Page 295 - erewhon

and I threw out another bag.
Then the battle commenced in earnest. It lasted all that
afternoon and through the night until the following eve-
ning. I had seen never a sail nor a sign of a sail, though I
had half blinded myself with straining my eyes incessantly
in every direction; we had parted with everything but the
clothes which we had upon our backs; food and water were
gone, all thrown out to the wheeling albatrosses, in order
to save us a few hours or even minutes from the sea. I did
not throw away the books till we were within a few feet of
the water, and clung to my manuscripts to the very last.
Hope there seemed none whatever—yet, strangely enough
we were neither of us utterly hopeless, and even when the
evil that we dreaded was upon us, and that which we great-
ly feared had come, we sat in the car of the balloon with
the waters up to our middle, and still smiled with a ghastly
hopefulness to one another.
* * *
He who has crossed the St. Gothard will remember that
below Andermatt there is one of those Alpine gorges which
reach the very utmost limits of the sublime and terrible. The
feelings of the traveller have become more and more highly
wrought at every step, until at last the naked and overhang-
ing precipices seem to close above his head, as he crosses a
bridge hung in mid-air over a roaring waterfall, and enters
on the darkness of a tunnel, hewn out of the rock.
What can be in store for him on emerging? Surely some-
thing even wilder and more desolate than that which he has
seen already; yet his imagination is paralysed, and can sug-

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