e. Hills, and more hills. Glacial stretch,
followed by glacial stretch. Doubtless the hollows contained vast
primordial woods, and fiercely flooding mountain streams, scoring their
paths through wide stretches of miry tundra, quaking and treacherous.

This was the distance, than which nothing could have been more
desolate. But the nearer view was their chief concern.

The gorge yawned almost at their feet. It was tremendous, and its
vastness set the mind dizzy. Great circling patches of mist rose up
from below and added a sense of infinity to its depths. So wide. So
deep. The broad river in its bowels was reduced to something like a
trickling streamlet. The woodlands crowding the lower slopes, dim,
vague in the distance, became merely a deepening of the shadows below.
Forests of primordial immensity were lost in the overwhelming nature of
their setting.

The air of sterility, in spite of the woodlands so far down below, in
spite of the attenuated grass on which they stood, inspired a profound
sense of repugnance. To the mind of Bill Brudenell, at least, it was a
land of hopelessness, a land of starvation and despair.

He turned to his companion at last, and his voice rang with deep
feeling.

"Fierce? Gee! There's not a word in the whole vocabulary of a white
man that gets nearer than ten miles of describing it," he exclaimed.
"And the neches, here, figger to scrap to hold it. Well, it certainly
needs attractions we can't locate from here."

Kars nodded agreement.

"That's how I've felt all through," he said. "Now? Why, now I'm dead
sure. This is where they murdered Jessie's father. Well, even a
railroad corporation couldn't advertise it a pleasure resort. We'd
best get right on down to the camp. I reckon to locate those
attractions before we're through."

Leaving the plateau they passed down the seemingly endless slope. Bill
cursed the foothold, and blasphemed generally. Kars remained silent.
He was absorbed with the task he had set himself in approaching this
murder-haunted gorge.

The return to the camp occupied the best part of an hour, and the
latter part of the journey was made through a belt of pine wood, the
timber of which left the human figure something so infinitesimal that
its passage was incapable of disturbing the abiding silence. The
scrunch of the springy carpet of needles and pine cones under heavily
shod feet was completely lost. The profoundness of the gloom was
trem