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Behind them, two by two, came the four others. They stood on a small ledge in the shadow of the great cliff that loomed on their left. Thence the mountain-side might be scanned as well as in such a light it was to be discerned. The tramp of feet had now grown louder and nearer, and with it came the clank of armour.
If she should lean from her window she would see the mountain-side dropping from the gray walls of her home, with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here and there a precarious little garden halfway up the steep.
Thus I went through the long hours, and at last evening came a beautiful warm May evening, and long before the appointed hour I was at our rendezvous in a deserted podere on the mountain-side, overgrown with flags and other spring flowers, among which the fireflies were flitting noiselessly. I had no eyes for the beauty of the scene, however.
Those travellers who think that a Tahitian prays only when the eyes of the missionary are fixed on him, should have slept with us that night on the mountain-side. Before morning it rained very heavily; but the good thatch of banana- leaves kept us dry. November 19th. At daylight my friends, after their morning prayer, prepared an excellent breakfast in the same manner as in the evening.
In the evening Chanden Sing fired at a black wolf which came close to camp. I discovered, about one hundred feet above the lake-level, imbedded in the mountain-side, a stratum of gigantic fossils, which, owing to their size and weight, I was unable to dig out and carry away.
Then he took them to the cave in which puma, bear, and wapiti skins were piled, together with a few stores and the kits of travellers who had left their belongings in Boldrick's keeping till they should come again. After Mrs. Falchion and Ruth had seen all, they came out upon the mountain-side and waved their handkerchiefs to us, who were still watching from below.
It was very dark, and the wind was increasing. The last gust had been preceded by an ominous roaring down the whole mountain-side, which continued for some time after the trees in the little valley had lapsed into silence. The air was filled with a faint, cool, sodden odor, as of stirred forest depths.
A casual remark about India aided by a question or two from Phillips and Neil Durant brought forth a story of a trip into the jungles of that distant country; at another time the sight of a bare mountain-side called forth reference to a snow-covered range in China and led to interesting details of life in the Far East.
Whatever the difference between her and Stewart, or whatever the imagined difference set up by false standards of class and culture, the truth was that here on this wild mountain-side she was only a woman and he was simply a man.
No doubt the snowflakes, in corries on the mountain-side, do look deliciously cool on a hot summer day. But such a drizzling rain as this was the other side of the picture, which her Majesty, with a shiver, called "cold, wet, and cheerless."
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