against the Columbia desert.  She was like a woman stranded, the last survivor, on an inhospitable coast.  Turning to look across the valley of the Wenatchee, she saw the blue and glaciered crests of the Chelan mountains, and behind her, over the neck of a loftier height, loomed other white domes.  And there yesterday’s thunder-caps, bigger and blacker, with fringed edges, drove along the sky line.  One purplish mass was streaming like a sieve.  For an interval the sun was obscured, and her glance came back to the vale below where Cerberus reclined, watchful, his tawny head lifted slightly between two advanced paws.  Suddenly the lower clouds grew brilliant, and shafts of light breaking through changed the mountain before her to a beast of brass.

She turned and began to pick her way through grease brush and insistent sage towards a grove of pines.  In a little while she saw water shining through the trees.  She hesitated—­it was as though she had come to the threshold of a sanctuary—­then went on under the boughs to the opal pool.

She remained in the grove a long time.  When she reappeared, the desert eastward was curtained in a gray film.  Torn breadths of it, driven by some local current of air, formed tented clouds along the promontory.  It was as though yesterday’s army was marshalled against other hosts that held the Chelan heights.  A twilight indistinctness settled over the valley between.  Rain, a downpour, was near.  She hurried on to the brow of the plateau, but she dared not attempt to go down around those crumbling chimneys alone.  And Tisdale had said he would come back this side of the vale.  Any moment he might appear.  She turned to go back to the shelter of the pines.  It was then a first electrical flash, like a drawn sword, challenged the opposite ridge.  Instantly a searchlight from the encamped legions played over the lower plain.  She turned again, wavering, and began to run on over the first dip of the slope and along to the first pillar.  There she stopped, leaning on the rock, trembling, yet trying to force down her fear.  It was useless; she could not venture over that stream of shifting granite.  She started back, then stopped, wavering again.  After a moment she lifted her voice in a clear, long call:  “Mr. Tis—­da—­le!”

“I’m coming!” The answer rang surprisingly close, from the gully above the basin.  Soon she discovered him and, looking up, he saw her standing clear-cut against a cavernous, dun-colored cloud, which, gathering all lesser drift into its gulf, drove low towards the plateau.  She turned her face, watching it, and it seemed to belch wind like a bellows, for her skirt stiffened, and the loosened chiffon veil, lifting from her shoulders, streamed like the drapery of some aerial figure, poised there briefly on its flight through space.  Then began cannonading.  Army replied to army.  The advancing film from the desert, grown black, became an illuminated scroll; thin ribbons of gold were traced on it, bowknots of tinsel.  The pattern changed continually.  The legions repeated their fire; javelins, shafts, flew.  Lightning passed in vertical bolts, in sheets from ridge to ridge.  Then the cloud approaching the plateau spoke, and the curtain moving from the Columbia became a wall of doom, in which great cracks yawned, letting the light of eternity through.