an intensity of temperament, but I craved for her; I
visioned evils befalling her; I pierced my heart with dagger-thrusts of
fear for her. Oh, if I only knew she was safe and well! Every slim woman
I saw in the distance looked to be her, and made my heart leap with
emotion. Yet always I chewed on the rind of disappointment. There was
never a sign of Berna.

In the agitation and unrest of my mind I climbed the hill that
overshadows the gold-born city. The Dome they call it, and the face of
it is vastly scarred, blanched as by a cosmic blow. There on its topmost
height by a cairn of stone I stood at gaze, greatly awestruck.

The view was a spacious one, and of an overwhelming grandeur. Below me
lay the mighty Yukon, here like a silken ribbon, there broadening out to
a pool of quicksilver. It seemed motionless, dead, like a piece of
tinfoil lying on a sable shroud.

The great valley was preternaturally still, and pall-like as if steeped
in the colours of the long, long night. The land so vast, so silent, so
lifeless, was round in its contours, full of fat creases and bold
curves. The mountains were like sleeping giants; here was the swell of a
woman's breast, there the sweep of a man's thigh. And beyond that huddle
of sprawling Titans, far, far beyond, as if it were an enclosing
stockade, was the jagged outline of the Rockies.

Quite suddenly they seemed to stand up against the blazing sky,
monstrous, horrific, smiting the senses like a blow. Their primordial
faces were hacked and hewed fantastically, and there they posed in their
immemorial isolation, virgin peaks, inviolate valleys, impregnably
desolate and savagely sublime.

And beyond their stormy crests, surely a world was consuming in the
kilns of chaos. Was ever anything so insufferably bright as the
incandescent glow that brimmed those jagged clefts? That fierce
crimson, was it not the hue of a cooling crucible, that deep vermillion
the rich glory of a rose's heart? Did not that tawny orange mind you of
ripe wheat-fields and the exquisite intrusion of poppies? That pure,
clear gold, was it not a bank of primroses new washed in April rain?
What was that luminous opal but a lagoon, a pearly lagoon, with floating
in it islands of amber, their beaches crisped with ruby foam? And, over
all the riot of colour, that shimmering chrysoprase so tenderly
luminous--might it not fitly veil the splendours of paradise?

I looked to where gulped the mouth of Bonanza, caverno