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Our road was a mere white thread winding loosely through a sinuous valley, and pulled taut as it rose nearer and nearer to the cold, high level of les Causses, the roof of that gnome-land where we had journeyed together yesterday. From snow-covered billows which should have been sprayed with mountain wild-flowers by now, a fierce blast pounced down on us like a swooping bird of prey.

Every natural feature in any way pronounced has a mythical reason for its existence, every peculiarity in bird life, every peculiarity in the trees and stones. Besides there are many mythical bogies still at large, according to native lore, making the bush a gnome-land. Even the winds carry a legend in their breath.

He rose, master of his limbs now, descended, unrobed in an alcove, and in a corridor above the circular stair came upon Quilter- Beckett, who, acting as guide, Rebekah's hand now resting on Hogarth's arm, led them about the Boodah, now walking, now slipping in little trains over eighty-foot rails, rolled in one heat, laid down the vanishing length of dim-lit corridors floored with white tiles, their frieze of majolica, with rows of ceramics; and they saw the armouries, piles of rifles, cutlasses, pistols; ferneries grown by electric light; great cold-storage rooms that struck a chill, for preserving meats, butter, fruit; the doctors' environ, the dispensary, and roomy hospital; watched from a railing the working engines that fixed the Boodah's position, Hogarth here saying: "There you have a menagerie of gnome-land: observe those two black beetles, sedately nodding; and there is daddy-longlegs, working his legs gymnastically; and the three pairs of gallant grey stallions, galloping grandly neck to neck; and those two ridiculous beings, rubbing their palms together, round and round: each preoccupied, comically solemn, busied about its own quaint affairs like a varied gnomeland".

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.