“If we camp at the base of those hills, we’ll be out of that wind,” said Jim. “It’s five o’clock. We ought to make it in an hour.”
We set off. Bursts of willow ptarmigans shot up around us from the berry thickets like brown rockets; golden plovers and curlews were whistling on all sides; within rifle shot a small herd of caribou was feeding, and the little brown cranes were stalking everywhere. No one could starve in that country, and after we had set up camp we dined very well.
There were no sounds that night — or if there were we slept too deeply to hear them.
The next morning we debated our trail. The low range stood directly in our path north. It continued, increasing in height, both east and west. It presented no great difficulties from where we were, at least so far as we could see. We determined to climb it, taking it leisurely. It was more difficult than it had appeared; it took us two hours to wind our way to the top.
We tramped across the top toward a line of huge boulders that stretched like a wall before us. We squeezed between two of these, and drew hastily back. We were standing at the edge of a precipice that dropped hundreds of feet sheer to the floor of a singular valley. The jumble of snow-and-ice-mantled mountains clustered around it. At its far end, perhaps twenty miles away, was a pyramidal-shaped peak.
Down its centre, from tip to the floor of the valley, ran a glittering white streak, without question a glacier filling a chasm which split the mountain as evenly as though it had been made by a single sword stroke. The valley was not wide, not more than five miles, I estimated, at its widest point. A long and narrow valley, its far end stoppered by the glacier-cleft giant, its sides the walls of the other mountains, dropping, except here and there where there had been falls of rock, as precipitously into it as the cliff under us.
But it was the floor of the valley itself that riveted our attention. It seemed nothing but a tremendous level field covered with rocky rubble. At the far end, the glacier ran through this rubble for half the length of the valley. There was no trace of vegetation among the littered rocks. There was no hint of green upon the surrounding mountains; only the bare black cliffs with their ice and snow-filled gashes. It was a valley of desolation.
“It’s cold here, Leif.” Jim shivered.
It was cold — a cold of a curious quality, a still and breathless cold. It seemed to press out upon us from the valley, as though to force us away.
“It’s going to be a job getting down there,” I said.
“And hard going when we do,” said Jim. “Where the hell did all those rocks come from, and what spread them out so flat?”
“Probably dropped by that glacier when it shrunk,” I said. “It looks like a terminal moraine. In fact this whole place looks as though it had been scooped out by the ice.”
“Hold on to my feet, Leif, I’ll take a look.” He lay on his belly and wriggled his body over the edge. In a minute or two I heard him call, and pulled him back.
“There’s a slide about a quarter of a mile over there to the left,” he said. “I couldn’t tell whether it goes all the way to the top. We’ll go see. Leif, how far down do you think that valley is?”
“Oh, a few hundred feet.”
“It’s all of a thousand if it’s an inch. The cliff goes down and down. I don’t understand what makes the bottom seem so much closer here. It’s a queer place, this.”
We picked up the packs and marched off behind the wall — like rim of boulders. In a little while we came across a big gouge in the top, running far back. Here frost and ice had bitten out the rock along some fault. The shattered debris ran down the middle of the gouge like giant stepping-stones clear to the floor of the valley.
“We’ll have to take the packs off to negotiate that,” said Jim. “What shall be do — leave them here while we explore, or drop them along with us as we go?”
“Take them with us. There must be an outlet off there at the base of the big mountain.”
We began the descent. I was scrambling over one of the rocks about a third of the way when I heard his sharp exclamation.
Gone was the glacier that had thrust its white tongue in among the rubble. Gone was the rubble. Toward its .far end, the valley’s floor was covered with scores of pyramidal black stones, each marked down its centre with a streak of glistening white. They stood in ranks, spaced regularly, like the dolmens of the Druids. They marched half-down the valley. Here and there between them arose wisps of white steam, like smokes of sacrifices.
Between them and us, lapping at the black cliffs, was a blue and rippling lake! It filled the lower valley from side to side. It rippled over the edges of the shattered rocks still far below us.
Then something about the marshalled ranks of black stones struck me.
“Jim! Those pyramid-shaped rocks. Each and every one of them is a tiny duplicate of the mountain behind them! Even to the white streak!”
As I spoke, the blue lake quivered. It flowed among the black pyramids, half-submerging them, quenching the sacrificial smokes. It covered the pyramids. Again it quivered. It was gone. Where the lake had been was once more the rubble-covered floor of the valley.
There had been an odd touch of legerdemain about the transformations, like the swift work of a master magician. And it had been magic — of a kind. But I had watched nature perform that magic before.
“Hell t” I said. “It’s a mirage I”
Jim did not answer. He was staring at the valley with a singular expression.
“What’s the matter with you, Tsantawu? Listening to the ancestors again? It’s only a mirage.”
“Yes?” he said. “But which one? The lake — or the rocks?”
I studied the valley’s floor. It looked real enough. The theory of a glacial moraine accounted for its oddly level appearance — that and our height above it. When we reached it we would find that distribution of boulders uncomfortably uneven enough, I would swear.
“Why, the lake of coarse.”
“No,” he said, “I think the stones are the mirage.”
“Nonsense. There’s a layer of warm air down there. The stones radiate the sun’s heat. This cold air presses on it. It’s one of the conditions that produces mirages, and it has just done it for us. That’s all.”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t all.”
He leaned against the rock.
“Leif, the ancestors had a few things more to say last night than I told you.”
“I know damned well they did.”
“They spoke of Ataga’hi. Does that mean anything to you.”
“Not a thing.”
“It didn’t to me — then. It does now. Ataga’hi was an enchanted lake, in the wildest part of the Great Smokies, westward from the headwaters of the Ocana-luftee. It was the medicine lake of the animals and birds. All the Cherokee knew it was there, though few had seen it. If a stray hunter came close, all he saw was a stony flat, without blade of grass, forbidding. But by prayer and fasting and an all-night vigil, he could sharpen his spiritual sight. He would then behold at daybreak a wide shallow sheet of purple water, fed by springs, spouting