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Narrow and rock-lined, the gorge was like a boiler flue to suck the flames down it. From where he sat he saw it caging with inconceivable fury. The earth rift seemed to be roofed with flame. Great billows of black smoke poured out laden with sparks and live coals carried by the wind. It was plain at the first glance that the fire was bound to leap from the cañon to the brush-covered hills beyond.
He was so near to the rock-lined beach that he could hear the soft throat-cries of the moose-birds. And what he saw, so far as his eyes could see in all directions, was "God's Country" a glory of colour that was like a great master painting. The birch had turned to red and gold.
These were the homes of shepherds, hunters and others whose vocations related especially to the mountains. Farther on there were signs of farming interests; the homes became more numerous and more pretentious in appearance. The rock-lined gorge broadened into a fertile valley; the road was smooth and level, a condition which afforded relief to the travelers.
The moon was up. It shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his passions. Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality, their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within. A jargon of dance-hall music floated on the air.
The overseer leaned back in his chair. Uncle Bisco stooped forward, his chin resting on his hickory staff. And then like the clear notes of a spring, dripping drop by drop with a lengthening cadence into the covered pool of a rock-lined basin, came a simple Sunday School song the two old men loved so well. There were tears in the old negro's eyes when she had finished. Then he sobbed like a child.
More precious than its bulk in diamonds, a spring of clear, cold water from the rock-lined depths of mother earth gushed out through a fissure near the Summit, and round that spring had been built, in bygone centuries, a battlemented nest to breed and turn out warriors.
She tore his note into fragments, twisted and rolled them into a ball and shot it, as a marble, into the gulch below. Then, suddenly she remembered, and reaching over she looked into a scarred crevice in the rock. Twice that summer had Clay Westmore left her a quaint love note in this little rock-lined post-office.
We made no examination of these, not even a cursory one. The pig-sty is usually next to the house, and is nothing but a rock-lined pit, open to the sky, except where the house is built directly over it.
It was very dark down there, but the light from our port-holes, and the reflection from what must have been a powerful searchlight on the submarine's nose showed that we were forging through a narrow passage, rock-lined, and tube-like. After a few minutes the propellers ceased their whirring. We came to a full stop, and then commenced to rise swiftly toward the surface.
Those blue mountains, the long parallel ranges of Old Bear and his brothers, seem no more a misty, uncertain mirage against the delicious indefinable tints of the horizon. Sharply outlined they are now, with dark, irregular shadows upon their precipitous slopes which tell of wild ravines, and rock-lined gorges, and swirling mountain torrents, and great, beetling, gray crags.
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