below them, ever widening as they climbed, a soundless flood of
cloud, like the tide of a milky sea.


Hour after hour they climbed;--and forms invisible yielded to
their tread with dull soft crashings;--and faint cold fires
lighted and died at every breaking.

And once the pilgrim-youth laid hand on a something smooth that
was not stone,--and lifted it,--and dimly saw the cheekless gibe
of death.

"Linger not thus, my son!" urged the voice of the teacher;--"the
summit that we must gain is very far away!"


On through the dark they climbed,--and felt continually beneath
them the soft strange breakings,--and saw the icy fires worm and
die,--till the rim of the night turned grey, and the stars began
to fail, and the east began to bloom.

Yet still they climbed,--fast, fast,--mounting by help of power
superhuman. About them now was frigidness of death,--and silence
tremendous....A gold flame kindled in the east.

Then first to the pilgrim's gaze the steeps revealed their
nakedness;--and a trembling seized him,--and a ghastly fear. For
there was not any ground,--neither beneath him nor about him nor
above him,--but a heaping only, monstrous and measureless, of
skulls and fragments of skulls and dust of bone,--with a shimmer