It was a desolate dawn, and showed no glorious gleams of color.

There was no rose-pink glow, no merging of a thousand tints, no final burst of gleaming gold; the night merely faded away, changing to a sickly pallor that grew to ashen gray, and then dissolved the low-hung, distorted shadows a quarter of a mile inland on either hand into a forbidding row of unbroken forest backed by plain, morass, and distant hills untipped by slanting rays.

Overhead a bleak ruin of clouds drifted; underneath the river ran, a bilious yellow.

The whole country so far as the eye could range was unmarred by the hand of man, untracked save by the feet of the crafty forest people.
She saw Runnion gazing over his shoulder in search of a shelving beach or bar, his profile showing more debased and mean than she had ever noticed it before.

They rounded a bend where the left bank crumbled before the untiring teeth of the river, forming a bristling chevaux-de-frise of leaning, fallen firs awash in the current.