He began to
forget that it was a man who whistled, and such a man! He began to look
about to the hills and the sky and the rocks--for these, it might be
said, were set to music--they, too, had the sweep of line, and the
broken rhythms, the sense of spaciousness, the far horizons.
That day was a climax of the unusual weather. For a long time the sky
had been periodically blanketed with thick mists, but to-day the wind
had freshened and it tore the mists into a thousand mighty fragments.
There was never blue sky in sight--only, far up, a diminishing and
lighter grey to testify that above it the yellow sun might be shining;
but all the lower heavens were a-sweep with vast cloud masses,
irregular, huge, hurling across the sky. They hung so low that one could
follow the speed of their motion and almost gauge it by miles per hour.
And in the distance they seemed to brush the tops of the hills. Seeing
this, the doctor remembered what he had heard of rain in this region. It
would come, they said, in sheets and masses--literal water-falls. Dry
arroyos suddenly filled and became swift torrent, rolling big boulders
down their courses. There were tales of men fording rivers who were
suddenly overwhelmed by terrific walls of water which rushed down from
the higher mountains in masses four and eight feet high. In coming they
made a thundering among the hills and they plucked up full grown trees
like twigs thrust into wet mud.
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