The distant humming grew to a roar, the roar to a hellish hurricane of sound which presently drowned all attempts at ordinary speech.
Then bellowing like ten millions of bulls, at length far away there appeared something terrible.

I can only describe its appearance as that of an attenuated mountain on fire.

When it drew nearer I perceived that it was more like a ballet-dancer whirling round and round upon her toes, or rather all the ballet-dancers in the world rolled into one and then multiplied a million times in size.

No, it was like a mushroom with two stalks, one above and one below, or a huge top with a point on which it spun, a swelling belly and another point above.

But what a top! It must have been two thousand feet high, if it was an inch, and its circumference who could measure?
On it came, dancing, swaying and spinning at a rate inconceivable, so that it looked like a gigantic wheel of fire.