The ominous darkness continued, but, though we could not see, we knew that something was happening all around us. There were fearsome cries and a thousand strange sounds which were frightening because we could not understand them. Then came a sudden opening in the gray pall above us--caused, it may be, by some whirlwind of the sky--and the sunlight streamed down for a few moments. We saw now whence came the sounds! The world seemed full of living things fleeing in wild terror before approaching evil. The earth was crowded with the desperate fugitives; the sky above was filled with thousands of them. Showing against the briefly lightened clouds, screaming their different cries, were an innumerable host of seafowl sweeping over us in whirling flight, and, as they neared the mountain, streaming away by some common instinct in a great mass toward the northwest, seeking, it might be, the shores of the sea from which we had come. There were vultures and eagles among them, but these seemed to be flying straight ahead toward the mountain-tops. It was a marvellous and dreadful flight. But strange, impressive and alarming as was the flight of the birds, it was nothing to what was happening on the earth beneath. Here was an exhibition of mortal terror close at hand. There was no limit to it. All the beasts of the region, great and small, were coming toward us in a wild and senseless tide. A great stag, with his does, swept by us like the wind, and next a thundering urus; then, strangest of all, came four lions together in long leaps--the country was full of them--straight toward us and regarding us not at all! Over the heads of some of us they leaped and were gone in a moment. It was this happening, I think, which most affected us and gave us a greater sense of fear for ourselves. And so the terrible flight continued. Leopards, wild-cats, all the beasts of prey, and all the harmless animals, they came in a rushing army, whole herds of deer and flocks of goats, and all the grazing things, and the little creatures of the wood and plain. But among all this horde of fugitives there were no men. Where were the Goatskins? I could not understand it, until I remembered that, perhaps a league to the south of us, there rose in the plain a solitary high mountain. To this must have fled such of the tribe as perceived their danger in time. It was a cone-shaped mountain with no great area at its summit. What scenes, I thought, must be there now!