not seem as though we could reach it before dusk, and
Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in
the peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was
startled by his exclamation.

He was staring at a point some hundred yards to his
right. I followed his gaze.

The towering cliffs were a scant half mile away. At some
distant time there had been an enormous fall of rock.
This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast
which sloped down to merge with the valley's floor. Willow
and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar had found
roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts,
thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back
seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where it melted into
the meadows.

In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its
slopes and stretching down into the flowered fields was a
colossal imprint.

Gray and brown, it stood out against the green and
blue of slope and level; a rectangle all of thirty feet wide,
two hundred long, the heel faintly curved and from its
hither end, like claws, four slender triangles radiating from
it like twenty-four points of a ten-rayed star.

Irresistibly was it like a footprint--but what thing was
there whose tread could leave such a print as this?