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The tangled brush had vanished and wet ashes covered the ground. Half-burned logs lay about, and here and there small trees, leaning at sharp angles with blackened branches locked, held each other up. In places, big charred rampikes stood in rows like colonnades. The nearer rows looked black; farther off they shone in the rain with a curious silver gleam.
As the sky was scrawled by the gray-and-black rampikes, so the slope was scrawled by zigzag lines of gray-and-black snake fence, leading down to three log cabins, with their cluster of log barns and sheds, scattered irregularly along a terrace of the slope. A quarter of a mile further down, beyond the little gray dwellings, a sluggish river wound between alder swamps and rough wild meadows.
When the lopsided moon, now hung high over a low, desolate shore of blanched rampikes, was fading to a papery whiteness against a sky of dawn, the roar of the river grew louder, and the islet, no longer slowly revolving, plunged forward, through a succession of wallowing waves, over a wild half-mile of ledges, and joined itself to a wider and mightier stream.
At long intervals there would be a faint rustling in some near-by clump of juniper, or a squeak and a brief scuffle in the thickets; or, on wings as soundless as sleep, a great owl would pass by, to drop sharply behind a rock, or sail away like a ghost among the rampikes. But to none of these furtive happenings did the watcher on the rock pay any heed.
The man kicked the snow from his trousers and shoe-packs, and climbed into the pung again. "We'll make it in time fer breakfast yet!" he murmured to himself, confidently, as the horses once more broke into a trot. They were traversing now a high table-land, rather sparsely wooded, and dotted here and there with towering rampikes.
Some would burn for long and the ashes and hot stones would not cool soon, while the rampikes that stood above the ruin would come down when a strong gust shook them. A brulée is dangerous when the wind blows, and sometimes in a calm. For the next few days the fire raged below the camp, and when Jim ventured down hill he was driven back by heat and smoke.
For an hour he crouched there, motionless as the eternal granite itself, while the moon climbed and whitened, and the shadows of the rampikes changed, and the breathless enchantment deepened over Ringwaak.
When that was done, it was high time to paddle homewards; the sun was gliding forth from the roseate vault over the western rim, and a silvery haze rose from the waters, softly veiling the brilliant landscape. 'A great improvement to your charcoal forest, it must be owned, said Robert, pointing Armytage to where the sharp black tops of rampikes projected over the mist.
As they pushed on the country got wilder. The rocks were more numerous, the trees smaller, and in places they crossed wide belts where fires had raged. The flames had burned off the branches, but left the trunks, and the long rows of rampikes sprang from the new brush, shining a curious silver-gray where they caught the light. The mode of travel, however, did not change.
Here one can look up the muddy road to the hamlet of Serre, where the wrecks of some brick buildings stand in a clump of tree stumps, or half-right down a God-forgotten kind of glen, blasted by fire to the look of a moor in hell. A few rampikes of trees standing on one side of this glen give the place its name of Ten Tree Alley.
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