I can best describe the passage of day and night, at this period,
as a sort of gigantic, ponderous flicker. Moment by moment, the
acceleration of time continued; so that, at nights now, I saw the moon,
only as a swaying trail of palish fire, that varied from a mere line of
light to a nebulous path, and then dwindled again, disappearing
periodically.
The flicker of the days and nights quickened. The days had grown
perceptibly darker, and a queer quality of dusk lay, as it were, in the
atmosphere. The nights were so much lighter, that the stars were
scarcely to be seen, saving here and there an occasional hair-like line
of fire, that seemed to sway a little, with the moon.
Quicker, and ever quicker, ran the flicker of day and night; and,
suddenly it seemed, I was aware that the flicker had died out, and,
instead, there reigned a comparatively steady light, which was shed upon
all the world, from an eternal river of flame that swung up and down,
North and South, in stupendous, mighty swings.
The sky was now grown very much darker, and there was in the blue of it
a heavy gloom, as though a vast blackness peered through it upon the
earth.
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