ns, beat about us; ashes of the flaming
ambitions of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet--the feet of an
American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through
clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the
White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids
until at last both fell before the Turks.

Over the highways and byways of Persia's glory, Persia's shame and
Persia's death we four--two men, two beasts--had passed. For a fortnight
we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation.

Game had been plentiful--green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his
cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We
were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the
Trans-Himalayas.

That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of
enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had pitched my
tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow.

It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquillity. A spirit
brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable--like the untroubled calm
which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the
Buddha, sleeping.

At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak
through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of
silver set with pale emeralds--the snow fields and glaciers that crowned
him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk,
closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of
pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each
diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow.

And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, unbroken
fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile
after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path
which we must take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they
seemed to whisper--then to lift their heads and look up like crowding
swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into
the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them. And when the
little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the
soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening
Presences.

Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched
to the gray feet of the mountain. Between t