Noah's Ark by Israel Zangwill

So winter came, and there was still nothing to record, save the witchery of the muffled white world with its blue shadows and fantastic ice friezes and stalactites. Great icicles glittered on the rocks, showing all the hues beneath. Peloni, wrapped in his blanket, crouched on his monument over a log that burnt in an improvised grate. It was very lonely. He had heard from no one, neither from Noah, nor Smith, nor any Jewish or even Indian pilgrim to the New Jerusalem, and the stock of winter provisions had exhausted his little hoard of coin. The old despair began to twine round him like some serpent of ice. As he listened in such moods to the distant thunder of Niagara -- which waxed louder as the air grew heavier, till it quite dominated the ever present rumble of the rapids -- the sound took on endless meanings to his feverish brain.

Now it was no longer the voice of the Eternal Being, it was the endless plaint of Israel beseeching the deaf heaven, the roar of prayer from some measureless synagogue; now it was the raucous voice of persecution, the dull bestial roar of malicious multitudes; and again it was the voice of the whole earth, groaning and travailing. And the horror of it was that it would not stop. It dropped on his brain, this falling water, as on the prisoner's in the mediaeval torture chamber. Could no one stop this turning wheel of the world, jar it grindingly to a standstill?