When, recovering courage, he opened his eyes an instant to throw a
troubled glance about him, he found himself far, very far from Montagut,
and in a district that was to him entirely unknown. The steed ran, ran
without ceasing, and trees, rocks, castles and villages passed by him
like a breath. New and still new horizons opened to his view,--horizons
that melted away only to give place to others stranger and yet more
strange. Narrow valleys, bristling with colossal fragments of granite
which the tempests had torn down from mountain-summits; smiling plains,
covered with a carpet of verdure and sprinkled over with white villages;
limitless deserts, where the sands seethed beneath the searching rays of
a sun of fire; immeasurable wildernesses, boundless steppes, regions of
eternal snow, where the gigantic icebergs, standing out against a dim
grey sky, were like white phantoms reaching out their arms to seize him
by the hair as he fled past; all this, and thousands of other sights
that I cannot depict, he saw in his wild race, until, enveloped in an
obscure cloud, he ceased to hear the tramp of his horse’s hoofs beating
the ground.
* * * * *