t they could surmount the
obstacles of great rocks, could find a deer-path through the dense
jungle of the laurel, otherwise impenetrable, could cross foaming
mountain torrents so swift and so deep that more than once it seemed
that the packhorses, with Odalie also mounted now for the ford, must
succumb to the strength of the current.

At length the party stood upon the summit, with a dozen wild outliers of
the Cumberland and the intervenient coves below their feet; then came a
vast spread of undulating country to the eastward, broken here and there
by parallel ridges; and beyond rose mountains brown, and mountains
purple, and still further, mountains blue; and still beyond and above,
a-glimmering among the clouds, so high and so vague, apparently so like
the gossamer texture of the vapor that one could hardly judge whether
these congeners of the very heavens were earth or sky, mythical peaks or
cloud mountains--the Great Smoky Range. In the wide, wide world below,
noble rivers flowed, while aloft, like the gods on Olympus, it seemed
the travelers could overlook the universe, so vast as to discount all
theories of measurement, and mark its varying mood. So clear and limpid
was the air that trivial incidents of that great scene were asserted
despite the distance, and easily of note,--a herd of buffalo was
distinguishable in an open, trodden space about a salt-lick; a fleet of
canoes, like a bevy of swallows, winged along the broad surface of the
largest of these splendid streams, called the Tsullakee (Cherokee) as
Willinawaugh informed them, for these Indians never used the sound
represented by our letter R. In the phonetically spelled words in which
it seems to occur the sound is more accurately indicated by the letter
L. A notable philological authority states that the English rendering of
the word "Cherokee" and others of the language in which the letter R
appears is derived from the mistaken pronunciation of neighboring tribes
and of the French, who called the Tsullakee[B]--_La riviere des
Cheraquis_.

Odalie could not refrain from asking in what direction was Chote,
"beloved town, city of refuge." She had the art to affect to interpret
for her husband, but she could not keep the light from her eyes, the
scarlet flush of joyful expectation from her cheek, when the savage,
with a sweeping wave of his pipe-stem, indicated a region toward the
southeast on the banks of a tributary (the Little Tennessee) of that
broad a