ty-four
hours more of this misery would bring the troubles of most of them to an
end. Without food or shelter it was very certain that few of those alive
to-night would live to see a second dawn.

At last the light came and to their wonder and exceeding joy they found
that the rain had ceased and the mist was melting.

Once more they beheld the face of the sun, and rejoiced in its warmth
as only those can rejoice who for days and nights have lived in
semi-darkness, wet to the skin and frozen to the marrow.

The worst of the mist was gone indeed, but it was not until they had
breakfasted off a buck which Otter shot in the reeds by the river, that
the lingering veils of vapour withdrew themselves from the more distant
landscape. At last they had vanished, and for the first time the
wanderers saw the land through which they were travelling. They stood
upon a vast plain that sloped upwards gradually till it ended at the
foot of a mighty range of snow-capped mountains named, as they learned
in after-days, the Bina Mountains.

This range was shaped like a half-moon, or a bent bow, and the nearest
point of the curve, formed by a soaring snowy peak, was exactly opposite
to them, and to all appearance not more than five-and-twenty miles away.
On either side of this peak the unbroken line of mountains receded with
a vast and majestic sweep till the eye could follow them no more. The
plain about them was barren and everywhere strewn with granite boulders,
between which wandered herds of wild cattle, mixed with groups of
antelopes; but the lower slopes of the mountains were clothed with dense
juniper forests, and among them were clearings, presumably of cultivated
land. Otter searched the scene with his eyes, that were as those of a
hawk; then said quietly:

"Look yonder, Baas; the old hag has not lied to us. There is the city of
the People of the Mist."

Following the line of the dwarf's outstretched hand, Leonard saw what
had at first escaped him, that standing back in a wide bend at the foot
of the great mountain in front of them were a multitude of houses, built
of grey stone and roofed with green turf. Indeed, had not his attention
been called to it, the town might well have missed observation until
he was quite close to its walls, for the materials of which it was
constructed resembled those of the boulders that lay about them in
thousands, and the vivid green of its roofs gave it the appearance of a
distant space of g