re to climb was over, and I longed
to lie down. By that time the sun was almost set, and the air had begun
to grow dark. At my feet lay a carpet of softest, greenest moss, couch
for a king: I threw myself upon it, and weariness at once began to ebb,
for, the moment my head was down, the third time I heard below me many
waters, playing broken airs and ethereal harmonies with the stones of
their buried channels. Loveliest chaos of music-stuff the harp aquarian
kept sending up to my ears! What might not a Haendel have done with that
ever-recurring gurgle and bell-like drip, to the mingling and mutually
destructive melodies their common refrain!

As I lay listening, my eyes went wandering up and down the rocky slope
abrupt above me, reading on its face the record that down there, ages
ago, rushed a cataract, filling the channels that had led me to its
foot. My heart swelled at the thought of the splendid tumult, where
the waves danced revelling in helpless fall, to mass their music in one
organ-roar below. But soon the hidden brooks lulled me to sleep, and
their lullabies mingled with my dreams.

I woke before the sun, and eagerly climbed to see what lay beyond. Alas,
nothing but a desert of finest sand! Not a trace was left of the river
that had plunged adown the rocks! The powdery drift had filled its
course to the level of the dreary expanse! As I looked back I saw that
the river had divided into two branches as it fell, that whose bank I
had now followed to the foot of the rocky scaur, and that which first I
crossed to the Evil Wood. The wood I descried between the two on the
far horizon. Before me and to the left, the desert stretched beyond my
vision, but far to the right I could see a lift in the sky-line, giving
hope of the forest to which my hostess had directed me.

I sat down, and sought in my pocket the half-loaf I had brought with
me--then first to understand what my hostess had meant concerning it.
Verily the bread was not for the morrow: it had shrunk and hardened to a
stone! I threw it away, and set out again.

About noon I came to a few tamarisk and juniper trees, and then to a few
stunted firs. As I went on, closer thickets and larger firs met me, and
at length I was in just such a forest of pines and other trees as that
in which the Little Ones found their babies, and believed I had returned
upon a farther portion of the same. But what mattered WHERE while
EVERYWHERE was the same as NOWHERE! I had not