Where was the good forthcoming out of so much that was evil, he asked?  Looking back over the years, he saw much evil for himself, for everything and every one he cared about, and mingled with it there was little good, and that good purely accidental, the result of fortuitous circumstances.  He knew that until the war broke out he had lived in a backwater of life, himself and Myra, contented, happy, untried by adversity.  Once swung out of that backwater they had been swept away, powerless to know where they went, to guess what was their destination.

Nothing that he could have done would have altered one iota the march of events.  Nothing that he could do now would have more than the slightest bearing on what was still to come.  He was like a man beaten to a dazed state in which he expects anything, in which his feeble resistance will not ward off a single blow aimed at him by an unseen, inscrutable enemy.

Hollister, sitting on the bank of the river, looked at the mountains rising tier upon tier until the farthest ranges were dazzling white cones against a far sky line.  He saw them as a chaos of granite and sandstone flung up by blind forces.  Order and logical sequence in the universe were a delusion—­except as they were the result of ordered human thought, effected by patient, unremitting human effort, which failed more often than it succeeded.

He looked at one bold peak across the valley, standing so sheer above the Black Hole that it seemed to overhang from the perpendicular; a mass of bald granite, steep cliff, with glacial ice and perpetual snow lurking in its crevasses.  Upon its lower slopes the forest ran up, a green mantle with ragged edges.  From the forest upward the wind wafted seeds to every scanty patch of soil.  They took root, became saplings, grew to substantial trees.  And every winter the snow fell deep on that mountain, piling up in great masses delicately poised, until a mere nothing—­a piece of stone loosened by the frost; a gust of wind; perhaps only the overhanging edge of a snow-drift breaking under its own weight—­would start a slide that gathered speed and bulk as it came down.  And as this insensate mass plunged downward, the small trees and the great, the thickets and the low salal, everything that stood in its path, was overwhelmed and crushed and utterly destroyed.  To what end?  For what purpose?

It was just the same with man, Hollister thought.  If he got in the way of forces greater than himself, he was crushed.  Nature was blind, ruthless, disorderly, wantonly destructive.  One had to be alert, far-seeing, gifted with definite characteristics, to escape.  Even then one did not always, or for long, escape being bruised and mauled by the avalanches of emotion, the irresistible movement of circumstance over which one could exert no control.

How could it be otherwise?  Hollister thought of all that had happened to all the people he knew, the men he had seen killed and maimed, driven insane by the shocks of war; of Doris, stricken blind in the full glow of youth; Myra pulled and hauled this way and that because she was as she was and powerless to be otherwise; himself marred and shunned and suffering intolerable agonies of spirit; of Bland, upon whom had fallen the black mantle of unnecessary tragedy; and Mills, who had paid for his passion with his life.