And yet to Rodriguez and Morano all that they saw seemed wholly
and hideously evil.
How long they may have watched there they tried to guess
afterwards, but as they looked on those terrific scenes they had
no way to separate days from minutes: nothing about them seemed to
escape destruction, and time itself seemed no calmer than were
those shuddering mountains.
Then the thundering ranges passed; and afterwards there came a
gleaming mountain, one huge and lonely peak, seemingly all of
gold. Had our whole world been set beside it and shaped as it was
shaped, that golden mountain would yet have towered above it: it
would have taken our moon as well to reach that flashing peak. It
rode on toward them in its golden majesty, higher than all the
flames, save now and then when some wild gas seemed to flee from
the dread earthquakes of the Sun, and was overtaken in the height
by fire, even above that mountain.
As that mass of gold that was higher than all the world drew near
to Rodriguez and Morano they felt its unearthly menace; and though
it could not overcome their spirits they knew there was a hideous
terror about it. It was in its awful scale that its terror lurked
for any creature of our planet. Though they could not quake or
tremble they felt that terror. The mountain dwarfed Earth.
Man knows his littleness, his own mountains remind him; many
countries are small, and some nations: but the dreams of Man make
up for our faults and failings, for the brevity of our lives, for
the narrowness of our scope; they leap over boundaries and are
away and away.
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