Description of a Dragon

Swirled the milk-white snow; whistled the mountain wind; rattled the hollow pines.  Winter.

White, a wall of white; wind, a wave of wind; wood, a whirl of woods.  Winter – the wraiths of winter.

Snow, snow, snow! – as far as the eye could see – which was not very far.  Had the landscape been visible, its solitary grandeur would have been more awe inspiring than even the white world of swirling snow; rocky outcroppings, coated now with a mantle of purity; tall evergreens, pointing long fingers at the airy vault; grand peaks, majestic symbols of age and stability.  But the landscape was not visible.

Instead, a traveler would have been haunted only by the ghosts of pine trees – cheerful ghosts, for the day was a bright though not a clear one, and the crisp crackle of their clanging boughs suggested no midnight horrors – cheerful ghosts, looming through the whirl of snow – light, powdery snow, lifted by the breeze, dropped by the clouds, puffing in the air, dancing to the tune of the wind’s whistle.  But there was no traveler.

No traveler?  Stay – hark!  Whence that footstep?  Whence that sound of crunching snow, of harsh, raucous breathing?  And whence yon stone, dislodged by a careless step, gathering speed as it crashes down the ravine?

Yon stone, indeed!  Yon boulder, yon small mountain, rather.  This is no human traveler thus brashly invading the domains of eternal snows.  No; and had we thought so, that roar – that earth-shaking roar, rattling the very seeds in their pine cones – would speedily have undeceived us.  The snowy vapors seem to brace themselves for a shock, for the whistle of the wind has died away – and suddenly the enveloping folds of the curtain of snow are rudely thrust aside – caught up, twisted, flung far away – and the Dragon stands before us.

The Dragon.  Fit creature of a nightmare, hideous in size and terrible in teeth, but yet with a beauty of proportion and strength in his finely molded limbs.  All fire and sparkle and glory he is, as the light, reflecting off his scales, is cast back in a hundred bewildering rays.  He seems to be cased in armor.

And the brilliant blue of his neck and head, streaking darker as it lowers, lighter as it ascends, tapering into a near white at the ends of the monstrous wings – seemingly borrowed from the deep azure of the airy vault itself – glorious, majestic, awesome.

No chiseled sculpture is this dragon; no thing of paint and color.  Even now, still though he is, one feels the energy that pulsates around him, the little trembling of the air as he breathes – and when he stretches out his wings, enveloping yards – when easily, effortlessly, he begins to move, leaving behind him only his tremendous footprints, to tell all the world that no ordinary creature has been there – when the whirlwind he burst through subsides again into its customary flurry as the wraiths of winter claim the scene once more – then the energy, the power, the force he takes with him makes the swirling of the snow, the whistling of the wind, and the rattling of the pines seem like the feeble flailing of a child beside the mighty strokes of a giant.