a single blow aimed at him by an unseen,
inscrutable enemy.

Hollister, sitting on the bank of the river, looked at the mountains
rising tier upon tier until the farthest ranges were dazzling white
cones against a far sky line. He saw them as a chaos of granite and
sandstone flung up by blind forces. Order and logical sequence in the
universe were a delusion--except as they were the result of ordered
human thought, effected by patient, unremitting human effort, which
failed more often than it succeeded.

He looked at one bold peak across the valley, standing so sheer above
the Black Hole that it seemed to overhang from the perpendicular; a
mass of bald granite, steep cliff, with glacial ice and perpetual snow
lurking in its crevasses. Upon its lower slopes the forest ran up, a
green mantle with ragged edges. From the forest upward the wind wafted
seeds to every scanty patch of soil. They took root, became saplings,
grew to substantial trees. And every winter the snow fell deep on that
mountain, piling up in great masses delicately poised, until a mere
nothing--a piece of stone loosened by the frost; a gust of wind;
perhaps only the overhanging edge of a snow-drift breaking under its
own weight--would start a slide that gathered speed and bulk as it
came down. And as this insensate mass plunged downward, the small
trees and the great, the thickets and the low salal, everything that
stood in its path, was overwhelmed and crushed and utterly destroyed.
To what end? For what purpose?

It was just the same with man, Hollister thought. If he got in the way
of forces greater than himself, he was crushed. Nature was blind,
ruthless, disorderly, wantonly destructive. One had to be alert,
far-seeing, gifted with definite characteristics, to escape. Even then
one did not always, or for long, escape being bruised and mauled by
the avalanches of emotion, the irresistible movement of circumstance
over which one could exert no control.

How could it be otherwise? Hollister thought of all that had happened
to all the people he knew, the men he had seen killed and maimed,
driven insane by the shocks of war; of Doris, stricken blind in the
full glow of youth; Myra pulled and hauled this way and that because
she was as she was and powerless to be otherwise; himself marred and
shunned and suffering intolerable agonies of spirit; of Bland, upon
whom had fallen the black mantle of unnecessary tragedy; and Mills,
who had paid for his pas