The sky, too, was now overcast, ever with darker clouds, which came creeping up out of every cavern, raising heads of monstrous size, stretching forth long lean flanks, throwing their grey manes to the winds, baring gigantic discoloured teeth, and coming on in mighty battalions.—From the north: black, huge, all shredded and tattered, piled in tiers, branching out like a score of overthrown forests, one upon the other, separated by deep chasms, and with—so it seemed—great streaks scattered over them of greenish ice, as it were: these rushed forward with wild might and a dull murmuring sound. From the west: those advanced slowly—livid, enormously swollen bulks, which in places shone bright as fire; and they rolled one after another, more and more persistent in their long advance, not unlike flocks of great birds. From the east came sailing flattened, rusty-hued masses of vapour, monotonously the same, and forbidding to the eye as mouldering carcasses that drip with tainted gore. From the south, too, were wafted ancient-looking clouds, reddish dark in hue, recalling clods of peat, striped and motley to see, though dingy and dull, as if vermin burrowed within them. There were also clouds floating on high, seeming to descend from the pale quenched orb of the sun, and forming dingy wisps, or spreading out in manifold tints, as embers that are dying. And they all came forward, built up mountains of prodigious height, and concealed all the sky under a black seething flood of squalor and grime. The whole land had suddenly turned to darkness; a dull silence prevailed on every side; all the lights had grown dim; the bright eyes of the waters were glazing over; all beings felt petrified and stood in amazement with bated breath. Up out of the earth surged the fear of what was to come; the frost penetrated even to the marrow of the bones, and every living thing trembled with the terror of it. They saw the hare running through the village, with shaggy fur standing fluffy on end; they saw the ravens alighting with hoarse croaks upon the granaries, and even entering the houses. Dogs howled wildly outside in the yard; men sped in fear to take shelter in their huts: while along the pond the priest’s blind mare went to and fro with the ruins of the cart, and struck against the fences, and with a weird cry sought her way back to the stable. The darkness began to be continual, murky and exceedingly depressing; daily the clouds sailed lower; they came creeping down from the forests, like thick volumes of dust, and rolled along the fields like floods of turbid water: then, coming to the village, plunged all things in a dingy ice-cold fog. And suddenly there would come a rent through the midst of the sky that shone dark-blue like the azure mirror of a well: a wild wind whistled through the dim space, the fogs at once were driven together on either side, and by the shattered gateway thus made came a first loud blast, soon followed by another, a score, and hundreds.