She did not answer.  They watched Corpang gain the summit of the hill, and disappear through the line of posts.

Maskull turned again to Sullenbode.  “Now we two are alone in a lonely world.”

She regarded him steadily.  “Our last night on this earth must be a grand one.  I am ready to go on.”

“I don’t think you are fit to go on.  It will be better to go down the pass a little, and find shelter.”

She half smiled.  “We won’t study our poor bodies tonight.  I mean you to go to Adage, Maskull.”

“Then at all events let us rest first, for it must be a long, terrible climb, and who knows what hardships we shall meet?”

She walked a step or two forward, half turned, and held out her hand to him.  “Come, Maskull!”

When they had covered half the distance that separated them from the foot of the hill, Maskull heard the drum taps.  They came from behind the hill, and were loud, sharp, almost explosive.  He glanced at Sullenbode, but she appeared to hear nothing.  A minute later the whole sky behind and above the long chain of stone posts on the crest of the hill began to be illuminated by a strange radiance.  The moonlight in that quarter faded; the posts stood out black on a background of fire.  It was the light of Muspel.  As the moments passed, it grew more and more vivid, peculiar, and awful.  It was of no colour, and resembled nothing—­it was supernatural and indescribable.  Maskull’s spirit swelled.  He stood fast, with expanded nostrils and terrible eyes.

Sullenbode touched him lightly.

“What do you see, Maskull?”

“Muspel-light.”

“I see nothing.”

The light shot up, until Maskull scarcely knew where he stood.  It burned with a fiercer and stranger glare than ever before.  He forgot the existence of Sullenbode.  The drum beats grew deafeningly loud.  Each beat was like a rip of startling thunder, crashing through the sky and making the air tremble.  Presently the crashes coalesced, and one continuous roar of thunder rocked the world.  But the rhythm persisted—­the four beats, with the third accented, still came pulsing through the atmosphere, only now against a background of thunder, and not of silence.

Maskull’s heart beat wildly.  His body was like a prison.  He longed to throw it off, to spring up and become incorporated with the sublime universe which was beginning to unveil itself.

Sullenbode suddenly enfolded him in her arms, and kissed him—­ passionately, again and again.  He made no response; he was unaware of what she was doing.  She unclasped him and, with bent head and streaming eyes, went noiselessly away.  She started to go back toward the Mornstab Pass.

A few minutes afterward the radiance began to fade.  The thunder died down.  The moonlight reappeared, the stone posts and the hillside were again bright.  In a short time the supernatural light had entirely vanished, but the drum taps still sounded faintly, a muffled rhythm, from behind the hill.  Maskull started violently, and stared around him like a suddenly awakened sleeper.