day.
The sun was hidden from me; but, from moment to moment, the world would
brighten and darken, brighten and darken, beneath waves of subtle light
and shadow....

The light shifted ever Westward, and the night fell upon the earth. A
vast rain seemed to come with it, and a wind of a most extraordinary
loudness--as though the howling of a nightlong gale, were packed into
the space of no more than a minute.

This noise passed, almost immediately, and the clouds broke; so that,
once more, I could see the sky. The stars were flying Westward, with
astounding speed. It came to me now, for the first time, that, though
the noise of the wind had passed, yet a constant 'blurred' sound was in
my ears. Now that I noticed it, I was aware that it ha