d ones, and I lay
down flat on the ground like the dead ones, and I went up to one that
was grinning, and put my arms round him and hugged him. And so I went on
and on through the rocks till I came to a round mound in the middle of
them. It was higher than a mound, it was nearly as high as our house,
and it was like a great basin turned upside down, all smooth and round
and green, with one stone, like a post, sticking up at the top. I
climbed up the sides, but they were so steep I had to stop or I should
have rolled all the way down again, and I should have knocked against
the stones at the bottom, and perhaps been killed. But I wanted to get
up to the very top of the big round mound, so I lay down flat on my
face, and took hold of the grass with my hands and drew myself up, bit
by bit, till I was at the top. Then I sat down on the stone in the
middle, and looked all round about. I felt I had come such a long, long
way, just as if I were a hundred miles from home, or in some other
country, or in one of the strange places I had read about in the 'Tales
of the Genie' and the 'Arabian Nights,' or as if I had gone across the
sea, far away, for years and I had found another world that nobody had
ever seen or heard of before, or as if I had somehow flown through the
sky and fallen on one of the stars I had read about where everything is
dead and cold and grey, and there is no air, and the wind doesn't blow.
I sat on the stone and looked all round and down and round about me. It
was just as if I was sitting on a tower in the middle of a great empty
town, because I could see nothing all around but the grey rocks on the
ground. I couldn't make out their shapes any more, but I could see them
on and on for a long way, and I looked at them, and they seemed as if
they had been arranged into patterns, and shapes, and figures. I knew
they couldn't be, because I had seen a lot of them coming right out of
the earth, joined to the deep rocks below, so I looked again, but still
I saw nothing but circles, and small circles inside big ones, and
pyramids, and domes, and spires, and they seemed all to go round and
round the place where I was sitting, and the more I looked, the more I
saw great big rings of rocks, getting bigger and bigger, and I stared so
long that it felt as if they were all moving and turning, like a great
wheel, and I was turning, too, in the middle. I got quite dizzy and
queer in the head, and everything began to be hazy an