A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct depths.
The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant from you with a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in space or in one''s own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the dreams of sleeping flowers.
There are fierce attitudes on the horizon. One inhales the effluvia of the great black void.
One is afraid to glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so.
The cavities of night, things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one advances, obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, unknown but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches, alarming torsos of trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,-- against all this one has no protection.
There is no hardihood which does not shudder and which does not feel the vicinity of anguish. One is conscious of something hideous, as though one''s soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness.~思~兔~在~線~閱~讀~
This penetration of the shadows is indescribably sinister in the case of a child.
Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.
Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered. There are no words to express the strangeness of that shiver which chilled her to the very bottom of her heart; her eye grew wild; she thought she felt that she should not be able to refrain from returning there at the same hour on the morrow.