a year of time; the recollection is of an arduous
undertaking, accomplished without the usual incentives of men's
activity. Necessity, alone, remained; the iron necessity without the
glamour of freedom of choice, of pride.

Our unsteady feet crushed, at last, the black embers of the fires
scattered by the hoofs of horses; and the plain appeared immense to our
weakness, swept of shadows by the high sun, lonely and desolate as
the sea. We looked at the litter of the _Lugarenos' _camp, rags on the
trodden grass, a couple of abandoned blankets, a musket thrown away in
the panic, a dirty red sash lying on a heap of sticks, a wooden
bucket from the schooner, smashed water-gourds. One of them remained
miraculously poised on its round bottom and full to the brim, while
everything else seemed to have been overturned, torn, scattered
haphazard by a furious gust of wind. A scaffolding of poles, for drying
strips of meat, had been knocked over; I found nothing there except bits
of hairy hide; but lumps of scorched flesh adhered to the white bones
scattered amongst the ashes of the camp--and I thanked God for them.

We averted our eyes from our faces in very love, and we did not speak
from pity for each other. There was no joy in our escape, no relief,
no sense of freedom. The _Lugarenos_ and the peons, the pursued and the
pursuers, had disappeared from the upland without leaving as much as a
corpse in view. There were no moving things on the earth, no bird
soared in the pellucid air, not even a moving cloud on the sky. The
sun declined, and the rolling expanse of the plain frightened us, as if
space had been something alive and hostile.

We walked away from that spot, as if our feet had been shod in lead; and
we hugged the edge of the cruel ravine, as one keeps by the side of
a friend. We must have been grotesque, pathetic, and lonely; like two
people newly arisen from a tomb, shrinking before the strangeness of
the half-forgotten face of the world. And at the head of the ravine we
stopped.

The sensation of light, vastness, and solitude, rolled upon our souls
emerging from the darkness, overwhelmingly, like a wave of the sea. We
might have been an only couple sent back from the underworld to begin
another cycle of pain on a depopulated earth. It had not for us even the
fitful caress of a breeze; and the only sound of greeting was the angry
babble of the brook dashing down the stony slope at our feet.

We knelt over it to dri