It came to me like a picture, and a great stillness brooded over it.

At the back of this landscape stood a towering cliff of stern rock thousands of feet high.

Set at intervals along the edge of the cliff were golden figures, mighty and immovable.

Whether they were living guards or only statues I do not know, for I never came near to them.
Here and there, miles apart, streams from the lands beyond poured over the edge of the cliff in huge cascades of foam that became raging torrents when they reached its lowest slopes.

One of these rivers fed a lake which lay in a chasm on the slopes, and from either end of this lake poured two rivers which seemed to me about twenty miles apart, as we should judge.