My God, a buffalo herd, and we'll be trampled to death,"
almost shrieked one of the Earl's followers.
"Peace! keep cool! Up, up instantly into these trees!"
and the word was obeyed as if each man was an instrument
of the leader's will. Beyond, in the south-east, a full
moon, luscious seeming as some ripened, mellow fruit,
was rising, and the yellow light was all over the plain.
Then the tremendous mass, headed by maddened bulls, with
blazing eyes and foaming nostrils, drove onward toward
the south, like an unchained hurricane. Some of the
terrified beasts ran against the trees, crushing horns
and skull, and fell prone upon the plain, to be trampled
into jelly by the hundreds of thousands in the rear. The
tree upon which the earl had taken refuge received many
a shock from a crazed bull; and it seemed to the party
from the tree-branches as if all the face of the plains
was being hurled toward the south in a condition of the
wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no
such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping
over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the
new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into
spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky,
writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand
eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible
than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the
Inferno. The spectacle, as observed by those some twenty
feet from the ground, might be likened somewhat to a
turbulent sea when a sturdy tide sets against the storm,
and the mad waves tumble hither and thither, foiled, and
impelled, yet for all the confusion and obstruction moving
in one direction with a sweep and a force that no power
could chain.
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