The gigantic beast wriggled through the sky, from end to end of the vast sky. The beast wobbled the point of its tail slowly up and down over the earth: in the room, above the bed, which had become a narrow coffin; and, commencing with that wobbling tail, the beast's body wound up and up, filling the room and the house with one mighty contortion of monstrous dragon's scales and sweeping away with its tangible reality all the dreamy unreality of the room and the house, the ceilings and roofs. With thousands of legs the beast humped its sinuous body over the chimney-stacks and church-steeples, slung itself wriggling round the church-steeples and chimney-stacks like a festoon of scales, which then turned into a long, dense chain of clouds, filling the sky with great cloud-eddies, which whirled and whirled over the town and through the sky, from end to end of the vast sky. And the monstrous beast now lifted its long crocodile's jaws out of its own winding clouds; and its eyes belched forth fire like volcanoes; and shafts of flame shot like lightning-flashes from its darting tongue: shafts darting to such a length from the very high expanse, right up there, up there, from the sky above the
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