ven this sacrifice. Could
anything change the leopard West into the tameness and serenity of the ox?
"No," he decided, "nothing but death will do that. This generation, these
fierce and bloody hearts, must die; only in that way can the tradition of
violence be overcome and a new State reared."

At the foot of the toilsome, upward-winding trail he dismounted, and led
his weary horse. Over his head, and about half-way to the first hilltop,
lay a roof of fleecy vapor, faint purple in color and seamless in texture.
Through this he must pass, and it symbolized to him the line of
demarkation between the plain and the mountain, between order and
violence.

Again he rose above it, to find it a fantastic sea lit by the sun, and
glowing with pink and gold and violet. Celestial in its ethereal beauty,
it threw into still more appalling shadow the smoking altar of passion
toward which he spurred. From moment to moment the surface rose and
shifted in swift, tumultuous, yet soundless waves, breaking round
pine-clad promontories in shimmering breakers, faint, and far, and
serene.

Down through a deep canon to the south a prodigious river of mist was
rushing, a silent cataract of ashy vapor plunging to a soundless beach.
Above and beyond it the high peaks shone in radiance so pure that the
heart of the lover ached with the pain of its evanescent beauty. It was as
if he were looking across a foaming flood upon the stupendous and shining
park of some imperial potentate whose ornate and splendid country home lay
just beyond. Rocky spires rose like cathedral towers, and fortresses
abutted upon the stream. And yet in the midst of that glorified plain the
smoke of the burning rose.

Slowly he led his horse along the mountain-side, grasping with eager
desire at every changing aspect of this marvellous scene. It was
infinitely more gorgeous, more compelling, than his moonlight experience
the night before, for here reality, definite and powerful, was interfused
with mystery. These foot-hills, hitherto pleasantly precipitous, had
suddenly become grandiose. All was made over upon a mightier scale, each
rock and tree being distorted by the passing translucent clouds into a
kind of monstrous yet epic proportion.

Ghostly white ledges broke from the darker mist like fields of distant
crusted snow. Castellated crags loomed from the mystic river like
fortified islands. Cattle, silent, enormously aggrandized, emerged like
fabled beasts of the eld