“How good the earth feels underfoot!” said Madame de Ferrier.  We were both stiff.  I drew the boats where they could not be floated away, and we turned our faces to the unknown.  I took her unresisting arm to guide her, and she depended upon me.

This day I look back at those young figures groping through cloud as at disembodied and blessed spirits.  The man’s intensest tenderness, restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at his side, was put forth only in her service.  They walked against bushes.  He broke a stick, and with it probed every yard of the ascent which they were obliged to make.  Helping his companion from bush to log, from seam to seam of the riven slope, from ledge to ledge, he brought her to a level of high forest where the fog was thinner, and branches interlaced across their faces.

The climb made Madame de Ferrier draw her breath quickly.  She laughed when we ended it.  Though I knew the shores as well as a hunter, it was impossible to recognize any landmark.  The trees, the moss, and forest sponge under our feet, the very rocks, were changed by that weird medium.  And when the fog opened and we walked as through an endless tunnel of gray revolving stone, it was into a world that never existed before and would never exist again.

There was no path.  Creeping under and climbing over obstacles, sometimes enclosed by the whiteness of steam, sometimes walking briskly across lighted spaces, we reached a gorge smoking as the lake smoked in the chill of early mornings.  Vapor played all its freaks on that brink.  The edge had been sharply defined.  But the fog shut around us like a curtain, and we dared not stir.

Below, a medallion shaped rift widened out, and showed us a scene as I have since beheld such things appear upon the stage.  Within the round changing frame of wispy vapor two men sat by a fire of logs and branches.  We could smell wood smoke, and hear the branches crackle, convincing us the vision was real.  Behind them stood a cabin almost as rude as my shelter on the island.

One man was a grand fellow, not at all of the common order, though he was more plainly clothed than De Chaumont.  His face was so familiar that I almost grasped recognition—­but missed it.  The whole cast was full and aquiline, and the lobe of his ear, as I noticed when light fell on his profile, sat close to his head like mine.

The other man worked his feet upon the treadle of a small wheel, which revolved like a circular table in front of him, and on this he deftly touched something which appeared to be an earthenware vessel.  His thin fingers moved with spider swiftness, and shaped it with a kind of magic.  He was a mad looking person, with an air of being tremendously driven by inner force.  He wore mustaches the like of which I had never seen, carried back over his ears; and these hairy devices seemed to split his countenance in two crosswise.