seen no sign of human habitation.

Game had been plentiful--green things Chiu-Ming
might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was
a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere
within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the Trans-Himalayas.

That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into
this valley of enchantment, and here, though it had been
so early, I had pitched my tent, determining to go no
farther till the morrow.

It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquillity.
A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable--like
the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over
every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping.

At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the
unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept.
On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds--the
snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west
another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the
vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land
of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted
and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of
eternal ice and snow.

And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies
in wide, unbroken fields, luminous as the morning skies of
mid-June; they rippled mile after mile over the path we