moment that the sun sank beyond
the long line of lofty, rugged, snow-clad peaks that ran parallel to the
lake on its western side. The evening was perfectly calm and cloudless,
save in the west, where an agglomeration of delicate rosy-purple streaks
and patches of vapour lay softly upon a clear background of palest
blue-green sky, forming the picture of a fairy archipelago of thickly
clustering islands, intersected by a bewildering maze of channels
winding hither and thither, with the thin sickle of the young moon,
gleaming softly silver-white, hanging just above the whole. It was one
of those skies that set the imaginative dreamer's fancy free to wander
afar into the realms of fairyland and to picture all sorts of strange,
unreal happenings; the sort of sky that probably suggested to the simple
mind of the Indian the poetic idea that when gazing upon it he was
vouchsafed a vision of the Isles of the Blessed where dwell the souls of
the departed in everlasting bliss; and for full five minutes after the
two Englishmen had halted by the margin of the lake, the smooth,
unruffled surface of which repeated the picture as in a mirror, they
stood gazing, entranced, upon the loveliness of the scene that lay
spread out before them.

In front of them and almost at their feet lay the placid waters of the
lake, bordered with reeds and rushes just where they happened to stand,
its glassy, mirrorlike surface faithfully reproducing every soft,
delicate tint of the overarching sky, the bank of rosy clouds in the
west, the cold, pure blue of the snow-capped sierras on their right, the
ruddy blush of the peaks on their left--upon the summits of which the
last rays of the vanished sun still lingered, to change to purest white
even as they gazed--and every clump of sombre olive vegetation between.
To the right and left of them, a few miles apart, two streams, having
their sources in the neighbouring mountains, discharged into the lake;
and so perfectly still was the air that the murmur of their waters came
faint but clear to the ears of the two comrades who had travelled so
many hundreds of miles with that scene as their goal. To right and left
of them the shores of the lake swept away in many a curve and bay and
indentation clear to the horizon, and far beyond it; and in the whole of
that fair landscape never a sign of life, human or animal! Yet, stay;
what was that dark film, like a tiny cloud, that came sweeping down
toward them fro