a seal--"

"But why?" I asked. "What could be the purpose--"

"Better ask where the devil such a force could be gotten
together and how it came here," he said. "Look--except
for this one place there isn't a mark anywhere. All the
bushes and the trees, all the poppies and the grass are just
as they ought to be.

"How did whoever or whatever it was that made this,
get here and get away without leaving any trace but this?
Damned if I don't think Chiu-Ming's explanation puts
less strain upon the credulity than any I could offer."

I peered about. It was so. Except for the mark, there was
no slightest sign of the unusual, the abnormal.

But the mark was enough!

"I'm for pushing up a notch or two and getting into the
gorge before dark," he was voicing my own thought. "I'm
willing to face anything human--but I'm not keen to be
pressed into a rock like a flower in a maiden's book of
poems."
Just at twilight we drew out of the valley into the pass.
We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us
to make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but
a hundred feet away; but we had no quarrel with them
for their neighborliness, no! Their solidity, their immutability,