"Was I the traveller who had come from Seth?"

"Yes."

"Oh, then that was well. They had heard such a traveller was on the road, and had come a little way down the path, as far as might be without fatigue, to meet him."

"Would I eat with them?" these amiable strangers asked, pushing their soft warm fingers into mine and ringing me round with a circle. "But firstly might they help me out of my clothes? It was hot, and these things were cumbersome." As to the eating, I was agreeable enough seeing how casual meals had been with me lately, but my clothes, though Heaven knows they were getting horribly ragged and travel-stained, I clung to desperately.

My new friends shrugged their dimpled shoulders and, arguments being tedious, at once squatted round me in the dappled shade of a big tree and produced their stores of never failing provisions. After a pleasant little meal taken thus in the open and with all the simplicity Martians delight in, we got to talking about those yellow canoes which were bobbing about on the blue waters of the bay.

"Would you like to see where they are grown?" asked an individual basking by my side.

"Grown!" I answered with incredulity. "Built, you mean. Never in my life did I hear of growing boats."

"But then, sir," observed the girl as she sucked the honey out of the stalk of an azure convolvulus flower and threw the remains at a butterfly that sailed across the sunshine, "you know so little! You have come from afar, from some barbarous and barren district. Here we undoubtedly grow our boats, and though we know the Thither folk and such uncultivated races make their craft by cumbrous methods of flat planks, yet we prefer our own way, for one thing because it saves trouble," and as she murmured that all-sufficient reason the gentle damsel nodded reflectively.

But one of her companions, more lively for the moment, tickled her with a straw until she roused, and then said, "Let us take the stranger to the boat garden now. The current will drift us round the bay, and we can come back when it turns. If we wait we shall have to row in both directions, or even walk," and again planetary slothfulness carried the day.

So down to the beach we strolled and launched one of the golden-hued skiffs upon the pretty dancing wavelets just where they ran, lipped with jewelled spray, on the shore, and then only had I a chance to scrutinise their material. I patted that one we were upon inside and out. I noted with a seaman's admiration its lightness, elasticity, and supreme sleekness, its marvellous buoyancy and fairy-like "lines," and after some minutes' consideration it suddenly flashed across me that it was all of gourd rind. And as if to supply confirmation, the flat land we were approaching on the opposite side of the bay was covered by the characteristic verdure of these plants with a touch here and there of splendid yellow blossoms, but all of gigantic proportions.

"Ay," said a Martian damsel lying on the bottom, and taking and kissing my hand as she spoke, in the simple-hearted way of her people, "I see you have guessed how we make our boats. Is it the same in your distant country?"

"No, my girl, and what's more, I am a bit uneasy as to what the fellows on the Carolina will say if they ever hear I went to sea in a hollowed-out pumpkin, and with a young lady—well, dressed as you are—for crew. Even now I cannot imagine how you get your ships so trim and shapely—there is not a seam or a patch anywhere, it looks as if you had run them into a mould."

"That's just what we have done, sir, and now you will witness the moulds at work, for here we are," and the little skiff was pulled ashore and the Martians and I jumped out on the shelving beach, hauled our boat up high and dry, and there right over us, like great green umbrellas, spread the fronds of the outmost garden of this strangest of all ship-building yards. Briefly, and not to make this part of my story too long, those gilded boys and girls took me ashore, and chattering like finches in the evening, showed how they planted their gourd seed, nourished the gigantic plants as they grew with brackish water and the burnt ashes; then, when they flowered, mated the male and female blossoms, glorious funnels of golden hue big enough for one to live in; and when the young fruit was of the bigness of an ordinary bolster, how they slipped it into a double mould of open reed-work something like the two halves of a walnut-shell; and how, growing day by day in this, it soon took every curve and line they chose to give it, even the hanging keel below, the strengthened bulwarks, and tall prow-piece. It was so ingenious, yet simple; and I confess I laughed over my first skiff "on the stalk," and fell to bantering the Martians, asking whether it was a good season for navies, whether their Cunarders were spreading nicely, if they could give me a pinch of barge seed, or a yacht in bud to show to my friends at home.

But those lazy people took the matter seriously enough. They led me down green alleys arched over with huge melon-like leaves; they led me along innumerable byways, making me peep and peer through the chequered sunlight at ocean-growing craft, that had budded twelve months before, already filling their moulds to the last inch of space. They told me that when the growing process was sufficiently advanced, they loosened the casing, and cutting a hole into the interior of each giant fruit, scooped out all its seed, thereby checking more advance, and throwing into the rind strength that would otherwise have gone to reproductiveness. They said each fruit made two vessels, but the upper half was always best and used for long salt-water journeys, the lower piece being but for punting or fishing on their lakes. They cut them in half while still green, scraped out the light remaining pulp when dry, and dragged them down with the minimum of trouble, light as feathers, tenacious as steel plate, and already in the form and fashion of dainty craft from five to twenty feet in length, when the process was completed.

By the time we had explored this strangest of ship-building yards, and I had seen last year's crop on the stocks being polished and fitted with seats and gear, the sun was going down; and the Martian twilight, owing to the comparative steepness of the little planet's sides, being brief, we strolled back to the village, and there they gave me harbourage for the night, ambrosial supper, and a deep draught of the wine of Forgetfulness, under the gauzy spell of which the real and unreal melted into the vistas of rosy oblivion, and I slept.



CHAPTER XI

With the new morning came fresh energy and a spasm of conscience as I thought of poor Heru and the shabby sort of rescuer I was to lie about with these pretty triflers while she remained in peril.

So I had a bath and a swim, a breakfast, and, to my shame be it acknowledged, a sort of farewell merry-go-round dance on the yellow sands with a dozen young persons all light-hearted as the morning, beautiful as the flowers that bound their hair, and in the extremity of statuesque attire.

Then at last I got them to give me a sea-going canoe, a stock of cakes and fresh water; and with many parting injunctions how to find the Woodman trail, since I would not listen to reason and lie all the rest of my life with them in the sunshine, they pushed me off on my lonely voyage.

"Over the blue waters!" they shouted in chorus as I dipped my paddle into the diamond-crested wavelets. "Six hours, adventurous stranger, with the sun behind you! Then into the broad river behind the yellow sand-bar. But not the black northward river! Not the strong, black river, above all things, stranger! For that is the River of the Dead, by which many go but none come back. Goodbye!" And waving them adieu, I sternly turned my eyes from delights behind and faced the fascination of perils in front.

In four hours (for the Martians had forgotten in their calculations that my muscles were something better than theirs) I "rose" the further shore, and then the question was, Where ran that westward river of theirs?

It turned out afterwards that, knowing nothing of their tides, I had drifted much too far to northward, and consequently the coast had closed up the estuary mouth I should have entered. Not a sign of an opening showed anywhere, and having nothing whatever for guidance I turned northward, eagerly scanning an endless line of low cliffs, as the day lessened, for the promised sand-bar or inlet.

About dusk my canoe, flying swiftly forward at its own sweet will, brought me into a bight, a bare, desolate-looking country with no vegetation save grass and sedge on the near marshes and stony hills rising up beyond, with others beyond them mounting step by step to a long line of ridges and peaks still covered in winter snow.

The outlook was anything but cheering. Not a trace of habitation had been seen for a long time, not a single living being in whose neighbourhood I could land and ask the way; nothing living anywhere but a monstrous kind of sea-slug, as big as a dog, battening on the waterside garbage, and gaunt birds like vultures who croaked on the mud-flats, and half-spread wings of funereal blackness as they gambolled here and there. Where was poor Heru? Where pink-shouldered An? Where those wild men who had taken the princess from us? Lastly, but not least, where was I?

All the first stars of the Martian sky were strange to me, and my boat whirling round and round on the current confused what little geography I might otherwise have retained. It was a cheerless look out, and again and again I cursed my folly for coming on such a fool's errand as I sat, chin in hand, staring at a landscape that grew more and more depressing every mile. To go on looked like destruction, to go back was almost impossible without a guide; and while I was still wondering which of the two might be the lesser evil, the stream I was on turned a corner, and in a moment we were upon water which ran with swift, oily smoothness straight for the snow-ranges now beginning to loom unpleasantly close ahead.

By this time the night was coming on apace, the last of the evil-looking birds had winged its way across the red sunset glare, and though it was clear enough in mid-river under the banks, now steep and unclimbable, it was already evening.

And with the darkness came a wondrous cold breath from off the ice-fields, blowing through my lowland wrappings as though they were but tissue. I munched a bit of honey-cake, took a cautious sip of wine, and though I will not own I was frightened, yet no one will deny that the circumstances were discouraging.

Standing up in the frail canoe and looking around, at the second glance an object caught my eye coming with the stream, and rapidly overtaking me on a strong sluice of water. It was a raft of some sort, and something extra-ordinarily like a sitting Martian on it! Nearer and nearer it came, bobbing to the rise and fall of each wavelet with the last icy sunlight touching it up with reds and golds, nearer and nearer in the deadly hush of that forsaken region, and then at last so near it showed quite plainly on the purple water, a raft with some one sitting under a canopy.

With a thrill of delight I waved my cap aloft and shouted—

"Ship-ahoy! Hullo, messmate, where are we bound to?"

But never an answer came from that swiftly-passing stranger, so again I hailed—

"Put up your helm, Mr. Skipper; I have lost my bearings, and the chronometer has run down," but without a pause or sound that strange craft went slipping by.

That silence was more than I could stand. It was against all sea courtesies, and the last chance of learning where I was passing away. So, angrily the paddle was snatched from the canoe bottom, and roaring out again—

"Stop, I say, you d—— lubber, stop, or by all the gods I will make you!" I plunged the paddle into the water and shot my little craft slantingly across the stream to intercept the newcomer. A single stroke sent me into mid-stream, a second brought me within touch of that strange craft. It was a flat raft, undoubtedly, though so disguised by flowers and silk trailers that its shape was difficult to make out. In the centre was a chair of ceremony bedecked with greenery and great pale buds, hardly yet withered—oh, where had I seen such a chair and such a raft before?

And the riddle did not long remain unanswered. Upon that seat, as I swept up alongside and laid a sunburnt hand upon its edge, was a girl, and another look told me she was dead!

Such a sweet, pallid, Martian maid, her fair head lolling back against the rear of the chair and gently moving to and fro with the rise and fall of her craft. Her face in the pale light of the evening like carved ivory, and not less passionless and still; her arms bare, and her poor fingers still closed in her lap upon the beautiful buds they had put into them. I fairly gasped with amazement at the dreadful sweetness of that solitary lady, and could hardly believe she was really a corpse! But, alas! there was no doubt of it, and I stared at her, half in admiration and half in fear; noting how the last sunset flush lent a hectic beauty to her face for a moment, and then how fair and ghostly she stood out against the purpling sky; how her light drapery lifted to the icy wind, and how dreadfully strange all those soft-scented flowers and trappings seemed as we sped along side by side into the country of night and snow.

Then all of a sudden the true meaning of her being there burst upon me, and with a start and a cry I looked around. WE WERE FLYING SWIFTLY DOWN THAT RIVER OF THE DEAD THEY HAD TOLD ME OF THAT HAS NO OUTLET AND NO RETURNING!

With frantic haste I snatched up a paddle again and tried to paddle against the great black current sweeping us forward. I worked until the perspiration stood in beads on my forehead, and all the time I worked the river, like some black snake, hissed and twined, and that pretty lady rode cheerily along at my side. Overhead stars of unearthly brilliancy were coming out in the frosty sky, while on either hand the banks were high and the shadows under them black as ink. In those shadows now and then I noticed with a horrible indifference other rafts were travelling, and presently, as the stream narrowed, they came out and joined us, dead Martians, budding boys and girls; older voyagers with their age quickening upon them in the Martian manner, just as some fruit only ripens after it falls; yellow-girt slaves staring into the night in front, quite a merry crew all clustered about I and that gentle lady, and more far ahead and more behind, all bobbing and jostling forward as we hurried to the dreadful graveyard in the Martian regions of eternal winter none had ever seen and no one came to! I cried aloud in my desolation and fear and hid my face in my hands, while the icy cliffs mocked my cry and the dead maid, tripping alongside, rolled her head over, and stared at me with stony, unseeing eyes.

Well, I am no fine writer. I sat down to tell a plain, unvarnished tale, and I will not let the weird horror of that ride get into my pen. We careened forward, I and those lost Martians, until pretty near on midnight, by which time the great light-giving planets were up, and never a chance did Fate give me all that time of parting company with them. About midnight we were right into the region of snow and ice, not the actual polar region of the planet, as I afterwards guessed, but one of those long outliers which follow the course of the broad waterways almost into fertile regions, and the cold, though intense, was somewhat modified by the complete stillness of the air.

It was just then that I began to be aware of a low, rumbling sound ahead, increasing steadily until there could not be any doubt the journey was nearly over and we were approaching those great falls An had told me of, over which the dead tumble to perpetual oblivion. There was no opportunity for action, and, luckily, little time for thought. I remember clapping my hand to my heart as I muttered an imperfect prayer, and laughing a little as I felt in my pocket, between it and that organ, an envelope containing some corn-plaster and a packet of unpaid tailors' bills. Then I pulled out that locket with poor forgotten Polly's photograph, and while I was still kissing it fervently, and the dead girl on my right was jealously nudging my canoe with the corner of her raft, we plunged into a narrow gully as black as hell, shot round a sharp corner at a tremendous pace, and the moment afterwards entered a lake in the midst of an unbroken amphitheatre of cliffs gleaming in soft light all round.

Even to this moment I can recall the blue shine of those terrible ice crags framing the weird picture in on every hand, and the strange effect upon my mind as we passed out of the darkness of the gully down which we had come into the sepulchral radiance of that place. But though it fixed with one instantaneous flash its impression on my mind forever, there was no time to admire it. As we swept on to the lake's surface, and a glance of light coming over a dip in the ice walls to the left lit up the dead faces and half-withered flowers of my fellow-travellers with startling distinctness, I noticed with a new terror at the lower end of the lake towards which we were hurrying the water suddenly disappeared in a cloud of frosty spray, and it was from thence came the low, ominous rumble which had sounded up the ravine as we approached. It was the fall, and beyond the stream dropped down glassy step after step, in wild pools and rapids, through which no boat could live for a moment, to a black cavern entrance, where it was swallowed up in eternal night.

I WOULD not go that way! With a yell such as those solitudes had probably never heard since the planet was fashioned out of the void, I seized the paddle again and struck out furiously from the main current, with the result of postponing the crisis for a time, and finding myself bobbing round towards the northern amphitheatre, where the light fell clearest from planets overhead. It was like a great ballroom with those constellations for tapers, and a ghastly crowd of Martians were doing cotillions and waltzes all about me on their rafts as the troubled water, icy cold and clear as glass, eddied us here and there in solemn confusion. On the narrow beaches at the cliff foot were hundreds of wrecked voyagers—the wall-flowers of that ghostly assembly-room—and I went jostling and twirling round the circle as though looking for a likely partner, until my brain spun and my heart was sick.

For twenty minutes Fate played with me, and then the deadly suck of the stream got me down again close to where the water began to race for the falls. I vowed savagely I would not go over them if it could be helped, and struggled furiously.

On the left, in shadow, a narrow beach seemed to lie between the water and the cliff foot; towards it I fought. At the very first stroke I fouled a raft; the occupant thereof came tumbling aboard and nearly swamped me. But now it was a fight for life, so him I seized without ceremony by clammy neck and leg and threw back into the water. Then another playful Martian butted the behind part of my canoe and set it spinning, so that all the stars seemed to be dancing giddily in the sky. With a yell I shoved him off, but only to find his comrades were closing round me in a solid ring as we sucked down to the abyss at ever-increasing speed.

Then I fought like a fury, hacking, pushing, and paddling shorewards, crying out in my excitement, and spinning and bumping and twisting ever downwards. For every foot I gained they pushed me on a yard, as though determined their fate should be mine also.

They crowded round me in a compact circle, their poor flower-girt heads nodding as the swift current curtsied their crafts. They hemmed me in with desperate persistency as we spun through the ghostly starlight in a swirling mass down to destruction! And in a minute we were so close to the edge of the fall I could see the water break into ridges as it felt the solid bottom give way under it. We were so close that already the foremost rafts, ten yards ahead, were tipping and their occupants one by one waving their arms about and tumbling from their funeral chairs as they shot into the spray veil and went out of sight under a faint rainbow that was arched over there, the symbol of peace and the only lovely thing in that gruesome region. Another minute and I must have gone with them. It was too late to think of getting out of the tangle then; the water behind was heavy with trailing silks and flowers. We were jammed together almost like one huge float and in that latter fact lay my one chance.

On the left was a low ledge of rocks leading back to the narrow beach already mentioned, and the ledge came out to within a few feet of where the outmost boat on that side would pass it. It was the only chance and a poor one, but already the first rank of my fleet was trembling on the brink, and without stopping to weigh matters I bounded off my own canoe on to the raft alongside, which rocked with my weight like a tea-tray. From that I leapt, with such hearty good-will as I had never had before, on to a second and third. I jumped from the footstool of one Martian to the knee of another, steadying myself by a free use of their nodding heads as I passed. And every time I jumped a ship collapsed behind me. As I staggered with my spring into the last and outermost boat the ledge was still six feet away, half hidden in a smother of foam, and the rim of the great fall just under it. Then I drew all my sailor agility together and just as the little vessel was going bow up over the edge I leapt from her—came down blinded with spray on the ledge, rolled over and over, clutched frantically at the frozen soil, and was safe for the moment, but only a few inches from the vortex below!

As soon as I picked myself up and got breath, I walked shorewards and found, with great satisfaction, that the ledge joined the shelving beach, and so walked on in the blue obscurity of the cliff shadow back from the falls in the bare hope that the beach might lead by some way into the gully through which we had come and open country beyond. But after a couple of hundred yards this hope ended as abruptly as the spit itself in deep water, and there I was, as far as the darkness would allow me to ascertain, as utterly trapped as any mortal could be.

I will not dwell on the next few minutes, for no one likes to acknowledge that he has been unmanned even for a space. When those minutes were over calmness and consideration returned, and I was able to look about.

All the opposite cliffs, rising sheer from the water, were in light, their cold blue and white surfaces rising far up into the black starfields overhead. Looking at them intently from this vantage-point I saw without at first understanding that along them horizontally, tier above tier, were rows of objects, like—like—why, good Heavens, they were like men and women in all sorts of strange postures and positions! Rubbing my eyes and looking again I perceived with a start and a strange creepy feeling down my back that they WERE men and women!—hundreds of them, thousands, all in rows as cormorants stand upon sea-side cliffs, myriads and myriads now I looked about, in every conceivable pose and attitude but never a sound, never a movement amongst the vast concourse.

Then I turned back to the cliffs behind me. Yes! they ere there too, dimmer by reason of the shadows, but there for certain, from the snowfields far above down, down—good Heavens! to the very level where I stood. There was one of them not ten yards away half in and half out of the ice wall, and setting my teeth I walked over and examined him. And there was another further in behind as I peered into the clear blue depth, another behind that one, another behind him—just like cherries in a jelly.

It was startling and almost incredible, yet so many wonderful things had happened of late that wonders were losing their sharpness, and I was soon examining the cliff almost as coolly as though it were only some trivial geological "section," some new kind of petrified sea-urchins which had caught my attention and not a whole nation in ice, a huge amphitheatre of fossilised humanity which stared down on me.

The matter was simple enough when you came to look at it with philosophy. The Martians had sent their dead down here for many thousand years and as they came they were frozen in, the bands and zones in which they sat indicating perhaps alternating seasons. Then after Nature had been storing them like that for long ages some upheaval happened, and this cleft and lake opened through the heart of the preserve. Probably the river once ran far up there where the starlight was crowning the blue cliffs with a silver diadem of light, only when this hollow opened did it slowly deepen a lower course, spreading out in a lake, and eventually tumbling down those icy steps lose itself in the dark roots of the hills. It was very simple, no doubt, but incredibly weird and wonderful to me who stood, the sole living thing in that immense concourse of dead humanity.

Look where I would it was the same everywhere. Those endless rows of frozen bodies lying, sitting, or standing stared at me from every niche and cornice. It almost seemed, as the light veered slowly round, as though they smiled and frowned at times, but never a word was there amongst those millions; the silence itself was audible, and save the dull low thunder of the fall, so monotonous the ear became accustomed to and soon disregarded it, there was not a sound anywhere, not a rustle, not a whisper broke the eternal calm of that great caravansary of the dead.

The very rattle of the shingle under my feet and the jingle of my navy scabbard seemed offensive in the perfect hush, and, too awed to be frightened, I presently turned away from the dreadful shine of those cliffs and felt my way along the base of the wall on my own side. There was no means of escape that way, and presently the shingle beach itself gave out as stated, where the cliff wall rose straight from the surface of the lake, so I turned back, and finding a grotto in the ice determined to make myself as comfortable as might be until daylight came.



CHAPTER XII

Fortunately there was a good deal of broken timber thrown up at "high-water" mark, and with a stack of this at the mouth of the little cave a pleasant fire was soon made by help of a flint pebble and the steel back of my sword. It was a hearty blaze and lit up all the near cliffs with a ruddy jumping glow which gave their occupants a marvellous appearance of life. The heat also brought off the dull rime upon the side of my recess, leaving it clear as polished glass, and I was a little startled to see, only an inch or so back in the ice and standing as erect as ever he had been in life, the figure of an imposing grey clad man. His arms were folded, his chin dropped upon his chest, his robes of the finest stuff, the very flowers they had decked his head with frozen with immortality, and under them, round his crisp and iron-grey hair, a simple band of gold with strange runes and figures engraved upon it.

There was something very simple yet stately about him, though his face was hidden and as I gazed long and intently the idea got hold of me that he had been a king over an undegenerate Martian race, and had stood waiting for the Dawn a very, very long time.

I wished a little that he had not been quite so near the glassy surface of the ice down which the warmth was bringing quick moisture drops. Had he been back there in the blue depths where others were sitting and crouching it would have been much more comfortable. But I was a sailor, and misfortune makes strange companions, so I piled up the fire again, and lying down presently on the dry shingle with my back to him stared moodily at the blaze till slowly the fatigues of the day told, my eyelids dropped and, with many a fitful start and turn, at length I slept.

It was an hour before dawn, the fire had burnt low and I was dreaming of an angry discussion with my tailor in New York as to the sit of my last new trousers when a faint sound of moving shingle caught my quick seaman ear, and before I could raise my head or lift a hand, a man's weight was on me—a heavy, strong man who bore me down with irresistible force. I felt the slap of his ice-cold hand upon my throat and his teeth in the back of my neck! In an instant, though but half awake, with a yell of surprise and anger I grappled with the enemy, and exerting all my strength rolled him over. Over and over we went struggling towards the fire, and when I got him within a foot or so of it I came out on top, and, digging my knuckles into his throttle, banged his head upon the stony floor in reckless rage, until all of a sudden it seemed to me he was done for. I relaxed my grip, but the other man never moved. I shook him again, like a terrier with a rat, but he never resented it. Had I killed him? How limp and cold he was! And then all of a sudden an uneasy feeling came upon me. I reached out, and throwing a handful of dried stuff upon the embers the fire danced gaily up into the air, and the blaze showed me I was savagely holding down to the gravel and kneeling on the chest of that long-dead king from my grotto wall!

It was the man out of the ice without a doubt. There was the very niche he had fallen from under the influence of the fire heat, the very recess, exactly in his shape in every detail, whence he had stood gazing into vacuity all those years. I left go my hold, and after the flutter in my heart had gone down, apologetically set him up against the wall of the cavern whence he had fallen; then built up the fire until twirling flames danced to the very roof in the blue light of dawn, and hobgoblin shadows leapt and capered about us. Then once more I sat down on the opposite side of the blaze, resting my chin upon my hands, and stared into the frozen eyes of that grim stranger, who, with his chin upon his knees, stared back at me with irresistible, remorseless steadfastness.

He was as fresh as if he had died but yesterday, yet by his clothing and something in his appearance, which was not that of the Martian of to-day, I knew he might be many thousand years old. What things he had seen, what wonders he knew! What a story might be put into his mouth if I were a capable writer gifted with time and imagination instead of a poor outcast, ill-paid lieutenant whose literary wit is often taxed hardly to fill even a log-book entry! I stared at him so long and hard, and he at me through the blinking flames, that again I dozed—and dozed—and dozed again until at last when I woke in good earnest it was daylight.

By this time hunger was very aggressive. The fire was naught but a circlet of grey ashes; the dead king, still sitting against the cave-side, looked very blue and cold, and with an uncomfortable realisation of my position I shook myself together, picked up and pocketed without much thought the queer gold circlet that had dropped from his forehead, and went outside to see what prospect of escape the new day had brought.

It was not much. Upriver there was not the remotest chance. Not even a Niagara steamer could have forged back against the sluice coming down from the gulch there. Looking round, the sides of the icy amphitheatre—just lighting up now with glorious gold and crimson glimmers of morning—were as steep as a wall face; only back towards the falls was there a possibility of getting out of the dreadful trap, so thither I went, after a last look at the poor old king, along my narrow beach with all the eagerness begotten of a final chance. Up to the very brink it looked hopeless enough, but, looking downwards when that was reached, instead of a sheer drop the slope seemed to be a wild "staircase" of rocks and icy ledges with here and there a little patch of sand on a cornice, and far below, five hundred feet or so, a good big spread of gravel an acre or two in extent close by where the river plunged out of sight into the nethermost cavern mouth.

It was so hopeless up above it, it could not possibly be worse further down, and there was the ugly black flood running into the hole to trust myself to as a last resource; so slipping and sliding I began the descent.

Had I been a schoolboy with a good breakfast ahead the incident might have been amusing enough. The travelling was mostly done on the seat of my trousers, which consequently became caked with mud and glacial loam. Some was accomplished on hands and knees, with now and then a bit down a snow slope, in good, honest head-over-heels fashion. The result was a fine appetite for the next meal when it should please providence to send it, and an abrupt arrival on the bottom beach about five minutes after leaving the upper circles.

I came to behind a cluster of breast-high rocks, and before moving took a look round. Judge then of my astonishment and delight at the second glance to perceive about a hundred yards away a brown object, looking like an ape in the half light, meandering slowly up the margin of the water towards me. Every now and then it stopped, stooping down to pick up something or other from the scum along the torrent, and it was the fact that these trifles, whatever they were, were put into a wallet by the vision's side—not into his mouth—which first made me understand with a joyful thrill that it was a MAN before me—a real, living man in this huge chamber of dead horrors! Then again it flashed across my mind in a luminous moment that where one man could come, or go, or live, another could do likewise, and never did cat watch mouse with more concentrated eagerness than I that quaint, bent-shouldered thing hobbling about in the blue morning shadows where all else was silence.

Nearer and nearer he came, till so close face and garb were discernible, and then there could no longer be any doubt, it was a woodman, an old man, with grizzled monkey-face, stooping gait, and a shaggy fur cloak, utterly unlike the airy garments of my Hither folk, who now stood before me. It gave me quite a start to recognise him there, for it showed I was in a new land, and since he was going so cheerfully about his business, whatever it might chance to be, there must be some way out of this accursed pit in which I had fallen. So very cautiously I edged out, taking advantage of all the cover possible until we were only twenty yards apart, and then suddenly standing up, and putting on the most affable smile, I called out—

"Hullo, mess-mate!"

The effect was electrical. That quaint old fellow sprang a yard into air as though a spring had shot him up. Then, coming down, he stood transfixed at his full height as stiff as a ramrod, staring at me with incredible wonder. He looked so funny that in spite of hunger and loneliness I burst out laughing, whereat the woodman, suddenly recovering his senses, turned on his heels and set off at his best pace in the opposite direction. This would never do! I wanted him to be my guide, philosopher, and friend. He was my sole visible link with the outside world, so after him I went at tip-top speed, and catching him up in fifty yards along the shingle laid hold of his nether garments. Whereat the old fellow stopping suddenly I shot clean over his back, coming down on my shoulder in the gravel.

But I was much younger than he, and in a minute was in chase again. This time I laid hold of his cloak, and the moment he felt my grip he slipped the neck-thongs and left me with only the mangy garment in my hands. Again we set off, dodging and scampering with all our might upon that frozen bit of beach. The activity of that old fellow was marvellous, but I could not and would not lose him. I made a rush and grappled him, but he tossed his head round and slipped away once more under my arm, as though he had been brought up by a Chinese wrestler. Then he got on one side of a flat rock, I the other, and for three or four minutes we waltzed round that slab in the most insane manner.

But by this time we were both pretty well spent—he with age and I with faintness from my long fast, and we came presently to a standstill.

After glaring at me for a time, the woodman gasped out as he struggled for breath—

"Oh, mighty and dreadful spirit! Oh, dweller in primordial ice, say from which niche of the cliffs has the breath of chance thawed you?"

"Never a niche at all, Mr. Hunter-for-Haddocks'-Eyes," I answered as soon as I could speak. "I am just a castaway wrecked last night on this shore of yours, and very grateful indeed will I be if you can show me the way to some breakfast first, and afterwards to the outside world."

But the old fellow would not believe. "Spirits such as you," he said sullenly, "need no food, and go whither they will by wish alone."

"I tell you I am not a spirit, and as hungry as I don't particularly want to be again. Here, look at the back of my trousers, caked three inches deep in mud. If I were a spirit, do you think I would slide about on my coat-tails like that? Do you think that if I could travel by volition I would slip down these infernal cliffs on my pants' seat as I have just done? And as for materialism—look at this fist; it punched you just now! Surely there was nothing spiritual in that knock?''

"No," said the savage, rubbing his head, "it was a good, honest rap, so I must take you at your word. If you are indeed man, and hungry, it will be a charity to feed you; if you are a spirit, it will at least be interesting to watch you eat; so sit down, and let's see what I have in my wallet."

So cross-legged we squatted opposite each other on the table rock, and, feeling like another Sindbad the Sailor, I watched my new friend fumble in his bag and lay out at his side all sorts of odds and ends of string, fish-hooks, chewing-gum, material for making a fire, and so on, until at last he came to a package (done up, I noted with delight, in a broad, green leaf which had certainly been growing that morning), and unrolling it, displayed a lump of dried meat, a few biscuits, much thicker and heavier than the honey-cakes of the Hither folk, and something that looked and smelt like strong, white cheese.

He signed to me to eat, and you may depend upon it I was not slow in accepting the invitation. That tough biltong tasted to me like the tenderest steak that ever came from a grill; the biscuits were ambrosial; the cheese melted in my mouth as butter melts in that of the virtuous; but when the old man finished the quaint picnic by inviting me to accompany him down to the waterside for a drink, I shook my head. I had a great respect for dead queens and kings, I said, but there were too many of them up above to make me thirsty this morning; my respect did not go to making me desire to imbibe them in solution!

Afterwards I chanced to ask him what he had been picking up just now along the margin, and after looking at me suspiciously for a minute he asked—

"You are not a thief?" On being reassured on that point he continued: "And you will not attempt to rob me of the harvest for which I venture into this ghost-haunted glen, which you and I alone of living men have seen?"

"No." Whatever they were, I said, I would respect his earnings.

"Very well, then," said the old man, "look here! I come hither to pick up those pretty trifles which yonder lords and ladies have done with," and plunging his hand into another bag he brought out a perfect fistful of splendid gems and jewels, some set and some unset. "They wash from the hands and wrists of those who have lodgings in the crevices of the falls above," he explained. "After a time the beach here will be thick with them. Could I get up whence you came down, they might be gathered by the sackful. Come! there is an eddy still unsearched, and I will show you how they lie."

It was very fascinating, and I and that old man set to work amongst the gravels, and, to be brief, in half an hour found enough glittering stuff to set up a Fifth Avenue jeweller's shop. But to tell the truth, now that I had breakfasted, and felt manhood in my veins again, I was eager to be off, and out of the close, death-tainted atmosphere of that valley. Consequently I presently stood up and said—

"Look here, old man, this is fine sport no doubt, but just at present I have a big job on hand—one which will not wait, and I must be going. See, luck and young eyes have favoured me; here is twice as much gold and stones as you have got together—it is all yours without a question if you will show me the way out of this den and afterwards put me on the road to your big city, for thither I am bound with an errand to your king, Ar-hap."

The sight of my gems, backed, perhaps, with the mention of Ar-hap's name, appealed to the old fellow; and after a grunt or two about "losing a tide" just when spoil was so abundant, he accepted the bargain, shouldered his belongings, and led me towards the far corner of the beach.

It looked as if we were walking right against the towering ice wall, but when we were within a yard or two of it a narrow cleft, only eighteen inches wide, and wonderfully masked by an ice column, showed to the left, and into this we squeezed ourselves, the entrance by which we had come appearing to close up instantly we had gone a pace or two, so perfectly did the ice walls match each other.

It was the most uncanny thoroughfare conceivable—a sheer, sharp crack in the blue ice cliffs extending from where the sunlight shone in a dazzling golden band five hundred feet overhead to where bottom was touched in blue obscurity of the ice-foot. It was so narrow we had to travel sideways for the most part, a fact which brought my face close against the clear blue glass walls, and enabled me from time to time to see, far back in those translucent depths, more and more and evermore frozen Martians waiting in stony silence for their release.

But the fact of facts was that slowly the floor of the cleft trended upwards, whilst the sky strip appeared to come downwards to meet it. A mile, perhaps, we growled and squeezed up that wonderful gully; then with a feeling of incredible joy I felt the clear, outer air smiting upon me.

In my hurry and delight I put my head into the small of the back of the puffing old man who blocked the way in front and forced him forward, until at last—before we expected it—the cleft suddenly ended, and he and I tumbled headlong over each other on to a glittering, frozen snowslope; the sky azure overhead, the sunshine warm as a tepid bath, and a wide prospect of mountain and plain extending all around.

So delightful was the sudden change of circumstances that I became quite boyish, and seizing the old man in my exuberance by the hands, dragged him to his feet, and danced him round and round in a circle, while his ancient hair flapped about his head, his skin cloak waved from his shoulders like a pair of dusky wings and half-eaten cakes, dried flesh, glittering jewels, broken diadems, and golden finger-rings were flung in an arc about us. We capered till fairly out of breath, and then, slapping him on the back shoulder, I asked whose land all this was about us.

He replied that it was no one's, all waste from verge to verge.

"What!" was my exclamation. "All ownerless, and with so much treasure hidden hereabout! Why, I shall annex it to my country, and you and I will peg out original settlers' claims!" And, still excited by the mountain air, I whipped out my sword, and in default of a star-spangled banner to plant on the newly-acquired territory, traced in gigantic letters on the snow-crust—U.S.A.

"And now," I added, wiping the rime off my blade with the lappet of my coat, "let us stop capering about here and get to business. You have promised to put me on the way to your big city."

"Come on then," said the little man, gathering up his property. "This white hillside leads to nowhere; we must get into the valley first, and then you shall see your road." And right well that quaint barbarian kept his promise.



CHAPTER XIII

It was half a day's march from those glittering snow-fields into the low country, and when that was reached I found myself amongst quite another people.

The land was no longer fat and flowery, giving every kind of produce for the asking, but stony for the most part, and, where we first came on vegetation, overgrown by firs, with a pine which looked to me like a species which went to make the coal measures in my dear but distant planet. More than this I cannot say, for there are no places in the world like mess-room and quarter-deck for forgetting school learning. Instead of the glorious wealth of parti-coloured vegetation my eyes had been accustomed to lately, here they rested on infertile stretches of marshland intersected by moss-covered gravel shoots, looking as though they had been pushed into the plains in front of extinct glaciers coming down from the region behind us. On the low hills away from the sea those sombre evergreen forests with an undergrowth of moss and red lichens were more variegated with light foliage, and indeed the pines proved to be but a fringe to the Arctic ice, giving way rapidly to more typical Martian vegetation each mile we marched to the southward.

As for the inhabitants, they seemed, like my guide, rough, uncouth fellows, but honest enough when you came to know them. An introduction, however, was highly desirable. I chanced upon the first native as he was gathering reindeer-moss. My companion was some little way behind at the moment, and when the gentle aborigine saw the stranger he stared hard for a moment, then, turning on his heels, with extraordinary swiftness flung at me half a pound of hard flint stone. Had his aim been a little more careful this humble narrative had never appeared on the Broadway bookstalls. As it was, the pebble, missing my head by an inch or two, splintered into a hundred fragments on a rock behind, and while I was debating whether a revengeful rush at the slinger or a strategic advance to the rear were more advisable, my guide called out to his countryman—

"Ho! you base prowler in the morasses; you eater of unclean vegetation, do you not see this is a ghost I am conducting, a dweller in the ice cliffs, a spirit ten thousand years old? Put by your sling lest he wither you with a glance." And, very reasonably, surprised, the aborigine did as he was bid and cautiously advanced to inspect me.

The news soon spread over the countryside that my jewel-hunter was bringing a live "spook" along with him, considerable curiosity mixed with an awe all to my advantage characterising the people we met thereafter. Yet the wonder was not so great as might have been expected, for these people were accustomed to meeting the tags of lost races, and though they stared hard, their interest was chiefly in hearing how, when, and where I had been found, whether I bit or kicked, or had any other vices, and if I possessed any commercial value.

My guide's throat must have ached with the repetition of the narrative, but as he made the story redound greatly to his own glory, he put up cheerfully with the hoarseness. In this way, walking and talking alternately, we travelled during daylight through a country which slowly lost its rugged features and became more and more inhabited, the hardy people living in scattered villages in contradiction to the debased city-loving Hither folk.

About nightfall we came to a sea-fishers' hamlet, where, after the old man had explained my exalted nature and venerable antiquity, I was offered shelter for the night.

My host was the headman, and I must say his bearing towards the supernatural was most unaffected. If it had been an Avenue hotel I could not have found more handsome treatment than in that reed-thatched hut. They made me wash and rest, and then were all agog for my history; but that I postponed, contenting myself with telling them I had been lately in Seth, and had come thence to see them via the ice valley—to all of which they listened with the simplicity of children. Afterwards I turned on them, and openly marvelled that so small a geographical distance as there was between that land and this could make so vast a human difference. "The truth, O dweller in blue shadows of primordial ice, is," said the most intelligent of the Thither folk as we sat over fried deer-steak in his hut that evening, "we who are MEN, not Peri-zad, not overstayed fairies like those you have been amongst, are newcomers here on this shore. We came but a few generations ago from where the gold curtains of the sun lie behind the westward pine-trees, and as we came we drove, year by year, those fays, those spent triflers, back before us. All this land was theirs once, and more and more towards our old home. You may still see traces of harbours dug and cities built thousands of years ago, when the Hither folk were living men and women—not their shadows. The big water outside stops us for a space, but," he added, laughing gruffly and taking a draught of a strong beer he had been heating by the fire, "King Ar-hap has their pretty noses between his fingers; he takes tribute and girls while he gets ready—they say he is nearly ready this summer, and if he is, it will not be much of an excuse he will need to lick up the last of those triflers, those pretences of manhood."

Then we fell to talking of Ar-hap, his subjects and town, and I learned the tides had swept me a long way to the northward of the proper route between the capitals of the two races, that day they carried me into the Dead-Men's Ice, as these entertainers of mine called the northern snows. To get back to the place previously aimed at, where the woodmen road came out on the seashore, it was necessary to go either by boat, a roundabout way through a maze of channels, "as tangled as the grass roots in autumn"; or, secondly, by a couple of days' marching due southward across the base of the great peninsula we were on, and so strike blue water again at the long-sought-for harbour.

As I lay dozing and dreaming on a pile of strange furs in the corner of the hut that evening I made up my mind for the land journey tomorrow, having had enough for the moment of nautical Martian adventures; and this point settled, fell again to wondering what made me follow so reckless a quest in the way I was doing; asking myself again and again what was gazelle-eyed Heru to me after all, and why should it matter even as much as the value of a brass waist-coat button whether Hath had her or Ar-hap? What a fool I was to risk myself day by day in quaint and dangerous adventures, wearing out good Government shoe-leather in other men's quarrels, all for a silly slip of royal girlhood who, by this time, was probably making herself comfortable and forgetting both Hath and me in the arms of her rough new lord.

And from Heru my mind drifted back dreamily to poor An, and Seth, the city of fallen magnificence, where the spent masters of a strange planet now lived on sufferance—the ghosts of their former selves. Where was An, where the revellers on the morning—so long ago it seemed!—when first that infernal rug of mine translated a chance wish into a horrible reality and shot me down here, a stranger and an outcast? Where was the magic rug itself? Where my steak and tomato supper? Who had eaten it? Who was drawing my pay? If I could but find the rug when I got back to Seth, gods! but I would try if it would not return whence I had come, and as swiftly, out of all these silly coils and adventuring.

So musing, presently the firelight died down, and bulky forms of hide-wrapped woodmen sleeping on the floor slowly disappeared in obscurity like ranges of mountains disappearing in the darkness of night. All those uncouth forms, and the throb of the sea outside, presently faded upon my senses, and I slept the heavy sleep of one whose wakefulness gives way before an imperious physical demand. All through the long hours of the night, while the waves outside champed upon the gravels, and the woodmen snored and grunted uneasily as they simultaneously dreamt of the day's hunting and digested its proceeds, I slept; and then when dawn began to break I passed from that heavy stupor into another and lighter realm, wherein fancy again rose superior to bodily fatigue, and events of the last few days passed in procession through my mind.

I dreamt I was lunching at a fashionable seaside resort with Polly at my side, and An kept bringing us melons, which grew so monstrous every time a knife was put into them that poor Polly screamed aloud. I dreamt I was afloat on a raft, hotly pursued by my tailor, whose bare and shiny head—may Providence be good to him!—was garlanded with roses, while in his fist was a bunch of unpaid bills, the which he waved aloft, shouting to me to stop. And thus we danced down an ink-black river until he had chiveyed me into the vast hall of the Admiralty, where a fearsome Secretary, whose golden teeth rattled and dropped from his head with mingled cold and anger, towered above me as he asked why I was absent from my ship without leave. And I was just mumbling out excuses while stooping to pick up his golden dentistry, when some one stirring in the hut aroused me. I started up on my elbow and looked around. Where was I? For a minute all was confused and dark. The heavy mound-like forms of sleeping men, the dim outlines of their hunting gear upon the walls, the pale sea beyond, half seen through the open doorway, just turning livid in the morning light; and then as my eyes grew more accustomed to the obscurity, and my stupid senses returned, I recognised the surroundings, and, with a sigh, remembered yesterday's adventures.

However, it would never do to mope; so, rising silently and picking a way through human lumber on the floor, I went out and down to the water's edge, where "shore-going" clothes, as we sailors call them, were slipped off, and I plunged into the sea for a swim.

It was a welcome dip, for I needed the plunge physically and intellectually, but it came to an abrupt conclusion. The Thither folk apparently had never heard of this form of enjoyment; to them water stood for drinking or drowning, nothing else, and since one could not drink the sea, to be in it meant, even for a ghost, to drown. Consequently, when the word went round the just rousing villages that "He-on-foot-from-afar" was adrift in the waves, rescue parties were hurriedly organised, a boat launched, and, in spite of all my kicking and shouting (which they took to be evidence of my semi-moribund condition), I was speedily hauled out by hairy and powerful hands, pungent herbs burnt under my nose, and my heels held high in the air in order that the water might run out of me. It was only with the greatest difficulty those rough but honest fellows were eventually got to believe me saved.

The breakfast I made of grilled deer flesh and a fish not unlike salmon, however, convinced them of my recovery, and afterward we parted very good friends; for there was something in the nature of those rugged barbarians just coming into the dawn of civilisation that won my liking far more than the effete gentleness of others across the water.

When the time of parting came they showed no curiosity as to my errand, but just gave me some food in a fish-skin bag, thrust a heavy stone-headed axe into my hand, "in case I had to talk to a thief on the road," and pointed out on the southern horizon a forked mountain, under which, they said, was the harbour and high-road to King Ar-hap's capital. Then they hugged me to their hairy chests in turn, and let me go with a traveller's blessing.

There I was again, all alone, none but my thoughts for companions, and nothing but youth to excuse the folly in thus venturing on a reckless quest!

However, who can gainsay that same youth? The very spice of danger made my steps light and the way pleasant. For a mile or two the track was plain enough, through an undulating country gradually becoming more and more wooded with vegetation, changing rapidly from Alpine to sub-tropical. The air also grew warmer, and when the dividing ridge was crossed and a thick forest entered, the snows and dreadful region of Deadmen's Ice already seemed leagues and leagues away.

Probably a warm ocean current played on one side of the peninsula, while a cold one swept the other, but for scientific aspects of the question I cared little in my joy at being anew in a soft climate, amongst beautiful flowers and vivid life again. Mile after mile slipped quickly by as I strode along, whistling "Yankee Doodle" to myself and revelling in the change. At one place I met a rough-looking Martian woodcutter, who wanted to fight until he found I also wanted to, when he turned very civil and as talkative as a solitary liver often is when his tongue gets started. He particularly desired to know where I came from, and, as in the case with so many other of his countrymen, took it for granted, and with very little surprise, that I was either a spirit or an inhabitant of another world. With this idea in his mind he gave me a curious piece of information, which, unfortunately, I was never able to follow up.

"I don't think you can be a spirit," he said, critically eyeing my clothes, which were now getting ragged and dirty beyond description. "They are finer-looking things than you, and I doubt if their toes come through their shoes like yours do. If you are a wanderer from the stars, you are not like that other one we have down yonder," and he pointed to the southward.

"What!" I asked, pricking my ears in amazement, "another wanderer from the outside world! Does he come from the earth?"—using the word An had given me to signify my own planet.

"No, not from there; from the one that burns blue in evening between sun and sea. Men say he worked as a stoker or something of the kind when he was at home, and got trifling with a volcano tap, and was lapped in hot mud, and blown out here. My brother saw him about a week ago."

"Now what you say is down right curious. I thought I had a monopoly of that kind of business in this sphere of yours. I should be tremendously interested to see him."

"No you wouldn't," briefly answered the woodman. "He is the stupidest fool ever blown from one world to another—more stupid to look at than you are. He is a gaseous, wavey thing, so glum you can't get two words a week out of him, and so unstable that you never know when you are with him and when the breeze has drifted him somewhere else."

I could but laugh and insist, with all respect to the woodcutter, such an individual were worth the knowing however unstable his constitution; at which the man shrugged his shoulders and changed the conversation, as though the subject were too trivial to be worth much consideration.

This individual gave me the pleasure of his company until nearly sundown, and finding I took an interest in things of the forest, pointed out more curious plants and trees than I have space to mention. Two of them, however, cling to my memory very tenaciously. One was a very Circe amongst plants, the horrible charm of which can never be forgotten. We were going down a glade when a most ravishing odour fell upon my nostrils. It was heavenly sweet yet withal there lurked an incredibly, unexpressibly tempting spice of wickedness in it. The moment he caught that ambrosial invitation in the air my woodman spit fiercely on the ground, and taking a plug of wool from his pouch stuffed his nostrils up. Then he beckoned me to come away. But the odour was too ravishing, I was bound to see whence it arose, and finding me deaf to all warnings, the man reluctantly turned aside down the enticing trail. We pushed about a hundred yards through bushes until we came to a little arena full in sunshine where there were neither birds nor butterflies, but a death-like hush upon everything. Indeed, the place seemed shunned in spite of the sodden loveliness of that scent which monopolised and mounted to my brain until I was beginning to be drunk with the sheer pleasure of it. And there in the centre of the space stood a plant not unlike a tree fern, about six feet high, and crowned by one huge and lovely blossom. It resembled a vast passion-flower of incredible splendour. There were four petals, with points resting on the ground, each six feet long, ivory-white inside, exquisitely patterned with glittering silver veins. From the base of these rose upright a gauzy veil of azure filaments of the same length as the petals, wirelike, yet soft as silk, and inside them again rested a chalice of silver holding a tiny pool of limpid golden honey. Circe, indeed! It was from that cup the scent arose, and my throat grew dry with longing as I looked at it; my eyes strained through the blue tendrils towards that liquid nectar, and my giddy senses felt they must drink or die! I glanced at the woodman with a smile of drunken happiness, then turned tottering legs towards the blossom. A stride up the smooth causeway of white petals, a push through the azure haze, and the wine of the wood enchantress would be mine—molten amber wine, hotter and more golden than the sunshine; the fire of it was in my veins, the recklessness of intoxication was on me, life itself as nothing compared to a sip from that chalice, my lips must taste or my soul would die, and with trembling hand and strained face I began to climb.

But the woodman pulled me back.

"Back, stranger!" he cried. "Those who drink there never live again."

"Blessed oblivion! If I had a thousand lives the price were still too cheap," and once more I essayed to scramble up.

But the man was a big fellow, and with nostrils plugged, and eyes averted from the deadly glamour, he seized me by the collar and threw me back. Three times I tried, three times he hurled me down, far too faint and absorbed to heed the personal violence. Then standing between us, "Look," he said, "look and learn."

He had killed a small ape that morning, meaning later on to take its fur for clothing, and this he now unslung from his shoulder, and hitching the handle of his axe into the loose skin at the back of its neck, cautiously advanced to the witch plant, and gently hoisted the monkey over the blue palings. The moment its limp, dead feet touched the golden pool a shudder passed through the plant, and a bird somewhere far back in the forest cried out in horror. Quick as thought, a spasm of life shot up the tendrils, and like tongues of blue flame they closed round the victim, lapping his miserable body in their embrace. At the same time the petals began to rise, showing as they did so hard, leathery, unlovely outer rinds, and by the time the woodman was back at my side the flower was closed.

Closer and closer wound the blue tendrils; tighter and tighter closed the cruel petals with their iron grip, until at last we heard the ape's bones crackling like dry firewood; then next his head burst, his brains came oozing through the crevices, while blood and entrails followed them through every cranny, and the horrible mess with the overflow of the chalice curled down the stem in a hundred steaming rills, till at last the petals locked with an ugly snap upon their ghastly meal, and I turned away from the sight in dread and loathing.

That was plant Number One.

Plant Number Two was of milder disposition, and won a hearty laugh for my friendly woodman. In fact, being of a childlike nature, his success as a professor of botany quite pleased him, and not content with answering my questions, he set to work to find new vegetable surprises, greatly enjoying my wonder and the sense of importance it gave him.

In this way we came, later on in the day, to a spot where herbage was somewhat scantier, the grass coarse, and soil shallow. Here I espied a tree of small size, apparently withered, but still bearing a few parched leaves on its uppermost twigs.

"Now that," quoth the professor, "is a highly curious tree, and I should like you to make a close acquaintance with it. It grows from a seed in the course of a single springtime, perishes in the summer; but a few specimens stand throughout the winter, provided the situation is sheltered, as this one has done. If you will kindly go down and shake its stem I believe you will learn something interesting."

So, very willing to humour him, away I went to the tree, which was perfect in every detail, but apparently very dry, clasped it with both hands, and, pulling myself together, gave it a mighty shake. The result was instantaneous. The whole thing was nothing but a skin of dust, whence all fibre and sap had gone, and at my touch it dissolved into a cloud of powder, a huge puff of white dust which descended on me as though a couple of flour-bags had been inverted over my head; and as I staggered out sneezing and blinking, white as a miller from face to foot, the Martian burst into a wild, joyous peal of laughter that made the woods ring again. His merriment was so sincere I had not the heart to be angry, and soon laughed as loud as he did; though, for the future, I took his botanical essays with a little more caution.



CHAPTER XIV

That woodman friend of mine proved so engaging it was difficult to get away, and thus when, dusk upon us, and my object still a long distance off, he asked me to spend the night at his hut, I gladly assented.

We soon reached the cabin where the man lived by himself whilst working in the forest. It was a picturesque little place on a tree-overhung lagoon, thatched, wattled, and all about were piles of a pleasant-scented bark, collected for the purpose of tanning hides, and I could not but marvel that such a familiar process should be practised identically on two sides of the universal ether. But as a matter of fact the similarity of many details of existence here and there was the most striking of the things I learned whilst in the red planet.

Within the hut stood a hearth in the centre of the floor, whereon a comfortable blaze soon sparkled, and upon the walls hung various implements, hides, and a store of dried fruits of various novel kinds. My host, when he had somewhat disdainfully watched me wash in a rill of water close by, suggested supper, and I agreed with heartiest good will.

"Nothing wonderful! Oh, Mr. Blue-coat!" he said, prancing about as he made his hospitable arrangements. "No fine meat or scented wine to unlock, one by one, all the doors of paradise, such as I have heard they have in lands beyond the sea; but fare good enough for plain men who eat but to live. So! reach me down yonder bunch of yellow aru fruit, and don't upset that calabash, for all my funniest stories lurk at the bottom of it."

I did as he bid, and soon we were squatting by the fire toasting arus on pointed sticks, the doorway closed with a wattle hurdle, and the black and gold firelight filling the hut with fantastic shadows. Then when the banana-like fruit was ready, the man fetched from a recess a loaf of bread savoured with the dust of dried and pounded fish, put the foresaid calabash of strong ale to warm, and down we sat to supper with real woodman appetites. Seldom have I enjoyed a meal so much, and when we had finished the fruit and the wheat cake my guide snatched up the great gourd of ale, and putting it to his lips called out:

"Here's to you, stranger; here's to your country; here's to your girl, if you have one, and death to your enemies!" Then he drank deep and long, and, passed the stuff to me.

"Here's to you, bully host, and the missus, and the children, if there are any, and more power to your elbow!"—the which gratified him greatly, though probably he had small idea of my meaning.

And right merry we were that evening. The host was a jolly good fellow, and his ale, with a pleasant savour of mint in it, was the heartiest drink I ever set lips to. We talked and laughed till the very jackals yapped in sympathy outside. And when he had told a score of wonderful wood stories as pungent of the life of these fairy forests as the aromatic scent of his bark-heaps outside, as iridescent with the colours of another world as the rainbow bubbles riding down his starlit rill, I took a turn, and told him of the commonplaces of my world so far away, whereat he laughed gloriously again. The greater the commonplace the larger his joy. The humblest story, hardly calculated to impress a griffin between watches on the main-deck, was a masterpiece of wit to that gentle savage; and when I "took off" the tricks and foibles of some of my superiors—Heaven forgive me for such treason!—he listened with the exquisite open-mouthed delight of one who wanders in a brand-new world of mirth.

We drank and laughed over that strong beer till the little owls outside raised their voice in combined accord, and then the woodman, shaking the last remnant of his sleepy wits together, and giving a reproachful look at me for finally passing him the gourd empty to the last drop, rose, threw a fur on a pile of dead grass at one side of the hut, and bid me sleep, "for his brain was giddy with the wonders of the incredible and ludicrous sphere which I had lately inhabited."

Slowly the fire died away; slowly the quivering gold and black arabesques on the walls merged in a red haze as the sticks dropped into tinder, and the great black outline of the hairy monster who had thrown himself down by the embers rose up the walls against that flush like the outline of a range of hills against a sunset glow. I listened drowsily for a space to his snoring and the laughing answer of the brook outside, and then that ambrosial sleep which is the gentle attendant of hardship and danger touched my tired eyelids, and I, too, slept.

My friend was glum the next morning, as they who stay over-long at the supper flagon are apt to be. He had been at work an hour on his bark-heaps when I came out into the open, and it was only by a good deal of diplomacy and some material help in sorting his faggots that he was got into a better frame of mind. I could not, however, trust his mood completely, and as I did not want to end so jovial a friendship with a quarrel, I hurried through our breakfast of dry bread, with hard-boiled lizard eggs, and then settling my reckoning with one of the brass buttons from my coat, which he immediately threaded, with every evidence of extreme gratification, on a string of trinkets hanging round his neck, asked him the way to Ar-hap's capital.

"Your way is easy, friend, as long as you keep to the straight path and have yonder two-humped mountain in front. To the left is the sea, and behind the hill runs the canal and road by which all traffic comes or goes to Ar-hap. But above all things pass not to the hills right, for no man goes there; there away the forests are thick as night, and in their perpetual shadows are the ruins of a Hither city, a haunted fairy town to which some travellers have been, but whence none ever returned alive."

"By the great Jove, that sounds promising! I would like to see that town if my errand were not so urgent."

But the old fellow shook his shaggy head and turned a shade yellower. "It is no place for decent folk," he growled. "I myself once passed within a mile of its outskirts at dusk, and saw the unholy little people's lanterned processions starting for the shrine of Queen Yang, who, tradition says, killed herself and a thousand babies with her when we took this land."

"My word, that was a holocaust! Couldn't I drop in there to lunch? It would make a fine paper for an antiquarian society."

Again the woodman frowned. "Do as I bid you, son. You are too young and green to go on ventures by yourself. Keep to the straight road: shun the swamps and the fairy forest, else will you never see Ar-hap."

"And as I have very urgent and very important business with him, comrade, no doubt your advice is good. I will call on Princess Yang some other day. And now goodbye! Rougher but friendlier shelter than you have given me no man could ask for. I am downright sorry to part with you in this lonely land. If ever we meet again—" but we never did! The honest old churl clasped me into his hairy bosom three times, stuffed my wallet with dry fruit and bread, and once more repeating his directions, sent me on my lonely way.

I confess I sighed while turning into the forest, and looked back more than once at his retreating form. The loneliness of my position, the hopelessness of my venture, welled up in my heart after that good comradeship, and when the hut was out of sight I went forward down the green grass road, chin on chest, for twenty minutes in the deepest dejection. But, thank Heaven, I was born with a tough spirit, and possess a mind which has learned in many fights to give brave counsel to my spirit, and thus presently I shook myself together, setting my face boldly to the quest and the day's work.

It was not so clear a morning as the previous one, and a steamy wind on what at sea I should have called the starboard bow, as I pressed forward to the distant hill, had a curiously subduing effect on my thoughts, and filled the forest glades with a tremulous unreality like to nothing on our earth, and distinctly embarrassing to a stranger in a strange land. Small birds in that quaint atmospheric haze looked like condors, butterflies like giant fowl, and the simplest objects of the forest like the imaginations of a disordered dream. Behind that gauzy hallucination a fine white mist came up, and the sun spread out flat and red in the sky, while the pent-in heat became almost unendurable.

Still I plodded on, growling to myself that in Christian latitudes all the evidences would have been held to betoken a storm before night, whatever they might do here, but for the most part lost in my own gloomy speculations. That was the more pity since, in thinking the walk over now, it seems to me that I passed many marvels, saw many glorious vistas in those nameless forests, many spreads of colour, many incidents that, could I but remember them more distinctly, would supply material for making my fortune as a descriptive traveller. But what would you? I have forgotten, and am too virtuous to draw on my imagination, as it is sometimes said other travellers have done when picturesque facts were deficient. Yes, I have forgotten all about that day, save that it was sultry hot, that I took off my coat and waistcoat to be cooler, carrying them, like the tramp I was, across my arm, and thus dishevelled passed some time in the afternoon an encampment of forest folk, wherefrom almost all the men were gone, and the women shy and surly.

In no very social humour myself, I walked round their woodland village, and on the outskirts, by a brook, just as I was wishing there were some one to eat my solitary lunch with, chanced upon a fellow busily engaged in hammering stones into weapons upon a flint anvil.

He was an ugly-looking individual at best, yet I was hard up for company, so I put my coat down, and, seating myself on a log opposite, proceeded to open my wallet, and take out the frugal stores the woodman had given me that morning.

The man was seated upon the ground holding a stone anvil between his feet, while with his hands he turned and chipped with great skill a spear-head he was making out of flint. It was about the only pastime he had, and his little yellow eyes gleamed with a craftsman's pleasure, his shaggy round shoulders were bent over the task, the chips flew in quick particles, and the wood echoed musically as the artificer watched the thing under his hands take form and fashion. Presently I spoke, and the worker looked up, not too pleased at being thus interrupted. But he was easy of propitiation, and over a handful of dried raisins communicative.

How, I asked, knowing a craftsman's craft is often nearest to his heart, how was it such things as that he chipped came to be thought of by him and his? Whereon the woodman, having spit out the raisin-stones and wiped his fingers on his fur, said in substance that the first weapon was fashioned when the earliest ape hurled the first stone in wrath.

"But, chum," I said, taking up his half-finished spear and touching the razor-fine edge with admiring caution, "from hurling the crude pebble to fashioning such as this is a long stride. Who first edged and pointed the primitive malice? What man with the soul of a thousand unborn fighters in him notched and sharpened your natural rock?"

Whereon the chipper grinned, and answered that, when the woodmen had found stones that would crack skulls, it came upon them presently that they would crack nuts as well. And cracking nuts between two stones one day a flint shattered, and there on the grass was the golden secret of the edge—the thing that has made man what he is.

"Yet again, good fellow," I queried, "even this happy chance only gives us a weapon, sharp, no doubt, and calculated to do a hundred services for any ten the original pebble could have done, but still unhandled, small in force, imperfect—now tell me, which of your amiable ancestors first put a handle to the fashioned flint, and how he thought of it?"

The workman had done his flake by now, and wrapping it in a bit of skin, put it carefully in his belt before turning to answer my question.

"Who made the first handle for the first flint, you of the many questions? She did—she, the Mother," he suddenly cried, patting the earth with his brown hand, and working himself up as he spoke, "made it in her heart for us her first-born. See, here is such as the first handled weapon that ever came out of darkness," and he snatched from the ground, where it had lain hidden under his fox-skin cloak, a heavy club. I saw in an instant how it was. The club had been a sapling, and the sapling's roots had grown about and circled with a splendid grip a lump of native flint. A woodman had pulled the sapling, found the flint, and fashioned the two in a moment of happy inspiration, the one to an axe-head and the other to a handle, as they lay Nature-welded!

"This, I say, is the first—the first!" screamed the old fellow as though I were contradicting him, thumping the ground with his weapon, and working himself up to a fury as its black magic entered his being. "This is the first: with this I slew Hetter and Gur, and those who plundered my hiding-places in the woods; with this I have killed a score of others, bursting their heads, and cracking their bones like dry sticks. With this—with this—" but here his rage rendered him inarticulate; he stammered and stuttered for a minute, and then as the killing fury settled on him his yellow teeth shut with a sudden snap, while through them his breath rattled like wind through dead pine branches in December, the sinews sat up on his hands as his fingers tightened upon the axe-heft like the roots of the same pines from the ground when winter rain has washed the soil from beneath them; his small eyes gleamed like baleful planets; every hair upon his shaggy back grew stiff and erect—another minute and my span were ended.

With a leap from where I sat I flew at that hairy beast, and sinking my fists deep in his throttle, shook him till his eyes blazed with delirious fires. We waltzed across the short greensward, and in and about the tree-trunks, shaking, pulling, and hitting as we went, till at last I felt the man's vigour dying within him; a little more shaking, a sudden twist, and he was lying on the ground before me, senseless and civil! That is the worst of some orators, I thought to myself, as I gloomily gathered up the scattered fragments of my lunch; they never know when they have said enough, and are too apt to be carried away by their own arguments.

That inhospitable village was left behind in full belief the mountain looming in the south could be reached before nightfall, while the road to its left would serve as a sure guide to food and shelter for the evening. But, as it turned out, the morning's haze developed a strong mist ere the afternoon was half gone, through which it was impossible to see more than twenty yards. My hill loomed gigantic for a time with a tantalising appearance of being only a mile or two ahead, then wavered, became visionary, and finally disappeared as completely as though the forest mist had drunk it up bodily.

There was still the road to guide me, a fairly well-beaten track twining through the glades; but even the best of highways are difficult in fog, and this one was complicated by various side paths, made probably by hunters or bark-cutters, and without compass or guide marks it was necessary to advance with extreme caution, or get helplessly mazed.

An hour's steady tramping brought me nowhere in particular, and stopping for a minute to consider, I picked a few wild fruit, such as my wood-cutter friend had eaten, from an overhanging bush, and in so doing slipped, the soil having now become damp, and in falling broke a branch off. The incident was only important from what follows. Picking myself up, perhaps a little shaken by the jolt, I set off again upon what seemed the plain road, and being by this time displeased by my surroundings, determined to make a push for "civilization" before the rapidly gathering darkness settled down.

Hands in pockets and collar up, I marched forward at a good round pace for an hour, constantly straining eyes for a sight of the hill and ears for some indications of living beings in the deathly hush of the shrouded woods, and at the end of that time, feeling sure habitations must now be near, arrived at what looked like a little open space, somehow seeming rather familiar in its vague outlines.

Where had I seen such a place before? Sauntering round the margin, a bush with a broken branch suddenly attracted my attention—a broken bush with a long slide in the mud below it, and the stamp of Navy boots in the soft turf! I glared at those signs for a moment, then with an exclamation of chagrin recognised them only too well—it was the bush whence I had picked the fruit, and the mark of my fall. An hour's hard walking round some accursed woodland track had brought me exactly back to the point I had started from—I was lost!

It really seemed to get twenty per cent darker as I made that abominable discovery, and the position dawned in all its uncomfortable intensity. There was nothing for it but to start off again, this time judging my direction only by a light breath of air drifting the mist tangles before it; and therein I made a great mistake, for the breeze had shifted several points from the quarter whence it blew in the morning.

Knowing nothing of this, I went forward with as much lightheartedness as could be managed, humming a song to myself, and carefully putting aside thoughts of warmth and supper, while the dusk increased and the great forest vegetation seemed to grow ranker and closer at every step.

Another disconcerting thing was that the ground sloped gradually downwards, not upwards as it should have done, till it seemed the path lay across the flats of a forest-covered plain, which did not conform to my wish of striking a road on the foot-hills of the mountain. However, I plodded on, drawing some small comfort from the fact that as darkness came the mist rose from the ground and appeared to condense in a ghostly curtain twenty feet overhead, where it hung between me and a clear night sky, presently illumined by starlight with the strangest effect.

Tired, footsore, and dejected, I struggled on a little further. Oh for a cab, I laughed bitterly to myself. Oh for even the humble necessary omnibus of civilisation. Oh for the humblest tuck-shop where a mug of hot coffee and a snack could be had by a homeless wanderer; and as I thought and plodded savagely on, collar up, hands in pockets, through the black tangles of that endless wood, suddenly the sound of wailing children caught my ear!

It was the softest, saddest music ever mortal listened to. It was as though scores of babes in pain were dropping to sleep on their mothers' breasts, and all hushing their sorrows with one accord in a common melancholy chorus. I stood spell-bound at that elfin wailing, the first sound to break the deathly stillness of the road for an hour or more, and my blood tingled as I listened to it. Nevertheless, here was what I was looking for; where there were weeping children there must be habitations, and shelter, and—splendid thought!—supper. Poor little babes! their crying was the deadliest, sweetest thing in sorrows I ever listened to. If it was cholic—why, I knew a little of medicine, and in gratitude for that prospective supper, I had a soul big enough to cure a thousand; and if they were in disgrace, and by some quaint Martian fashion had suffered simultaneous punishment for baby offences, I would plead for them.

In fact, I fairly set off at the run towards the sobbing, in the black, wet, night air ahead, and, tripping as I ran, looked down and saw in the filtering starlight that the forest grass had given place to an ancient roadway, paved with moss-grown flag-stones, such as they still used in Seth.

Without stopping to think what that might mean I hurried on, the wailing now right ahead, a tremulous tumult of gentle grief rising and falling on the night air like the sound of a sea after a storm; and so, presently, in a minute or two, came upon a ruined archway spanning the lonely road, held together by great masses of black-fingered creepers, gaunt and ghostly in the shadows, an extraordinary and unexpected vision; and as I stopped with a jerk under that forbidding gateway and glared at its tumbled masonry and great portals hanging rotten at their hinges, suddenly the truth flashed upon me. I had taken the forbidden road after all. I was in the ancient, ghost-haunted city of Queen Yang!



CHAPTER XV

The dark forest seemed to shut behind as I entered the gateway of the deserted Hither town, against which my wood-cutter friend had warned me, while inside the soft mist hung in the starlight like grey drapery over endless vistas of ruins. What was I to do? Without all was black and cheerless, inside there was at least shelter. Wet and cold, my courage was not to be put down by the stories of a silly savage; I would go on whatever happened. Besides, the soft sound of crying, now apparently all about, seemed companionable, and I had heard so much of ghosts of late, the sharp edge of fear at their presence was wearing off.

So in I went: up a broad, decayed street, its flagstones heaved everywhere by the roots of gnarled trees, and finding nothing save ruin, tried to rest under a wall. But the night air was chilly and the shelter poor, so out I came again, with the wailing in the shadows so close about now that I stopped, and mustering up courage called aloud:

"Hullo, you who weep there in the dark, are you living or dead?" And after a minute from the hollows of the empty hearths around came the sad little responsive echo:

"Are you living or dead?" It was very delusive and unsatisfactory, and I was wondering what to do next when a slant of warmer wind came up behind me under the mist, and immediately little tongues of blue flame blossomed without visible cause in every darksome crevice; pale flickers of miasmic light rising pallid from every lurking nook and corner in the black desolation as though a thousand lamps were lit by unseen fingers, and, knee high, floated out into the thoroughfare where they oscillated gently in airy grace, and then, forming into procession, began drifting before the tepid air towards the city centre. At once I thought of what the woodcutter had seen, but was too wet and sulky by this time to care. The fascination of the place was on me, and dropping into rear of the march, I went forward with it. By this time the wailing had stopped, though now and then it seemed a dark form moved in the empty doorways on either hand, while the mist, parting into gossamers before the wind, took marvellously human forms in every alley and lane we passed.

Thus I, a sodden giant, led by those elfin torches, paced through the city until we came to an open square with a great lumber of ruins in the centre all marred and spoiled by vegetation; and here the lights wavered, and went out by scores and hundreds, just as the petals drop from spent flowers, while it seemed, though it may have been only wind in the rank grass, that the air was full of most plaintive sighs as each little lamp slipped into oblivion.

The big pile was a mass of fallen masonry, which, from the broken pillars all about, might have been a palace or temple once. I pushed in, but it was as dark as Hades here, so, after struggling for a time in a labyrinth of chambers, chose a sandy recess, with some dry herbage by way of bedding in a corner, and there, thankful at least for shelter, my night's wanderings came to an end and I coiled myself down, ate a last handful of dry fruit, and, strange as it may seem, was soon sleeping peacefully.

I dreamed that night that a woman, with a face as white as ivory, came and bent over me. She led a babe by either hand, while behind her were scores of other ones, with lovely faces, but all as pale as the stars themselves, who looked and sighed, but said nothing, and when they had stared their fill, dropped out one by one, leaving a wonderful blank in the monotony where they had been; but beyond that dream nothing happened.

It was a fine morning when I woke again, and obviously broad day outside, the sunshine coming down through cracks in the old palace roof, and lying in golden pools on the floor with dazzling effect.

Rubbing my eyes and sitting up, it took me some time to get my senses together, and at first an uneasy feeling possessed me that I was somehow dematerialised and in an unreal world. But a twinge of cramp in my left arm, and a healthy sneeze, which frightened a score of bats overhead nearly out of their senses, was reassuring on this point, and rubbing away the cramp and staggering to my feet, I looked about at the strange surroundings. It was cavernous chaos on every side: magnificent architecture reduced to the confusion of a debris-heap, only the hollow chambers being here and there preserved by massive columns meeting overhead. Into these the yellow light filtered wherever a rent in a cupola or side-wall admitted it, and allured by the vision of corridors one beyond the other, I presently set off on a tour of discovery.

Twenty minutes' scrambling brought me to a place where the fallen jambs of a fine doorway lay so close together that there was barely room to pass between them. However, seeing light beyond, I squeezed through, and I found myself in the best-preserved chamber of all—a wide, roomy hall with a domed roof, a haze of mural paintings on the walls, and a marble floor nearly hidden in a century of fallen dust. I stumbled over something at the threshold, and picking it up, found it was a baby's skull! And there were more of them now that my eyes became accustomed to the light. The whole floor was mottled with them—scores and hundreds of bones and those poor little relics of humanity jutting out of the sand everywhere. In the hush of that great dead nursery the little white trophies seemed inexpressibly pathetic, and I should have turned back reverently from that chamber of forgotten sorrows but that something caught my eye in the centre of it.

It was an oblong pile of white stone, very ill-used and chipped, wrist-deep in dust, yet when a slant of light came in from above and fell straight upon it, the marble against the black gloom beyond blazed like living pearl. It was dazzling; and shading my eyes and going tenderly over through the poor dead babes, I looked, and there, full in the shine, lay a woman's skeleton, still wrapped in a robe of which little was left save the hard gold embroidery. Her brown hair, wonderful to say, still lay like lank, dead seaweed about her, and amongst it was a fillet crown of plain iron set with gems such as eye never looked upon before. There were not many, but enough to make the proud simplicity of that circlet glisten like a little band of fire—a gleaming halo on her dead forehead infinitely fascinating. At her sides were two other little bleached human flowers, and I stood before them for a long time in silent sympathy.

Could this be Queen Yang, of whom the woodcutter had told me? It must be—who else? And if it were, what strange chance had brought me here—a stranger, yet the first to come, since her sorrow, from her distant kindred? And if it were, then that fillet belonged of right to Heru, the last representative of her kind. Ought I not to take it to her rather than leave it as spoil to the first idle thief with pluck enough to deride the mysteries of the haunted city? Long time I thought over it in the faint, heavy atmosphere of that hall, and then very gently unwound the hair, lifted the circlet, and, scarcely knowing what I did, put it in my shoulder-bag.

After that I went more cheerfully into the outside sunshine, and setting my clothes to dry on a stone, took stock of the situation. The place was, perhaps, not quite so romantic by day as by night, and the scattered trees, matted by creepers, with which the whole were overgrown, prevented anything like an extensive view of the ruined city being obtained. But what gave me great satisfaction was to note over these trees to the eastward a two-humped mountain, not more than six or seven miles distant—the very one I had mislaid the day before. Here was reality and a chance of getting back to civilisation. I was as glad as if home were in sight, and not, perhaps, the less so because the hill meant villages and food; and you who have doubtless lunched well and lately will please bear in mind I had had nothing since breakfast the day before; and though this may look picturesque on paper, in practice it is a painful item in one's programme.

Well, I gave my damp clothes but a turn or two more in the sun, and then, arguing that from the bare ground where the forest ended half-way up the hill, a wide view would be obtained, hurried into my garments and set off thither right gleefully. A turn or two down the blank streets, now prosaic enough, an easy scramble through a gap in the crumbling battlements, and there was the open forest again, with a friendly path well marked by the passage of those wild animals who made the city their lair trending towards my landmark.

A light breakfast of soft green nuts, plucked on the way, and then the ground began to bend upwards and the woods to thin a little. With infinite ardour, just before midday, I scrambled on to a bare knoll on the very hillside, and fell exhausted before the top could be reached.

But what were hunger or fatigue to the satisfaction of that moment? There was the sea before me, the clear, strong, gracious sea, blue leagues of it, furrowed by the white ridges of some distant storm. I could smell the scent of it even here, and my sailor heart rose in pride at the companionship of that alien ocean. Lovely and blessed thing! how often have I turned from the shallow trivialities of the land and found consolation in the strength of your stately solitudes! How often have I turned from the tinselled presence of the shore, the infinite pretensions of dry land that make life a sorry, hectic sham, and found in the black bosom of the Great Mother solace and comfort! Dear, lovely sea, man—half of every sphere, as far removed in the sequence of your strong emotions from the painted fripperies of the woman-land as pole from pole—the grateful blessing of the humblest of your followers on you!

The mere sight of salt water did me good. Heaven knows our separation had not been long, and many an unkind slap has the Mother given me in the bygone; yet the mere sight of her was tonic, a lethe of troubles, a sedative for tired nerves; and I gazed that morning at the illimitable blue, the great, unfettered road to everywhere, the ever-varied, the immutable, the thing which was before everything and shall be last of all, in an ecstasy of affection.

There was also other satisfaction at hand. Not a mile away lay a well-defined road—doubtless the one spoken of by the wood-cutter—and where the track pointed to the seashore the low roofs and circling smoke of a Thither township showed.

There I went hot-footed, and, much too hungry to be nice in formality, swung up to the largest building on the waterside quay and demanded breakfast of the man who was lounging by its doorway chewing a honey reed. He looked me up and down without emotion, then, falling into the common mistake, said,

"This is not a hostel for ghosts, sir. We do not board and lodge phantoms here; this is a dry fish shop."