‘How? fallen away?’ Yes; just now there was a plain before the house, and now it stands on a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone down, and from the very house drops an almost overhanging, as it were scooped-out, black precipice.
We all crowded to the window.... Horror froze our hearts. ‘Here it is ... here it is!’ whispers one next me.
And behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth, something began to stir, some sort of small, roundish hillocks began heaving and falling.
‘It is the sea!’ the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. ‘It will swallow us all up directly.... Only how can it grow and rise upwards? To this precipice?’
And yet, it grows, grows enormously.... Already there are not separate hillocks heaving in the distance.... One continuous, monstrous wave embraces the whole circle of the horizon.
It is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an icy hurricane it flies, swirling in the darkness of hell. Everything shuddered—and there, in this flying mass—was the crash of thunder, the iron wail of thousands of throats....
Ah! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth howling for terror....
The end of it! the end of all!
The child whimpered once more.... I tried to clutch at my companions, but already we were all crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that pitch-black, icy, thundering wave! Darkness ... darkness everlasting!
Scarcely breathing, I awoke.