Read this excerpt adapted from "The Trip of Le Horla" by Guy de Maupassant. Which context clue helps you infer the
meaning of the word wails?
Select the correct text in the passage.

The two barometers-used to measure air pressure and weather changes-mark about five hundred meters, and
we gaze with enthusiastic admiration at the earth we are leaving and to which we are not attached in any way; it
looks like a colored map, an immense plan of the country. All its noises, however, rise to our ears very distinctly,
easily recognizable.... The locomotives whistle; we answer with the siren, which emits plaintive, fearfully shrill
wails like the mournful howl of a weird being wandering through the world....
(easily recognizable, the locomotives whistle, mournful howl, wandering through the world)