d men.
She led him into a wilderness; and it was night; and great rocks rose up
suddenly before them in the gloom, and awful chasms yawned. Then she was
wandering alone; she had lost her father, and was seeking him up and
down. Then it seemed that Penn was by her side; and when she asked for
her father he smilingly pointed upward at a wondrously beautiful light
that shone from the summit of a hill. She sought to go up thither, but
grew weary, and sat down to rest in a deep grove, with an ice-cold
mountain stream dashing at her feet. Then the light on the hill became a
lake of fire, and it poured its waves into the stream, and the stream
flowed past her a roaring river of flame. Lightnings crackled in the air
above her. Thunderbolts fell. The heat was intolerable. The river had
overflowed, and set the world on fire. And she could not fly, for terror
chained her limbs. She struggled, screamed, awoke. She started up. Her
dream was a reality.

Either the fire set by the soldiers had spread, driven by the wind over
the dry leaves, into the grove below her, or else they had fired the
grove itself on their retreat. Her eyes opened upon a vision of
appalling brightness. For a moment she stood utterly dazzled and
bewildered, not knowing where she was. Memory and reason were paralyzed:
she could not remember, she could not think: amazement and terror
possessed her.

Instinctively shielding her eyes, she looked down. The ground where she
had lain, the log, the sticks, the moss, and her handkerchief fallen
upon it, were illumined with a glare brighter than noonday. At sight of
the handkerchief came recollection. Her terrible adventure, the glow she
had seen in the woods, her bed on the earth,--she remembered everything.
And now the actual perils of her position became apparent to her
returning faculties.

Where all was blackness when she lay down, now all was preternatural
light. Every bush and jutting rock of the wild overhanging cliffs stood
out in fearful distinctness. The saplings and trees on their summits,
fifty feet above her head, seemed huddling together, and leaning forward
terror-stricken, in an atmosphere of whirling flame and smoke. Climb
those cliffs she could not, though she were to die.

She must then flee farther up into the deep and narrow gorge, or
endeavor to escape by the way she had come. But the way she had come was
fire.

The conflagration already enveloped the mouth of the gorge, shutting her
in. The