released from a weary
bondage. As we whirled earthwards, embankments and railway bridges
showed here and there by our side, but we lost all such traces of
feverish modern civilization as we swept into the dusky hollow at the
bottom of which Florac lay, like a sunken town engulfed by a dark lake.

We did not pause in the curiously picturesque place, which looked no
more than a village, with its gray-brown houses and gray brown shadows
huddled confusedly together. Probably it looked much the same when the
Camisards used to hide themselves and their gunpowder in caves near by;
and certainly scarce a stone or brick had been added or removed since
Stevenson's eyes saw the town, and his pen wrote of it, as he turned
away there from the Tarn region, instead of being the first Englishman
to explore it. And what a wild region it looked as we and the Aigle were
swallowed up in the yawning mouth of the gorge!

In an every-day world, above and outside, no doubt it was sunset, as on
other evenings which we had known and might know again; but this hidden,
underground country had no place in an every-day world. It seemed almost
as if my brother and I (I can't count the Turnours, for they were so
unsuitable that they temporarily ceased to exist for us) were explorers
arriving in an air-ship, unannounced, upon the planet Mars.

The moon, a glinting silver shield, shimmered pale through ragged red
clouds like torn and blood-stained flags; and the walls of the gorge
into which we penetrated, bleakly glittering here and there where the
moon touched a vein of mica, were the many-windowed castles of the
Martians, who did not yet know that they had visitors from another
world.

There were fantastic villages, too, whose builders and inhabitants must
have drawn their architectural inspiration from strange mountain forms
and groupings, after the fashion of those small animals who defend
themselves by looking as much as possible like their surroundings. And
if by some mistake we hadn't landed on Mars, we were in gnome-land,
wherever that might be.

There was no ordinary twilight here. The brown-gray of rocks and wild
rock-villages was flushed with red and shadowed with purple; but as the
moon drank up the ruddy draught of sunset, the landscape crouched and
hunched its shoulders into shapes ever more extraordinary. The white
light spilled down from the tilted crescent like silver rain, and
bleached the few pink peach-blossoms, which bloomed