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A VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 291
downhill. These were the first indications of some
river or other. There were folds and wrinkles and
scars; great frost-bluish gnarls and sulphurous yellow
pates; huge crusts of blood and menacing brows. The
earth lay below ws like a gigantic maltreated face, its
features distorted in pain and hatred. But when
viewed from the next ridge, it was a placid smile;
gleaming waterfalls over rocks standing like huge or-
gan pipes in the valleys below, pillar-like cliffs rising on
the battlements like great monuments, with birds
wheeling about their peaks in narrowing circles.
At times the landscape expanded into a world of
battlements and long ridges, limited only by the blue
ether in every direction, a highland floating lonely in
universal space. And then it closed around us again,
narrowing into a cleft between two steep walls of rock.
Or, a semicircular chain of mountains rose like a
mighty lower jaw above it; from out the jaw project
black rocks, broken off and intermingled with sharp
splinters and broad scars. Very appropriately this
spot is called the “Old Women’s Teeth.” At this ele-
vation there was not a human being, not an animal, not
a single habitation. But far above, hanging as it were
between two yellow rocks, clung a parcel of cultivated
soil—a signal to the sky that the earth is tilled even
at such altitudes—like a brown ragged paieon a
silken robe.
I asked the coachman how high we were.
“Oh, I suppose about fifty or sixty fathoms,” he an-
swered reflectively, and with a face that seemed to ex-
press a belated fear that he might have exaggerated.
We left the fat woman and her son at an old inn,
taking an hour’s rest, and then dashed on. Now we
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