Rodriguez and Morano stood and gazed in silence.  They had come twenty miles since morning, they were tired and hungry, but the mountains held them:  they stood there looking neither for rest nor food.  Beyond them, sheltering under the low hills, they saw a little village.  Smoke straggled up from it high into the evening:  beyond the village woods sloped away upwards.  But far above smoke or woods the bare peaks brooded.  Rodriguez gazed on their austere solemnity, wondering what secret they guarded there for so long, guessing what message they held and hid from man; until he learned that the mystery they guarded among them was of things that he knew not and could never know.

Tinkle-ting said the bells of a church, invisible among the houses of that far village.  Tinkle-ting said the crescent of hills that sheltered it.  And after a while, speaking out of their grim and enormous silences with all the gravity of their hundred ages, Tinkle-ting said the mountains.  With this trivial message Echo returned from among the homes of the mighty, where she had run with the small bell’s tiny cry to trouble their crowned aloofness.

Rodriguez and Morano pressed on, and the mountains cloaked themselves as they went, in air of many colours; till the stars came out and the lights of the village gleamed.  In darkness, with surprise in the tones of the barking dogs, the two wanderers came to the village where so few ever came, for it lay at the end of Spain, cut off by those mighty rocks, and they knew not much of what lands lay beyond.

They beat on a door below a hanging board, on which was written “The Inn of the World’s End”:  a wandering scholar had written it and had been well paid for his work, for in those days writing was rare.  The door was opened for them by the host of the inn, and they entered a room in which men who had supped were sitting at a table.  They were all of them men from the Spanish side of the mountains, farmers come into the village on the affairs of Mother Earth; next day they would be back at their farms again; and of the land the other side of the mountains that was so near now they knew nothing, so that it still remained for the wanderers a thing of mystery wherein romance could dwell:  and because they knew nothing of that land the men at the inn treasured all the more the rumours that sometimes came from it, and of these they talked, and mine host listened eagerly, to whom all tales were brought soon or late; and most he loved to hear tales from beyond the mountains.

Rodriguez and Morano sat still and listened, and the talk was all of war.  It was faint and vague like fable, but rumour clearly said War, and the other side of the mountains.  It may be that no man has a crazy ambition without at moments suspecting it; but prove it by the touchstone of fact and he becomes at once as a woman whose invalid son, after years of seclusion indoors, wins unexpectedly some athletic prize.  When Rodriguez heard all this talk of wars quite near he thought of his castle as already won; his thoughts went further even, floating through Lowlight in the glowing evening, and drifting up and down past Serafina’s house below the balcony where she sat for ever.