Chapter 7

---and now the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with their mountain-mirth.

Byron.

It is necessary to recapitulate a little, in order to connect events. The
signs of the hour had been gradually but progressively increasing. While
the lake was unruffled, a stillness so profound prevailed, that sounds
from the distant port, such as the heavy fall of an oar, or a laugh from
the waterman, had reached the ears of those in the Winkelried, bringing
with them the feeling of security, and the strong charm of a calm at even.
To these succeeded the gathering in the heavens, and the roaring of the
winds, as they came rushing down the sides of the Alps, in their first
descent into the basin of the Leman. As the sight grew useless, except as
it might study the dark omens of the impending vault, the sense of hearing
became doubly acute, and it had been a powerful agent in heightening the
vague but acute apprehensions of the travellers. The rushes of the wind,
which at first were broken, at intervals resembling the roar of a
chimney-top in a gale, had soon reached the fearful grandeur of those
aërial wheelings of squadrons, to which we have more than once alluded,
passing off in dread mutterings, that, in the deep quiet of all other
things, bore a close affinity to the rumbling of a surf upon the
sea-shore. The surface of the lake was first broken after one of these
symptoms, and it was this infallible sign of a gale which had assured Maso
there was no time to lose. This movement of the element in a calm is a
common phenomenon on waters that are much environed with elevated and
irregular head-lands, and it is a certain proof that wind is on some
distant portion of the sheet. It occurs frequently on the ocean, too,
where the mariner is accustomed to find a heavy sea setting in one
direction, the effects of some distant storm, while the breeze around him
is blowing in its opposite. It had been succeeded by the single rolling
swell, like the outer circle of waves produced by dropping a stone into
the water, and the regular and increasing agitation of the lake, until the
element broke as in a tempest, and that seemingly of its own volition,
since not a breath of air was stirring. This last and formidable symptom
of the force of the coming gust, however, had now become so unequivocal,
that, at the moment when the three travellers and the patron fell from her
gangway, the Winkelried, to use a seaman's phrase, was literally wallowing
in the troughs of the seas.

A dull unnatural light preceded the winds, and notwithstanding the
previous darkness, the nature of the accident was fully apparent to all.
Even the untamed spirits that had just been bent upon so fierce a
sacrifice to their superstitious dread, uttered cries