The sun was in the sky when the Duke awoke. He had slept eight hours
under the narcotics of the forest. He arose and stretched his limbs. The
packing cases were set in order; the fire was kindled; the mule stood
close beside him, eating her breakfast. The food seemed to be bits of
the yellow scone which the mountaineer had offered yesterday to the
Duke. The circuit rider sat smoking by the fire; he got up uneasily,
stood a moment, kneading his fingers, and moving the broken fern leaves
into a heap with the edge of his boot sole. Then he spoke, hesitating
and with apology:
"I guess there hain't no breakfast. There war some yaller biscuits, but
I give'em to Jezebel."
The Duke instantly remembered that sign laid down in the Hebrew
Scriptures, by which one, observing the righteous man, traveling with
his beast, should know him. He laughed and nodded to the mule.
"The lady, by all means," he said. Then he threw back his shoulders,
filled his lungs with the good pungent air, and looked up at the tree
tops. He was not intending to go hungry if the forest could provide a
breakfast. But the wood pigeon had departed while the Duke lay below,
sleeping on his back. Only the dapper woodpecker remained, hopping about
on a dead fir tree, mottled with the sun, his head cocked, looking for a
place to drill.
The Duke turned from the forest to the river. The sun lay upon it; the
amber water slipped by, gurgling among the reeds, in long wrinkles, over
the wide shallow, to a pool studded with huge stones, where it lay for
a moment sunning, in a gentle eddy. The Duke followed along the bank
to the pool. Out in the dark water beyond him, under the shelter of the
great bowlders, fish were moving or lay in vague outline like shadows
thrown into the water. Safe here, idling in their house, acquainted with
no peril save that of the otter swimming in the night, or the fishhawk
descending in the sun. The Duke stood for some moments looking out into
the pool, then he returned to the mountaineer who sat smoking by the
fire.
"Have you a stout knife?" he said.
The man arose, took a clasp knife out of his pocket, handed it to the
Duke, and returned to his place against the spruce tree, and his cob
pipe, glowing with a coal. The Duke went out into the forest, cut a
sapling, some eight feet long, trimmed it, and pared it even at the
butt. Then he cut a square trench along the sapling, from the butt
upward, three inches long and a quarter inch in depth. He cut also
narrow rings in the bark around the sapling over the trench. Then he
went back to the mountaineer, returned the knife, and put his second
query.
"Have you a bit of string!"
The man put out his hand, without a word, drew the gunny sack over to
him, unraveled the coarse threads around the top of it, wet them in his
mouth, rolled them between his fingers, and handed them to the Duke.
Then he flipped a hot ember deftly into his cooling pipe, and leaned
back again, silently, into his place against the spruce tree.
The Duke took a little knife out of his waistcoat pocket, opened its
larger blade, and set the handle of it into the trench which he had cut
into the sapling, forced it firmly in, and bound it tightly with the
bits of hemp. Then he went with the pole in his hand, down the bank of
the river to the pool. He laid it here on the bracken and stripped to
the skin. The mountaineer, pulling slowly at his pipe, bareheaded, the
long gray hair straggling over his face, watched every movement of the
Duke with deep and consuming interest.
When the Duke stood naked, as the first man in the Garden, he took the
sapling in his teeth, lowered himself into the water, and swam with long
noiseless strokes out to a great rock standing in the middle waters of
the pool--a rock, flat, smooth as a table, and covered with gray lichen,
as with a frost of silver. He drew himself noiselessly up out of the
water, crawled along the level surface of the rock, and stretched
himself at full length, with his face peering over the lower border of
it. Then he put his right arm slowly out with the pole grasped above
the middle. The lichen, heated by the sun, was warm. The light descended
into the dark pool as into a vat of amber. The Duke lay stretched out
in the sun, his lithe, powerful body glistening with drops of water,
his left arm doubled under his chest, his right, bronzed, sinewy, the
muscles set like steel, raised above the dark water.
The mountaineer watched from his place against the spruce tree, his chin
lifted, his pipe, turned over on its elder stem, going out. The mule
behind him, nosing the bracken for lost fragments of bread, made the
only sound rising in the forest. Suddenly the Duke's arm descended; the
eddy below the great rock boiled; something floundered across the deep
water of the pool, a faint stain of crimson rising to the amber surface.
The Duke arose, took his weapon by the end, and threw it, like a
harpoon, across the pool to the bank, where it stood fixed upright in
the bracken, quivering, the knife blade glittering in the sun. Then he
disappeared head first into the pool, and a moment later came ashore
with a three-pound trout, gaping with a wound, two inches deep,
descending behind the gills downward through the spine.
Thus the Duke got his breakfast as the savage of the Yukon gets it; as
the snub-nosed oriental-eyed Indian of the Pacific Coast to this day,
on occasion, gets it. And he cooked it, as the Indian cooks his salmon,
grilled on a flat stone before a heap of embers.
When the feast was ended, the Duke of Dorset roped the pack to the
mule, and they forded the river, wading through the black water to
their middle. They pushed through a huckleberry thicket and climbed the
shoulder of the mountain on an old trail, hardly to be followed; made,
doubtless, by the deer and the red Indian. For two hours they climbed
the mountain, laboriously, on this lost trail, and then, abruptly
passing around the huge, gnarled trunk of a gigantic fir, they came out
on the summit; and the Duke of Dorset stopped motionless, in his tracks,
like a man come suddenly by some enchantment into a land of wonders.
Below him, rimmed in by mountains, rising one above the other into haze,
threaded by a river, lay the work surely of those palace builders
of Arabia, imprisoned in copper pots under the stamp of Solomon.
Two hundred feet below him on a vast terrace stood a château of
cream-colored stone, roofed with red tile; carved beautifully around the
doors and windows; stretching across the whole terrace, with a huge door
under an arch set in a square tower. It was faced with delicate spires,
and to the left a second tower arose, circular, huge, with a flat roof,
and long windows rising unevenly as on the turn of some vast stairway;
then it stretched away on either side, with arches, balustrades, sweeps
of bare wall, great windows set in carving and mounted with fretwork, to
low square towers, flanking massively the ends.
The whole of it, in spite of its walls, its massive arches, its
towers--by some touch of architectural harmony, by some trick of
grouping, by some genius moving in the hand that traced the outline of
it thus fantastically against the sky--seemed a thing airy and illusive,
as though raised here on the instant by some fairy magic. From the
château, stretching level as a floor to the foot of the bluff on which
the Duke stood, lay a square of velvet turf, framed rigidly in a white
road. To the east of this court, behind the château, a park descended,
sloping to the river; to the south, rigid and formal against a wall
of yellow stone, long terraces lay, one below the other, each a formal
garden perfect in detail to the slightest fragment of color. The first
lying against the wall was severe in outline, white as though paved with
quartz, flanked at either end with a square of that exquisite velvet
turf and lying between were three pools floating with water flowers.
Against the wall, at regular intervals, was, here and there, a marble
figure standing in a niche, separated by a green sheared hedge, banking
the wall to its yellow coping. The second terrace was a formal Italian
garden after the ancient villas of the Campagna. The third, an Egyptian
garden, walled with pale-green tile. And thus, varied and beautiful,
the terraces descended to the valley. Whatever garden any people,
laboriously, through long generations, had made in form and color
beautiful to the eye, was here reproduced with minute and endless
patience.
Beyond, stretching westward and to the south, were green fields,
meadows, pastures, reaching to the shoulders of the mountains. Far down
the valley out of these mountains the great road leading from the sea
emerged, wound through the meadow land, ascended west of the terraces,
from which it was separated by a wall, and entered the court through
bronze gates swinging to stone pillars. These pillars were surmounted
by a figure having the face and bust of a woman and the body of a
monster--such a figure as the Latin sculptors have sometimes called "La
Chimera."
Eastward, the lands were forests; north, the rising lands were orchards,
vineyards, formal trees, shrubs, vines. And the whole of it rimmed in
by the far-off hazy, mysterious mountains fading into the sky line, like
some blue wall of the world. It was such a thing as that jinn--slave of
the lamp--might have lifted out of the baked earth of Arabia.
The mountaineer, standing beside the Duke of Dorset, broke the first
silence.
"Hit air Childers agin God Almighty," he said, "hit air all made," and
he pointed with his big finger directly down the ridge on which they
stood.
The Duke, following the finger, realized that the whole thing was indeed
made. The entire shoulder of the mountain, on which they now stood, had
been cut down, leveled and formed into these great terraces. The face of
this vast cut fell sheer below him. It was walled up almost to his feet
with that yellow stone--a vast perpendicular wall festooned with vines.
The mountaineer, having spoken this word of explanation, turned back to
his mule, cut the rope, and began to take down the leather boxes. The
Duke remained striving to comprehend the magnitude of this labor--a
labor colossal and appalling. A mountain pared down, a wilderness
parked, graded, landscaped, and no mark of it visible to the eye. Human
cleverness, patient, tireless, bad obscured here every trace of this
vast labor as beautifully, as subtly, as the wilderness back yonder bad
adorned and bidden the road cut through her dominions to the sea. The
whole estate lay before him, unreal, like the work of a magician--made
by no stroke of the pick, no clatter of the hammer. Those two strange,
impressive, sinister figures, mounted on the stone posts, where the road
entered the court, looking out over this enchantment, were mysteriously
suggestive. This scene, lying before him in the sun, was some illusion
of the fancy, some mirage, some chimera.
The Duke of Dorset was awakened from this reverie by the mountaineer
speaking behind him.
"I guess I'll be a-movin' along," he said, "you'll find somebody down
there to pack in your traps."
The Duke turned, thrusting his hand into his pocket, but the band
remained there when his eyes rested on the circuit rider's face.
The man's big stooping body was straight now, his features firm and
composed, his head set with a certain dignity on his shoulders.
"No, stranger," he said, "me an' Jezebel works fur God Almighty, an' we
don't take pay."
The Duke of Dorset did then what he would have done on the continent of
Europe, in the presence of such a priest; he offered money to adorn his
church, to aid his poor; but the circuit rider put back the hand.
"No," he said, "as I read hit in the Good Book, God Almighty don't ker
fur gewgaws, an' the poor man hain't helped much by a dollar that he
don't work fur." Then he put out his hand like one parting with an
equal.
The Duke of Dorset dropped the money into his pocket, and took the big
callous hand firmly in his own.
"My friend," he said, "you have guided me across the mountains from the
sea, transported my luggage, and provided me with food. I am, therefore,
in your debt. Is it quite fair to leave me under this obligation?"
The mountaineer was visibly embarrassed, his feet shifted uneasily, his
face grew thoughtful.
"Well," he said, "if you feel that away about this air little lift, that
me an' Jezebel give you, why, jist pass it on to the next man that you
find a settin' by the road, with more'n he kin pack."
Then he shook the Duke's hand as a bear might have done, slipped the
rope bridle again into the crook of his arm, and set out northward along
the ridge, with the mule following at his heels and the sack swaying on
his shoulder.
The Duke stood motionless watching the man until he disappeared in among
the boles of the fir trees, then he turned toward the château. At the
brink of the sheer wall he found a flight of steps descending, and
leaving his luggage where the mountaineer had piled it, he went slowly
down, hidden among the vines.