with tawny orchids, gay with carmine fungus and
golden moss. We stepped out into a blaze of sunlight.

Before us lay a wide green bowl held in the hands of
the clustered hills; shallow, circular, as though, while
plastic still, the thumb of God had run round its rim,
shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded, craning their
lofty heads to peer within.

It was about a mile in its diameter, this hollow, as my
gaze then measured it. It had three openings--one that
lay like a crack in the northeast slope; another, the tunnel
mouth through which we had come. The third lifted itself
out of the bowl, creeping up the precipitous bare scarp of
the western barrier straight to the north, clinging to the
ochreous rock up and up until it vanished around a far
distant shoulder.

It was a wide and bulwarked road, a road that spoke as
clearly as though it had tongue of human hands which
had cut it there in the mountain's breast. An ancient road
weary beyond belief beneath the tread of uncounted years.

From the hollow the blind soul of loneliness groped out
to greet us!

Never had I felt such loneliness as that which lapped the
lip of the verdant bowl. It was tangible--as though it had
been poured from some reservoir of misery. A pool of
despair--