Phil felt every fibre of his frame tingle with horror, and thrill with a sense of descending ruin. But the moment passed. His feet touched bottom. He turned and looked around. There, about three yards from him, lay the tree, its roots still on the other bank, and its top buried beneath the water. With a wild, despairing glance Phil looked for his float. Even as he looked, he saw it slowly emerge from the water, several yards below where the tree lay. For the tree in its descent had struck it, and dashed it to the bottom of the river; but fortunately it had become disentangled, and the current had freed it from the tree, and there it floated, ready once more to assist him. Phil swam down the stream towards it, and almost fainting with the fatigue of this exertion, he clung to it motionless, panting heavily, and now scarcely able even to guide himself aright. XIX. _The black Place of Desolation.--Blue Sky.--Open Heavens.--The Glory of the Sunshine.--Green Hills.--The open Sea once more.--Along the Road.--A strange, a very strange Encounter.--The Wandering Leper.--Naaman the Syrian._ PANTING heavily, and almost fainting with exhaustion, Phil drifted on, clinging with a convulsive grasp to his log, and scarce conscious of his surroundings. It was the current that now guided him, for he for some time was incapable of making any effort to guide himself. Several times he instinctively thrust his head under the water; and each time, though this did not ease his breathing, it at least caused relief by the grateful coolness and the drip of the water over his face. Drifting on in this way, he remained for some time without noticing the shores on either side, too much taken up with his own sensations to regard any external things. He had a general idea that the fires were all around him still; but he no longer sought with his former eager scrutiny to find some signs favorable to his own hopes. But at length he regained his breath, and began once more to look around. The first thing that he noticed was, that the heat had very materially lessened. The next thing was, that the land of the fiery glow had passed away. Around him there was now, not a fiery country, but a black and devastated country, out of which smoke was still arising in places, but from which the fire had departed, having done its work. He now saw that while he had been in a half senseless state he had been carried along; that the current had drifted him away from the place where the fire was now raging, to a place where it raged no longer--to a place where the air was cooler--where it was purer--where the smoke was much diminished. All around, and all before, the country was black, and there arose a forest of charred and blackened trees; but this sight, hideous though it might be in itself, was inexpressibly delightful to eyes that had just gazed upon the fire in its wrath.