A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable--like the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping.
At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept.

On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds--the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him.

Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale.

North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow.
And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, unbroken fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path which we must take.

They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they seemed to whisper--then to lift their heads and look up like crowding swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them.