Strange were the places they went to and curiously unlike each other were the people to whom they carried their message.  The most singular of all was an old woman who lived in so remote a place that the road which wound round and round the mountain, wound round it for miles and miles.  It was not a bad road and it was an amazing one to travel, dragged in a small cart by a mule, when one could be dragged, and clambering slowly with rests between when one could not:  the tree-covered precipices one looked down, the tossing whiteness of waterfalls, or the green foaming of rushing streams, and the immensity of farm- and village-scattered plains spreading themselves to the feet of other mountains shutting them in were breath-taking beauties to look down on, as the road mounted and wound round and round and higher and higher.

“How can any one live higher than this?” said The Rat as they sat on the thick moss by the wayside after the mule and cart had left them.  “Look at the bare crags looming up above there.  Let us look at her again.  Her picture looked as if she were a hundred years old.”

Marco took out his hidden sketch.  It seemed surely one of the strangest things in the world that a creature as old as this one seemed could reach such a place, or, having reached it, could ever descend to the world again to give aid to any person or thing.

Her old face was crossed and recrossed with a thousand wrinkles.  Her profile was splendid yet and she had been a beauty in her day.  Her eyes were like an eagle’s—­and not an old eagle’s.  And she had a long neck which held her old head high.

“How could she get here?” exclaimed The Rat.

“Those who sent us know, though we don’t,” said Marco.  “Will you sit here and rest while I go on further?”

“No!” The Rat answered stubbornly.  “I didn’t train myself to stay behind.  But we shall come to bare-rock climbing soon and then I shall be obliged to stop,” and he said the last bitterly.  He knew that, if Marco had come alone, he would have ridden in no cart but would have trudged upward and onward sturdily to the end of his journey.

But they did not reach the crags, as they had thought must be inevitable.  Suddenly half-way to the sky, as it seemed, they came to a bend in the road and found themselves mounting into a new green world—­an astonishing marvel of a world, with green velvet slopes and soft meadows and thick woodland, and cows feeding in velvet pastures, and—­as if it had been snowed down from the huge bare mountain crags which still soared above into heaven—­a mysterious, ancient, huddled village which, being thus snowed down, might have caught among the rocks and rested there through all time.

There it stood.  There it huddled itself.  And the monsters in the blue above it themselves looked down upon it as if it were an incredible thing—­this ancient, steep-roofed, hanging-balconied, crumbling cluster of human nests, which seemed a thousand miles from the world.  Marco and The Rat stood and stared at it.  Then they sat down and stared at it.