St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as if he were bounding down.

“Ah well now,” he said, “you know on the moon an ordinary man would weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds.  Why not here?  We aren’t held down by any map!”

They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.

“In America,” he said, “a man feels like a mountain.  Here he feels like a man.”

“What do you mean by that?” demanded St. George uneasily.  But Akko said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.

From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night.  And at length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met, scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.

“Now,” he said simply.

The two men stood beside him and looked down.  It seemed to St. George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones’ wistful definition of a picture:  “... a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only desire...” yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home.  It was like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little improvements has been made which we resent because no one has thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one remembers than one knew that one remembered.

[Illustration]

At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep twilight.  Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in a pattern among hidden green.  In the midst of the valley towered the mountain whose summit, royally crowned by shining towers, had been visible from the open sea.  At its feet, glittering in the abundant light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the King’s City—­but its light was not the light of the day, for that was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the dark.  Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with reality.  The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a massive, natural wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and populous and clothed in mystery.  This new face which Nature turned to him was a glorified face, and some way it meant what he meant.