As he crawled through the lank wet grass and soft spongy soil, he found
himself suddenly confronted with a great barrier of fallen rocks; as
though, at some period of its existence, the north end of the island had
tapered to a gigantic peak which, in the fulness of its time, had come
down with a crash, and now lay like a titanic wall from summit to
sea-board. Huge and forbidding, of all shapes and sizes, the mighty
fragments barred his course like a menace, and he attacked them warily,
drawing himself with infinite caution from one to another; over this
one, under this, deftly between these two, lest an unwary weighting
should start them on the movement that might grind him to powder.
The fog increased their forbidding aspect tenfold. He could not see a
foot before him, and could only worm his way among them, testing each
before he trusted it, and finding at times monsters become but mediocre
when his hand was on them. More than once he had to rest his hands on
cautiously-tried ledges and swing his legs forward and grope with his
feet for foothold, and whether the space below was trifling, or whether
it ran to incredible depth, he could not tell.
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