He walked towards this Nothing.  Around him was the vastness of human desertion.

He crossed the first plateau diagonally, then a second, then a third.  At the extremity of each plateau the child came upon a break in the ground.  The slope was sometimes steep, but always short; the high, bare plains of Portland resemble great flagstones overlapping each other.  The south side seems to enter under the protruding slab, the north side rises over the next one; these made ascents, which the child stepped over nimbly.  From time to time he stopped, and seemed to hold counsel with himself.  The night was becoming very dark.  His radius of sight was contracting.  He now only saw a few steps before him.

All of a sudden he stopped, listened for an instant, and with an almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction turned quickly and directed his steps towards an eminence of moderate height, which he dimly perceived on his right, at the point of the plain nearest the cliff.  There was on the eminence a shape which in the mist looked like a tree.  The child had just heard a noise in this direction, which was the noise neither of the wind nor of the sea, nor was it the cry of animals.  He thought that some one was there, and in a few strides he was at the foot of the hillock.

In truth, some one was there.

That which had been indistinct on the top of the eminence was now visible.  It was something like a great arm thrust straight out of the ground; at the upper extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger, supported from beneath, by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; the arm, the thumb, and the forefinger drew a square against the sky.  At the point of juncture of this peculiar finger and this peculiar thumb there was a line, from which hung something black and shapeless.  The line moving in the wind sounded like a chain.  This was the noise the child had heard.  Seen closely the line was that which the noise indicated, a chain—­a single chain cable.

By that mysterious law of amalgamation which throughout nature causes appearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, the mournful sea, the cloudy turmoils on the distant horizon, added to the effect of this figure, and made it seem enormous.

The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance of a scabbard.  It was swaddled like a child and long like a man.  There was a round thing at its summit, about which the end of the chain was rolled.  The scabbard was riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung out between the rents.

A feeble breeze stirred the chain, and that which hung to it swayed gently.  The passive mass obeyed the vague motions of space.  It was an object to inspire indescribable dread.  Horror, which disproportions everything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape.  It was a condensation of darkness, which had a defined form.  Night was above and within the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration.  Twilight and moonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the clouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into the composition of this visible nothing.  The species of log hanging in the wind partook of the impersonality diffused far over sea and sky, and the darkness completed this phase of the thing which had once been a man.