midnight
There they hovered as the clouds hover that leave their companions and drift among crags of the Alps : below them those awful mountains heaved and thundered . All Atlas , and Teneriffe , and lonely Kenia might have lain amongst them unnoticed . As often as the earthquake rocked their bases it loosened from near their summits wild avalanches of gold that swept down their flaming slopes with unthinkable tumult . As they watched , new mountains rode past them , crowned with their frightful flames ; for , whether man knew it or not , the Sun was rotating , but the force of its gravity that swung the planets had no grip upon spirits , who were held by the power of that tremendous spell that the Professor had learned one midnight at Saragossa from one of that dread line who have their secrets from a source that we do not know in a distant age . There is always something tremendous in the form of great mountains ; but these swept by , not only huger than anything Earth knows , but troubled by horrible commotions , as though overtaken in flight by some ceaseless calamity . Rodriguez and Morano , as they looked at them , forgetting the gardens of Earth , forgetting Spring and Summer and the sweet beneficence of sunshine , felt that the purpose of Creation was evil ! So shocking a thought may well astound us here , where green hills slope to lawns or peer at a peaceful sea ; but there among the flames of those dreadful peaks the Sun seemed not the giver of joy and colour and life , but only a catastrophe huger than everlasting war , a centre of hideous violence and ruin and anger and terror .