With a thousand painful apprehensions in his heart, with no way of relieving his anxiety, with nothing left but to wait for the return of daylight, he cast himself down again, after having called once or twice aloud upon Corse de Leon without receiving any answer. He could not distinguish whither he had been borne. He could see some large trees still standing near him, and some enormous black masses of rock lifting their heads around. The shadow of the giant mountain, too, rose up before him; but its form seemed changed, and he gazed as if to ascertain in what features it was altered. Gradually the summit of the hill, warmed into a dusky brown, caught some of the rays of the rising sun, and--while every moment it assumed a brighter hue, till it crowned itself, and decorated the mists which surrounded it with gold--a sober twilight crept into the valley; and Bernard de Rohan found himself standing in the gray morning with a world of ruin and desolation around him, without a trace of road or human habitation, and with the narrow pass along which his way had been bent completely blocked up by the huge masses of the fallen mountain. CHAPTER XVIII. With that strange, dizzy sensation which we feel when awaking from the first stunning effects of any great catastrophe, Bernard de Rohan continued to gaze around him for some minutes, as the morning rose brighter and brighter upon the wild scene of destruction in the midst of which he stood. He was himself much bruised and injured: blood was upon various parts of his garments; his strong, muscular arm would scarcely support him as he leaned against the rock, and his brain still reeled giddily from time to time with the fall and the blows he had received: but his own corporeal pain engaged less of his attention than the terrible picture which the rising light displayed. Everywhere appeared vestiges of the desolating phenomenon of the preceding night. The order of all things around him, and especially to the northeast, seemed to have been entirely broken up and changed. The granite rocks from the higher summits of the mountain were now piled up in immense masses below, mingled with vast tracts of the most dissimilar substances, slate, and sandstone, and common vegetable earth, with here and there a thick layer of snow protruding through the chasms, marked in long streaks by the various kinds of earth over which it had passed. Shivered fir-trees, and immense fragments of oak, with their green foliage still waving in the air, stuck out here and there in scattered disarray from the tumbled chaos of rock, and sand, and earth; and the fragments of a cottage roof, which lay reversed high up the side of the mountainous pile that now blocked up the valley, showed that the sweeping destruction had, at all events, reached one of the homes of earth's children.