Now it was a veritable Amazon, its black, ugly waters rolling and twisting like the slow boiling of a thick liquid over a fire.

There was little rush about it, no frenzied haste, no mountain-like madness in the advance of the torrent.

Rod had expected to see this, and he would not have been startled by it.
But there was something vastly more appalling in the flood that rolled slowly before his eyes, with its lazily twisting whirlpools, its thousand unseen currents, rolling the water here and there--always in different places--like the gurgling eruptions he had often observed in a pot of simmering oatmeal.

There was something uncanny about it, something terribly suggestive of giant hands under the surface, waiting to pull them down.

He knew, without questioning, that there was more deadly power in that creeping flood than in a dozen boisterous torrents thundering down from the mountains.