We did not speak much together, for fear of lowering our hearts yet more by the confession one to the other of the things we knew to be true.  We did not tell each other what reserve of courage remained to us, or of strength.  We sat and looked at the peaks immeasurably above us, and at the veils of rain between them, and at the black background of the sky.  Nor was there anything in the landscape which did not seem to us unearthly and forlorn.

It was, in a manner, more lonely than had been the very silence of the further slope:  there was less to comfort and support the soul of a man; but with every step downward we were penetrated more and more with the presence of things not mortal and of influences to which any desolation is preferable.  At one moment voices called to us from the water, at another we heard our names, but pronounced in a whisper so slight and so exact that the more certain we were of hearing them the less did we dare to admit the reality of what we had heard.  In a third place we saw twice in succession, though we were still going forward, the same tree standing by the same stone:  for neither tree nor stone were natural to the good world, but each had been put there by whatever was mocking us and drawing us on.

Already had we stumbled twice and thrice the distance that should have separated us from the first Andorran village, but we had seen nothing, not a wall, nor smoke from a fire, let alone the tower of a Christian church, or the houses of men.  Nor did any length of the way now make us wonder more than we had already wondered, nor did we hope, however far we might proceed, that we should be saved unless some other influence could be found to save us from the unseen masters of this place.  For by this time we had need of mutual comfort, and openly said it to one another—­but in low tones—­that the valley was Faery.  The river went on calling to us all the while.  In places it was full of distant cheering, in others crowded with the laughter of a present multitude of tiny things, and always mocking us with innumerable tenuous voices.  It grew to be evening.  It was nearly two days since we had seen a man.

There stood in the broader and lower part of the valley to which we had now come, numerous rocks and boulders; for our deception some one of them or another would seem to be a man.  I heard my companion call suddenly, as though to a stranger, and as he called I thought that he had indeed perceived the face of a human being, and I felt a sort of sudden health in me when I heard the tone of his voice; and when I looked up I also saw a man.  We came towards him and he did not move.  Close up beside his form we put out our hands:  but what we touched was a rough and silent stone.