As at the bidding of a god the whole multitude with one accord swerved round and gazed toward the forest, and there they beheld — Behemoth. Fixed in an attitude of astonishment and dread, they stood gazing and still gazing upon the spectacle — a boundless and motionless gallery of faces. It was near the sunset. Overhead in its level light, a gray bald eagle, just flown from its neighboring eyrie, hung poised in wonder, as if turned to stone by the novel sight of so vast a creature. In its motionless suspension it seemed as if sculptured from the air while its wings were gilded, like some remains of the old statuaries, by the golden touch of the sun.

Visible above the woods, moving heavily through the sea of green leaves, like leviathan in the deep, appeared the dark and prodigious form of the Mastodon : an awful ridge rolling like a billow, along the tops of the pine and cedar which grew beneath him. The boundless bulk moved through the trembling verdure, like an island which, in some convulsion of nature, shifts itself along the surface of the sea. The forest shook as he advanced, while its scared and barbarous denizens, the prairie wolf, the gopher and the panther, skulked silently away.

Part First, pages 19-20