ad gone a few steps towards that orchard and that
garden close, they would have turned into the bracken of the hillside,
bare granite and unfruitful scree.

The main range, where it appeared in revelations behind us through the
clouds, was far higher than mountains ever seem to waking men, and it
stood quite sheer as might a precipice in a dream. The forests upon
either side ran up until they were lost miles and miles above us in the
storm.

Night fell and we still went onward, the one never daring to fall far
behind the other, and once or twice in an hour calling to each other to
make sure that another man was near; but this we did not continue,
because as we went on each of us became aware under the midnight of the
presence of a Third.

There was a place where the path, now broad and plain, approached a sort
of little sandy bay going down towards the stream, and there I saw, by a
sudden glimpse of the moon through the clouds, a large cave standing
wide. We went down to it in silence, we gathered brushwood, we lit a
fire, and we lay down in the cave. But before we lay down I said to my
companion: "I have seen the moon--she is in the _north_. Into what place
have we come?" He said to me in answer, "Nothing here is earthly," and
after he had said this we both fell into a profound sleep in which we
forgot not only cold, great hunger, and fatigue, but our own names and
our very souls, and passed, as it were, into a deep bath of
forgetfulness.

When we woke at the same moment, it was dawn.

We stood up in the clear and happy light and found that everything was
changed. We poured water upon our faces and our hands, strode out a
hundred yards and saw again the features of a man. He had a kind face of
some age, and eyes such as are the eyes of mountaineers, which seem to
have constantly contemplated the distant horizons and wide plains
beneath their homes. We heard as he came up the sound of a bell in a
Christian church below, and we exchanged with him the salutations of
living men. Then I said to him: "What day is this?" He said "Sunday,"
and a sort of memory of our fear came on us, for we had lost a day.

Then I said to him: "What river are we upon, and what valley is this?"

He answered: "The river and the valley of the Aston." And what he said
was true, for as we rounded a corner we perceived right before us a
barrier, that rock of Guie from which we had set out. We had come down
again into France, and into the ver