Sentence:  ... strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and <WSD>terraqueous</WSD> distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  Consisting of or involving earth and water.