He remembered the way as if he had travelled it yesterday.  Soon the gorge would narrow and he would be almost at the water’s edge.  Then the path turned to the right and wound into the heart of a side nullah, which at length brought it out on a little plateau of rocks.  There the road climbed a long ridge till at last it reached the great plateau, where Forza, set on a small hilltop, watched thirty miles of primeval desert.  The air was growing chilly, for the road climbed steeply and already it was many thousand feet above the sea.  The curious salt smell which comes from snow and rock was beginning to greet his nostrils.  The blood flowed more freely in his veins, and insensibly he squared his shoulders to drink in the cold hill air.  It was of the mountains and yet strangely foreign, an air with something woody and alpine in the heart of it, an air born of scrub and snow-clad rock, and not of his own free spaces of heather.  But it was hill-born, and this contented him; it was night-born, and it refreshed him.  In a little the road turned down to the stream side, and he was on the edge of a long dark pool.

The river, which made a poor show in the broad channel at Bardur, was now, in this straitened place, a full lipping torrent of clear, green water.  Lewis bathed his flushed face and drank, and it was as cold as snow.  It stung his face to burning, and as he walked the heartsome glow of great physical content began to rise in his heart.  He felt fit and ready for any work.  Life was quick in his sinews, his brain was a weathercock, his strength was tireless.  At last he had found a man’s life.  He had never had a chance before.  Life had been too easy and sheltered; he had been coddled like a child; he had never roughed it except for his own pleasure.  Now he was outside this backbone of the world with a task before him, and only his wits for his servant.  Eton and Oxford, Eton and Oxford—­so it had been for generations—­an education sufficient to damn a race.  Stocks was right, and he had all along been wrong; but now he was in a fair way to taste the world’s iron and salt, and he exulted at the prospect.

It was hard walking in the nullah.  In and out of great crevices the road wound itself, on the brink of stupendous waterfalls, or in the heart of a brushwood tangle.  Soon a clear vault of sky replaced the out-jutting crags, and he came out on a little plateau where a very cold wind was blowing.  The smell of snow was in the air, a raw smell like salt when carried on a north wind over miles of granite crags.  But on the little tableland the moon was shining clearly.  It was green with small cloud-berries and dwarf juniper, and the rooty fragrance was for all the world like an English bolt or a Highland pasture.  Lewis flung himself prone and buried his face among the small green leaves.  Then, still on the ground, he scanned the endless yellow distance.  Mountains, serrated and cleft as in some giant’s play, rose on every hand, while through the hollows gleamed the farther snow-peaks.  This little bare plateau must be naked to any eye on any hill-side, and at the thought he got to his feet and advanced.