But there was nothing of movement or of sound.  No lightning, no thunder; and soon the hot breath of the afternoon had itself disappeared before the advance of this silent pall.  The night of June to the north was brighter than twilight, and still southward, a deliberate spectacle, stood this great range of vague and menacing cloud, shutting off the sky and towering above the downs, so that it seemed permissible to ascribe to those protecting gods of our valley a burden of fear.

Just when all that scene had been arranged to an adjustment that no art could have attained, the first great fire blazed out miles and miles to the west, somewhere above Midhurst:  I think near No Man’s Land.  Then we saw, miles to the east again, a glare over Mount Harry, the signal of Lewes, and one after another all the heights took it up in a chain—­above Bramber, above Poynings, above Wiston, on Amberley Mount (I think), certainly on the noble sweep of Bury.  Even in those greater distances which the horizon concealed they were burning and answering each other into Hampshire:  perhaps on the beaten grass of the high forts above Portsmouth, and to the left away to the flat Rye level, and to the eastern Rother; for we saw the line of red angry upon that cloud which had come to receive it, an endless line which suddenly called up what one had heard old men say of the prairie fires.

It was easy, without covering the face and without abstracting the mind from the whirl of modern circumstance, it was easy, merely looking at the thing, to be seized with an impression of disaster.  The stars were so pale on the lingering white light of the pure north, the smoky cloud so deep and heavy and steadfast and low above the hills, the fire so near to it, so sharp against it, and so huge, that the awe and sinister meaning of conflagrations dominated the impression of all the scene.  There arose in the mind that memory which associates such a glare and the rising and falling fury of flames with sacrifice or with vengeance, or with the warning of an enemy’s approach, or with the mark of his conquest; for with such things our race (for how many thousand years!) has watched the fires upon the hills far off.  It touched one as does the reiterated note of a chaunt; if not with an impression of doom, at least with that of calamity.

When the fires had died down to a sullen glow, and the men watching them had gone home under the weight of what they had seen, the storm broke and occupied the whole sky.  A very low wind rose and a furious rain fell.  It became suddenly cold; there was thunder all over the weald, and the lightning along the unseen crest of the downs answered the lightning above the forest.

THE MAN OF THE DESERT

I lay once alone upon the crest of a range whose name I have never seen spelt, but which is pronounced “Haueedja,” from whence a man can see right away for ever the expanse of the Sahara.