dry, tindery wool of inner bark. A fire,
gleaming high upon the mountainside, might be a beacon to draw
thither any night-wandering savage to watch in ambush, and learn
the path toward the mines of hiaqua. So he drowsed chilly and
fireless, awakened often by dread sounds of crashing and rumbling
among the chasms of Tacoma. He desponded bitterly, almost ready to
abandon his quest, almost doubting whether he had in truth received
a revelation, whether his interview with Tamanous had not been a
dream, and finally whether all the hiaqua in the world was worth
this toil and anxiety. Fortunate is the sage who at such a point
turns back and buys his experience without worse befalling him.

"Past midnight he suddenly was startled from his drowse and sat
bolt upright in terror. A light! Was there another searcher in the
forest, and a bolder than he? That flame just glimmering over the
treetops, was it a camp-fire of friend or foe? Had Tamanous been
revealing to another the great secret? No, smiled the miser, his
eyes fairly open, and discovering that the new light was the moon.
He had been waiting for her illumination on paths heretofore
untrodden by mortal. She did not show her full, round, jolly face,
but turned it askance as if she hardly liked to be implicated in
this night's transactions.

"However, it was light he wanted, not sympathy, and he started up
at once to climb over the dim snows. The surface was packed by the
night's frost, and his moccasins gave him firm hold; yet he
traveled but slowly, and could not always save himself from a
glissade backwards, and a bruise upon some projecting knob or crag.
Sometimes, upright fronts of ice diverted him for long circuits, or
a broken wall of cold cliff arose, which he must surmount
painfully. Once or twice he stuck fast in a crevice and hardly drew
himself out by placing his bundle of picks across the crack. As he
plodded and floundered thus deviously and toilsomely upward, at
last the wasted moon paled overhead, and under foot the snow grew
rosy with coming dawn. The dim world about the mountain's base
displayed something of its vast detail. He could see, more
positively than by moonlight, the far-reaching arteries of mist
marking the organism of Whulge beneath; and what had been but a
black chao