“He was so weak when he set out on his journey that he wondered if he would reach the end of it.  Part of the way he traveled by bullock cart, and part, he was carried by natives.  But at last the bearers came to a place more than halfway up the mountain, and would go no further.  Then they went back and left him to climb the rest of the way himself.  They had traveled slowly and he had got more strength, but he was weak yet.  The forest was more wonderful than anything he had ever seen.  There were tropical trees with foliage like lace, and some with huge leaves, and some of them seemed to reach the sky.  Sometimes he could barely see gleams of blue through them.  And vines swung down from their high branches, and caught each other, and matted together; and there were hot scents, and strange flowers, and dazzling birds darting about, and thick moss, and little cascades bursting out.  The path grew narrower and steeper, and the flower scents and the sultriness made it like walking in a hothouse.  He heard rustlings in the undergrowth, which might have been made by any kind of wild animal; once he stepped across a deadly snake without seeing it.  But it was asleep and did not hurt him.  He knew the natives had been convinced that he would not reach the ledge; but for some strange reason he believed he should.  He stopped and rested many times, and he drank some milk he had brought in a canteen.  The higher he climbed, the more wonderful everything was, and a strange feeling began to fill him.  He said his body stopped being tired and began to feel very light.  And his load lifted itself from his heart, as if it were not his load any more but belonged to something stronger.  Even Samavia seemed to be safe.  As he went higher and higher, and looked down the abyss at the world below, it appeared as if it were not real but only a dream he had wakened from—­only a dream.”

The Rat moved restlessly.

“Perhaps he was light-headed with the fever,” he suggested.

“The fever had left him, and the weakness had left him,” Marco answered.  “It seemed as if he had never really been ill at all—­as if no one could be ill, because things like that were only dreams, just as the world was.”

“I wish I’d been with him!  Perhaps I could have thrown these away—­down into the abyss!” And The Rat shook his crutches which rested against the table.  “I feel as if I was climbing, too.  Go on.”

Marco had become more absorbed than The Rat.  He had lost himself in the memory of the story.

“I felt that I was climbing, when he told me,” he said.  “I felt as if I were breathing in the hot flower-scents and pushing aside the big leaves and giant ferns.  There had been a rain, and they were wet and shining with big drops, like jewels, that showered over him as he thrust his way through and under them.  And the stillness and the height—­the stillness and the height!  I can’t make it real to you as he made it to me!  I can’t!  I was there.  He took me.  And it was so high—­and so still—­and so beautiful that I could scarcely bear it.”