was prepared--fragments of
traveler's news and gossip, as is the habit of journeyers who come upon
each other in the silent places. Ever the speculation grew in his face
as he made away with Chiu-Ming's artful concoctions.

Drake sighed, drawing out his pipe.

"A cook, a marvel of a cook. Where did you get him?"

Briefly I told him.

Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the
flank of the stone giant guarding the valley's western gate; the whole
vale swiftly darkened--a flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within
it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere
else on this earth--the sunset of Tibet.

We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down
from the watching steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding
poppies, sighed and was gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a
homing kite whistled, mellowly.

As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the western
sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting
their heads into the path of the setting sun. They changed from mottled
silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson.

"The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset," said Chiu-Ming.

As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens,
their blue turned swiftly to a clear and glowing amber--then as abruptly
shifted to a luminous violet A soft green light pulsed through the
valley.

Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it seemed to
flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed forward like gigantic
slices of palest emerald jade, translucent, illumined, as though by a
circlet of little suns shining behind them.

The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain's
mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak,
from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion
of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered
chaos of rainbows.

Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with
an incredible glory--as if some god of light itself had touched the
eternal rocks and bidden radiant souls stand forth.

Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that
utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat
of the beholder with the hand of ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans
name the Ting-Pa. For a moment th