who were held by the power of that
tremendous spell that the Professor had learned one midnight at
Saragossa from one of that dread line who have their secrets from a
source that we do not know in a distant age.

There is always something tremendous in the form of great mountains;
but these swept by, not only huger than anything Earth knows, but
troubled by horrible commotions, as though overtaken in flight by some
ceaseless calamity.

Rodriguez and Morano, as they looked at them, forgetting the gardens of
Earth, forgetting Spring and Summer and the sweet beneficence of
sunshine, felt that the purpose of Creation was evil! So shocking a
thought may well astound us here, where green hills slope to lawns or
peer at a peaceful sea; but there among the flames of those dreadful
peaks the Sun seemed not the giver of joy and colour and life, but only
a catastrophe huger than everlasting war, a centre of hideous violence
and ruin and anger and terror. There came by mountains of copper
burning everlasting, hurling up to unthinkable heights their mass of
emerald flame. And mountains of iron raged by and mountains of salt,
quaking and thundering and clothed with their colours, the iron always
scarlet and the salt blue. And sometimes there came by pinnacles a
thousand miles high that from base to summit were fire, mountains of
pure flame that had no other substance. And these explosive mountains,
born of thunder and earthquake, hurling down avalanches the size of our
continents, and drawing upward out of the deeps of the Sun new material
for splendour and horror, this roaring waste, this extravagant
destruction, were necessary for every tint that our butterflies wear on
their wings. Without those flaming ranges of mountains of iron they
would have no red to show; even the poppy could have no red for her
petals: without the flames that were blasting the mountains of salt
there could be no answering blue in any wing, or one blue flower for
all the bees of Earth: without the nightmare light of those frightful
canyons of copper that awed the two spirits watching their ceaseless
ruin, the very leaves of the woods we love would be without their green
with which to welcome Spring; for from the flames of the various metals
and wonders that for ever blaze in the Sun, our sunshine gets all its
colours that it conveys to us almost unseen, and thence the wise little
insects and patient flowers softly draw the gay tints that they glory
in; th