ed the night
off them in the stream and ate hastily, and got to horse on a fair
forenoon; then they rode the mountain neck east from that valley; and
it was a long slope of stony and barren mountain nigh waterless.

And on the way Ursula told Ralph how the man who was scared by the
wizardry last night was verily the nephew of the Lord from whom she had
stolen her armour by wheedling and a seeming promise. "But," said she,
"his love lay not so deep but that he would have avenged him for my
guile on my very body had he taken us." Ralph reddened and scowled at
her word, and the Sage led them into the other talk.

So long was that fell, that they were nigh benighted ere they gained
the topmost, or came to any pass. When they had come to a place where
there was a little pool in a hollow of the rocks they made stay there,
and slept safe, but ill-lodged, and on the morrow were on their way
betimes, and went toiling up the neck another four hours, and came to a
long rocky ridge or crest that ran athwart it; and when they had come
to the brow thereof, then were they face to face with the Great
Mountains, which now looked so huge that they seemed to fill all the
world save the ground whereon they stood. Cloudless was the day, and
the air clean and sweet, and every nook and cranny was clear to behold
from where they stood: there were great jutting nesses with
straight-walled burgs at their top-most, and pyramids and pinnacles
that no hand of man had fashioned, and awful clefts like long streets
in the city of the giants who wrought the world, and high above all the
undying snow that looked as if the sky had come down on to the
mountains and they were upholding it as a roof.

But clear as was the fashion of the mountains, they were yet a long way
off: for betwixt them and the ridge whereon those fellows stood,
stretched a vast plain, houseless and treeless, and, as they beheld it
thence grey and ungrassed (though indeed it was not wholly so) like a
huge river or firth of the sea it seemed, and such indeed it had been
once, to wit a flood of molten rock in the old days when the earth was
a-burning.

Now as they stood and beheld it, the Sage spake: "Lo ye, my children,
the castle and its outwork, and its dyke that wardeth the land of the
Well at the World's End. Now from to-morrow, when we enter into the
great sea of the rock molten in the ancient earth-fires, there is no
least peril of pursuit for you. Yet amidst that sea