He remembered the way as if he had travelled it yesterday. Soon the
gorge would narrow and he would be almost at the water's edge. Then the
path turned to the right and wound into the heart of a side nullah,
which at length brought it out on a little plateau of rocks. There the
road climbed a long ridge till at last it reached the great plateau,
where Forza, set on a small hilltop, watched thirty miles of primeval
desert. The air was growing chilly, for the road climbed steeply and
already it was many thousand feet above the sea. The curious salt smell
which comes from snow and rock was beginning to greet his nostrils. The
blood flowed more freely in his veins, and insensibly he squared his
shoulders to drink in the cold hill air. It was of the mountains and
yet strangely foreign, an air with something woody and alpine in the
heart of it, an air born of scrub and snow-clad rock, and not of his own
free spaces of heather. But it was hill-born, and this contented him;
it was night-born, and it refreshed him. In a little the road turned
down to the stream side, and he was on the edge of a long dark pool.
The river, which made a poor show in the broad channel at Bardur, was
now, in this straitened place, a full lipping torrent of clear, green
water. Lewis bathed his flushed face and drank, and it was as cold as
snow. It stung his face to burning, and as he walked the heartsome glow
of great physical content began to rise in his heart.
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