There was even something unnatural in its appearance
of immensity, as if it were, perhaps, deceptive, and existed in their
vision of it only. So, surely, might look a plain to one who had taken
haschish, which enlarges, makes monstrous and threateningly terrific.
Domini had a feeling that no human eyes could really see such infinite
tracts of land and water as those she seemed to be seeing at this
moment. For there was water here, in the midst of the desert. Infinite
expanses of sea met infinite plains of snow. Or so it seemed to both
of them. And the sea was grey and calm as a winter sea, breathing its
plaint along a winter land. From it, here and there, rose islets whose
low cliffs were a deep red like the red of sandstone, a sad colour that
suggests tragedy, islets that looked desolate, and as if no life had
ever been upon them, or could be. Back from the snowy plains stretched
sand dunes of the palest primrose colour, sand dunes innumerable,
myriads and myriads of them, rising and falling, rising and falling,
till they were lost in the grey distance of this silent world. In the
foreground, at their horses' feet, wound from the hill summit a broad
track faintly marked in the deep sand, and flanked by huge dunes shaped,
by the action of the winds, into grotesque semblances of monsters,
leviathans, beasts with prodigious humps, sphinxes, whales.
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