“And why?” asked Maskull slowly.

“Yes, that’s the responsibility you incurred when you kissed me for the first time.  I never meant to tell you.”

“Do you mean that if I had gone on alone, you would have died?”

“I have no other life but what you give me.”

He gazed at her mournfully, without attempting to reply, and then slowly placed his arms around her body.  During this embrace he turned very pale, but Sullenbode grew as white as chalk.

A few minutes later the journey toward Adage was resumed.

They had been walking for two hours.  Teargeld was higher in the sky and nearer the south.  They had descended many hundred feet, and the character of the ridge began to alter for the worse.  The thin snow disappeared, and gave way to moist, boggy ground.  It was all little grassy hillocks and marshes.  They began to slip about and become draggled with mud.  Conversation ceased; Sullenbode led the way, and the men followed in her tracks.  The southern half of the landscape grew grander.  The greenish light of the brilliant moon, shining on the multitude of snow-green peaks, caused it to appear like a spectral world.  Their nearest neighbour towered high above them on the other side of the valley, due south, some five miles distant.  It was a slender, inaccessible, dizzy spire of black rock, the angles of which were too steep to retain snow.  A great upward-curving horn of rock sprang out from its topmost pinnacle.  For a long time it constituted their clues landmark.

The whole ridge gradually became saturated with moisture.  The surface soil was spongy, and rested on impermeable rock; it breathed in the damp mists by night, and breathed them out again by day, under Branchspell’s rays.  The walking grew first unpleasant, then difficult, and finally dangerous.  None of the party could distinguish firm ground from bog.  Sullenbode sank up to her waist in a pit of slime; Maskull rescued her, but after this incident took the lead himself.  Corpang was the next to meet with trouble.  Exploring a new path for himself, he tumbled into liquid mud up to his shoulders, and narrowly escaped a filthy death.  After Maskull had got him out, at great personal risk, they proceeded once more; but now the scramble changed from bad to worse.  Each step had to be thoroughly tested before weight was put upon it, and even so the test frequently failed.  All of them went in so often, that in the end they no longer resembled human beings, but walking pillars plastered from top to toe with black filth.  The hardest work fell to Maskull.  He not only had the exhausting task of beating the way, but was continually called upon to help his companions out of their difficulties.  Without him they could not have got through.

After a peculiarly evil patch, they paused to recruit their strength.  Corpang’s breathing was difficult, Sullenbode was quiet, listless, and depressed.