d joins in and his voice is lost, and
no one learns his name. At once a host of birds answered him out of dim
bushes, whose shapes had barely as yet emerged from night. And in this
chorus Perez awoke, and even Morano.

They all three breakfasted together, and then the wanderers said
good-bye to Perez. And soon he was gone with his bright blue sash,
drifting homewards with the Segre, well paid yet singing a little sadly
as he drifted; for he had been one of a quest, and now he left it at
the edge of adventure, near solemn mountains and, beyond them,
romantic, near-unknown lands. So Perez left and Rodriguez and Morano
turned again to the road, all the more lightly because they had not
done a full day's march for so long, and now a great one unrolled its
leagues before them.

The heads of the mountains showed themselves again. They tramped as in
the early days of their quest. And as they went the mountains,
unveiling themselves slowly, dropping film after film of distance that
hid their mighty forms, gradually revealed to the wanderers the
magnificence of their beauty. Till at evening Rodriguez and Morano
stood on a low hill, looking at that tremendous range, which lifted far
above the fields of Earth, as though its mountains were no earthly
things but sat with Fate and watched us and did not care.

Rodriguez and Morano stood and gazed in silence. They had come twenty
miles since morning, they were tired and hungry, but the mountains held
them: they stood there looking neither for rest nor food. Beyond them,
sheltering under the low hills, they saw a little village. Smoke
straggled up from it high into the evening: beyond the village woods
sloped away upwards. But far above smoke or woods the bare peaks
brooded. Rodriguez gazed on their austere solemnity, wondering what
secret they guarded there for so long, guessing what message they held
and hid from man; until he learned that the mystery they guarded among
them was of things that he knew not and could never know.

Tinkle-ting said the bells of a church, invisible among the houses of
that far village. Tinkle-ting said the crescent of hills that sheltered
it. And after a while, speaking out of their grim and enormous silences
with all the gravity of their hundred ages, Tinkle-ting said the
mountains. With this trivial message Echo returned from among the homes
of the mighty, where she had run with the small bell's tiny cry to
trouble their crowned aloofness.

Rodrig