“How restlessly and to no bourne dost thou move, lost soul!” The boy at his feet stirred and sighed.  “Poor Robin!  Tired and sleepy and frightened, art not?  Why, dear knave, the jaguar is not roaring for thee!” Bending, he put an arm about the lad and drew him to his side.  “I only wait for the brightness to grow,” he said.  “Do not shiver so!  In a little while we shall be gone.”

The moon rose higher and the plain grew spectral, the town a dream town, and the ships dream ships.  Ferne turned slightly so that he might behold the Cordillera.  In mystery and enormity the mountains reared themselves, high as the battlements of heaven, deep as those of hell.  The Elizabethan looked long upon them, and he wreathed that utter wall, that sombre and terrific keep, with strange imaginings.

At last the two, master and boy, arose, and climbing the farther slope to the tunal, began to skirt that spiked and thorny circlet, moving warily because to the core it was envenomed.  Beneath the sun it swarmed with hideous life; beneath the moon the poison might yet stir.  The moon silvered the edge of things, drew illusion like a veil across the haunted ring; below, what hidden foulness!...  Did the life there know its hideousness?  Those lengths and coils, those twisting locks of Medusa, might think themselves desirable.  These pulpy, starkly branching cacti, these shrubs that bred poignards, these fibrous ropes, dark and knotted lianas, binding all together like monstrous exaggerations of the tenants of the place, like serpents seen of a drunkard, were they not to themselves as fair as the fairest vine or tree or flower?  The dwellers here deceived themselves, never dreamed they were so thwart and distorted.

As he walked, the halo of the moon seemed to widen until it embraced a quarter of the heavens.  The sea beneath was molten silver.  A low sound of waves was in his ears, and a wind pressed against him faintly, like a ghost’s withstanding.  From the woods towards the mountains came a long, bestial cry, hoarse and mournful.  “O God,” said Sir Mortimer, “whither dost Thou draw us?  What am I?  What is my meaning and my end?”

Beyond loomed the fortress, all its lineaments blurred, softened, qualitied like a dream by the flooding moonlight.  A snake stretching across their path, Sir Mortimer drew his sword, but the creature slipped away, kept before them for a while, then turned aside into its safe home.  They came to the place they were seeking.  Here was the cactus, taller than its fellows, and gaunt as a gallows-tree, and here the projecting end of a fallen cross.  Between showed no vestige of an opening; dark, impervious, formidable as a fortress wall, the tunal met the eye.  Ferne, attacking it with his sword, thrust aside a heavy curtain of broad-leaved vine, came upon a network of thorn and spike and prickly leaf, hewed this away, to find behind it a like barrier.  Evidently the man had lied!—­to what purpose Sir Mortimer Ferne would presently make