between the two ranges to the south. He sat down, pulled out his pipe, and
prepared to enjoy the magnificent panorama under him while he was getting
his wind.

Through his glasses he could see for miles, and what he looked upon was an
unhunted country. Scarcely half a mile away a band of caribou was filing
slowly across the bottom toward the green slopes to the west. He caught the
glint of many ptarmigan wings in the sunlight below. After a time, fully
two miles away, he saw sheep grazing on a thinly verdured slide.

He wondered how many valleys there were like this in the vast reaches of
the Canadian mountains that stretched three hundred miles from sea to
prairie and a thousand miles north and south. Hundreds, even thousands, he
told himself, and each wonderful valley a world complete within itself; a
world filled with its own life, its own lakes and streams and forests, its
own joys and its own tragedies.

Here in this valley into which he gazed was the same soft droning and the
same warm sunshine that had filled all the other valleys; and yet here,
also, was a different life. Other bears ranged the slopes that he could see
dimly with his naked eyes far to the west and north. It was a new domain,
filled with other promise and other mystery, and he forgot time and hunger
as he sat lost in the enchantment of it.

It seemed to Langdon that these hundreds or thousands of valleys would
never grow old for him; that he could wander on for all time, passing from
one into another, and that each would possess its own charm, its own
secrets to be solved, its own life to be learned. To him they were largely
inscrutable; they were cryptic, as enigmatical as life itself, hiding their
treasures as they droned through the centuries, giving birth to multitudes
of the living, demanding in return other multitudes of the dead. As he
looked off through the sunlit space he wondered what the story of this
valley would be, and how many volumes it would fill, if the valley itself
could tell it.

First of all, he knew, it would whisper of the creation of a world; it
would tell of oceans torn and twisted and thrown aside--of those first
strange eons of time when there was no night, but all was day; when weird
and tremendous monsters stalked where he now saw the caribou drinking at
the creek, and when huge winged creatures half bird and half beast swept
the sky where he now saw an eagle soaring.

And then it would tell of The Change--of t