CHAPTER V.THE SMITING THING.
Silently we looked at each other, and silently we passed out of the courtyard.

The dread was heavy upon me.

The twilight was stealing upon the close-clustered peaks.

Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in irised beauty; nightfall.
As I gazed upon them I wondered to what secret place within their brooding immensities the little metal mysteries had fled.

And to what myriads, it might be, of their kind?
And these hidden hordes--of what shapes were they?
Of what powers?
Small like these, or--or-- Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side--the little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley.
I turned aside, crept through the shattered portal and looked over the haunted hollow.
Unbelieving, I rubbed my eyes; then leaped to the very brim of the bowl.
A lark had risen from the roof of one of the shattered heaps and had flown caroling up into the shadowy sky.
A flock of the little willow warblers flung themselves across the valley, scolding and gossiping; a hare sat upright in the middle of the ancient roadway.
The valley itself lay serenely under the ambering light, smiling, peaceful--emptied of horror! I dropped over the side, walked cautiously down the road up which but an hour or so before we had struggled so desperately; paced farther and farther with an increasing confidence and a growing wonder.
Gone was that soul of loneliness; vanished the whirlpool of despair that had striven to drag us down to death.
The bowl was nothing but a quiet, smiling lovely little hollow in the hills.