o clear.

Baret and Selda

I remember that I lived nearly two months--or so it seemed--in that
other world. I was assigned an apartment near to Edvar's--Selda was
between us. Edvar instructed me in the details of the life I was to
lead. But he was a rather cold sort: his interests were ancient history
and archeology, and he would spend his mornings at work in the Library
of History or in his study, the rest of his time flying about the world
on curious expeditions of discovery--examining the soil, I suppose, and
investigating the customs and records of other cities.

Selda devoted most of her time to me. It was she who took me from place
to place, showing me the natural beauties of that world. There were, you
see, not only gentle slopes and hill-tops. There were mountainous crags
as high and as wild as the Alps, forests as impenetrably deep and still
as the jungles of the Amazon, and rivers that rushed and tumbled over
rocks, or fell for thousands of feet from mountain cliffs.

The first time I went with her, she took me to a gigantic peak that
overlooked the sea. There was, of course, a small level place for the
airship to land. We left it there, and climbed on foot the last hundred
yards or so. Our way lay through the heavy snow, but it was not too cold
to be more than gloriously bracing, exhilarating. We wore our usual
costume of trunks and tunic.

We stood at the top and looked out over the grandest horizon I had ever
seen. To the east there lay the sea, deep and very blue in the sunlight.
The shore was just a dark line far away and below us. There was a long
strip of grass and field bordering the sea for miles, and behind that
the forest. Toward the north, the mountains crept out from under the
forest and moved down to the sea, rising until they became a vast
wilderness of cliffs and rocks, and hid the sea, with peak after peak
rising as far as the eye could reach into the snow and the mist. Then
the hills sloped down westward into a series of wooded valleys, through
which ran the wide river I had seen at my awakening, coming down from
the mountains and through the valleys until it flattened broadly out
into the low plains in the south and moved eastward to the sea.
Everywhere in the valleys and over the plains, I knew that cities were
scattered, lonely and tall like the one they called Richmond. But we
were so high in the mountains that they were invisible to us--perhaps a
keen eye could have found th