The scene was striking enough. A quantity of dry splinters of some kind of resinous wood being heaped on the fire, it now blazed up brilliantly in massive tongues of flame, that glanced as they twined up the fissures, scorching the lichens into sudden blackness, and licking, like fiery serpents, the tortuous fretwork of naked roots depending from the trees that grew on the verge of the bank above, which spread like a net over the face of the bald grey rock; and lighting up the fringe of dry fibres depending from the narrow eave of red earth that projected over the brink of the precipice, under which the bank appeared white and dusty, but lower down, where wet by the beating of the rain, it was red, and glittering with pebbles, as if it had been the wall of a salt mine in Cheshire. The bright glare, and luminous smoke of the fire, in which a number of birds, frightened from their perches, glanced about like sparks, blasted the figures of such of the negroes as stood beyond it into the appearance of demons--little Rory Macgregor looking, to use his own phrase, like _the deil himsell_, while those of them who intervened between us and the fire seemed magnified into giants--their dark bodies edged with red flame; while every tree, and stock, and stone appeared as if half bronze and half red-hot iron--a shadock growing close by, looked as if hung with clusters of red-hot cannon balls. Our own party was very noticeable. I was leaning on the neck of my gig-horse, with his eyes glancing, and the brazen ornaments of his harness flashing like burnished gold. Abreast of me were Massas Twig, Flamingo, and Cosin Teemoty, wet as _muck_, and quite as steamy, to use a genteel phrase, with our cold drenched physiognomies thrust into the light, and the sparkling rain-drops hanging at our noses; Jacob's glazed hat glancing as if his caput had been covered with a glass porringer; while the group of mounted negroes and led horses in the background, with the animals pawing and splashing in the red stream that ran rippling and twinkling down the road, and the steam of our rapid travelling rising up like smoke above them, gave one a very lively idea of a cavalry picquet on the _qui vive_.