Strange fragrance stole from gum and bark of the decreasing vegetation. Dislodged stones rolled bounding from rock to rock into the abyss. To right and left the way went. There was not even the friendly beacon of the summit to beckon them. It seemed to St. George that their whole safety lay in motion, that a moment's cessation from the advance would hurl them all down the sides of the declivity. Since the ascent began he had not ceased to look down; and now as they rose free of the tree-tops that clothed the base of the mountain he could see across the plain, and beyond the bounding embankment of the island to the dark waste of the sea. Somewhere out there The Aloha was rocking. Somewhere, away to the northwest, the lights of New York harbour shone. Did they, St. George wondered vaguely; and, when he went back, how would they look to him? It seemed to him in some indeterminate fashion that when he saw them again there would be new lines and sides of beauty which he had never suspected, and as if all the world would be changed, included in this new world that he had found.
Half-way up the ascent a resting-place was contrived for the carriers. The projection upon which the baskets were lowered was hardly three feet in width. Its edge dropped into darkness. Within reach, leaves rustled from the summit of a tree rooted somewhere in the chasm. The blackness below was vast and to be measured only by the memory of that upward course. Gemmed by its lighted hamlets the fair plain of the island lay, with Med and Melita glowing like lamps to the huge dusk.
"St. George," said Amory soberly, "if it's all true--if these people do understand what the world doesn't know anything about--"
"Yes," said St. George.
"It makes a man feel--"
"Yes," said St. George, "it does."
This, they afterward remembered, was all that they said on the ascent. One wonders if two, being met among the "strengthless tribes of the dead," would find much more to say.
Then they went on, scaling that invisible way, with the twinkling feet of the carriers drawing upward like a thread of thin gold which they were to climb. What, St. George thought as the way seemed to lengthen before them, what if there were no end? What if this were some gigantic trick of Destiny to keep him for the rest of his life in mid-air, ceaselessly toiling up, a latter-day Sisyphus, in a palanquin? He had dreamed of stairs in the darkness which men mounted and found to have no summits, and suppose this were such a stair? Suppose, among these marvels that were related to his dreams, he had, as it were, tossed a ball of twine in the air and, like the Indian jugglers, climbed it? Suppose he had built a castle in the clouds and tenanted it with Olivia, and were now foolhardily attempting to scale the air? Ah well, he settled it contentedly, better so. For this divine jugglery comes once into every life, and one must climb to the castle with madness and singing if he would attain to the temples that lie on the castle-plain.