m their
dizzy terraces across the stream to where soaring mosques and mystic
domes of worship caught the sun. It was all like the visible dream of a
master architect gone mad. Gaunt, sinister ruins of medieval castles
sprawled down the slopes of unassailable summits. Grim brown towers,
haughtily crenellated, scowled defiance on the unappearing foe. Titanic
stools of stone dotted barren garden slopes, where surely gods had once
strolled in that far time when the stars sang and the moon was young.
Dark red walls of regularly laid stone--huge as that the Chinese flung
before the advance of the Northern hordes--held imaginary empires
asunder. Poised on a dizzy peak, Jove's eagle stared into the eye of the
sun, and raised his wings for the flight deferred these many centuries.
Kneeling face to face upon a lonesome summit, their hands clasped before
them, their backs bent as with the burdens of the race, two women prayed
the old, old woman prayer. The snow-white ruins of a vast cathedral lay
along the water's edge, and all about it was a hush of worship. And near
it, arose the pointed pipes of a colossal organ--with the summer silence
for music.

With a lazy sail we drifted through this place of awe; and for once I
had no regrets about that engine. The popping of the exhaust would have
seemed sacrilegious in this holy quiet.

Seldom do men pass that way. It is out of the path of the tourist. No
excursion steamers ply those awesome river reaches. Across the sacred
whiteness of that cathedral's imposing mass, no sign has ever been
painted telling you the merits of the best five-cent cigar in the world!
Few besides the hawks and the crows would see it, if it were there.

And yet, for all the quiet in this land of wonder, somehow you cannot
feel that the place is unpeopled. Surely, you think, invisible knights
clash in tourney under those frowning towers. Surely a lovelorn maiden
spins at that castle window, weaving her heartache into the magic
figures of her loom. Stately dames must move behind the shut doors of
those pillared mansions; devotees mutter Oriental prayers beneath those
sun-smitten domes. And amid the awful inner silence of that cathedral,
white-robed priests lift wan faces to their God.

Under the beat of the high sun the light stern wind fell. The slack sail
drooped like a sick-hearted thing. Idly drifting on the slow glassy
flood, we seemed only an incidental portion of this dream in which the
deepest passion