broken hope' that even in heaven and earth's
despite, he might yet win through in time.

On a night of intermittent moonbeams and racing cloud, the scene from
the little camp across the river had a sombre majesty--a suggestion of
impersonal, relentless power that crushes rather than uplifts; that
dwarfs man, with his puny struggles and aspirations, to a pin-point of
sand on an illimitable shore. Colossal ice-bound spurs walled them in;
their sides astonishingly steep, their embattled heads shattered by sun
and frost into fantastic peaks, from which masses of rock and stones
are hurled down into the valley, when rain and melting snow begin their
yearly task of modelling the face of the earth. And between these
threatening heights the Wakhan river hurried, a pale streak of light,
now grey, now silver, as the clouds, like great birds of ill-omen,
chased one another across the moon.

The sinister aspect of the place had its effect on Lenox,
hypersensitised as he was by anxiety over lost hours, and by the
premonitory chill of fever, strengthening that prescience of disaster
which saps spirit and courage more surely than disaster itself. But
they were on the march again betimes, next morning, breasting the
northern slopes of the Hindu Kush, which at this point can be crossed
without much difficulty. Before noon they were over the crest; and
Lenox, weary at last of his nightmare struggle with the mountains,
dropped thankfully into the Yarkhun valley, beyond which towered his
last great obstacle--the Darkot Pass.

It was late afternoon, and, come what might, he intended to requisition
a guide (no easy matter) and push his way across at daylight. But
neither earth nor heaven had a word of encouragement for the man who
scanned them with tired, desperate eyes. At his feet the Yarkhun river
whirled and foamed, a grey glacier torrent, thick with the milky scum
of ice-ground salt; beyond it the ink-black gorge leading to the summit
was shrouded in a scroll of threatening cloud; and the first natives
whom they questioned as to the state of the pass replied unconcernedly
that it had been closed four days; adding that no man who valued his
life would attempt to cross it in uncertain weather.

To force his little contingent forward in the face of such news seemed
nothing less than murder and suicide of an elevated type. But Lenox,
gritting his teeth on a curse, despatched Zyarulla in search of more
precise information, and ord