"Oh, what wide place is this!—And all the hunting-grounds of our people?"
"Not the twentieth part of it!" growled Pŭl-Yūn with a frown. "Have I not told thee how narrow our ground is, and that it grows narrower?"
The Master-Girl sucked in her lips and re-shouldered her pack. "Let us be getting down to them," she said shortly; then, half to herself, "Narrow or broad there shall be room enough for one Little Moon woman—and her bow! But, O Pŭl-Yūn, when thou hast found thy folk, do not quite forget poor Dêh-Yān."
The man fell back a stride and went beside his wife for a while in silence, albeit the going was so good that speech had been easy whilst in Indian file. It came home to him how bitter is the lot of the newly-caught slave-wife among the older women of the tribe, to whom her ignorance, youth and foreignness are subjects for ill-natured merriment and opportunities for spite.
"There shall be no breaking-in for my wife," he said. "Listen!—To-morrow night thou shalt sit upon that bear-skin in my chief's presence. I have said it!"
And all this fuss about crossing one of the lower cols!
Wait, my friend. These young people had neither guides nor porters, nor maps, compass, nor rope, nor ice-axes nor well-nailed, water-tight boots; appointments which make a fairly simple thing of what were otherwise a perilous feat. Moreover this was very early in the season, a time of year when every week makes a difference. The writer of this veracious history of the Old Time has himself seen the farm folk in a Pyrenean glen leave their hay to run shouting at the first tourist of the season who had news of their friends on the other side of the pass. And that was in May.
Nor were the Alps of that Old Time just as we see them to-day. I grant you they had come down in the world since their first glorious Himalayan youth; they no longer towered thirty, thirty-five thousand feet above the sub-tropical terai interspersed with its chain of salt lakes which we now know as the Mediterranean. The worst of the Great Ice Age was over, that grievous time when half the waters of the oceans were piled in a solid cap around the northern pole, a cap which extended southward in such sort that in Britain everything north of the Thames, and upon the mainland all that is now Germany and Austria, was sealed down beneath a solid sheet which was not melted for twenty thousand years on end. During this time, and for long after the worst of it was over, the Alps and the Tirol were in process of being ground down to something approaching what we see to-day. Their soaring peaks had arrested the cloud-systems of central Europe, and turned France into an arid steppe, the grazing-ground of countless herds of wild horse and gazelle, the clouds had deposited themselves in snow, the hoarded snows had ground down the sides of the giants, pared away their summits and crawled out half across Lombardy in glaciers, which, when they finally receded, left trails of rubbish thirty miles long, spoils filched from the heights behind them.
The worst of this was over. The Rhone glacier had dwindled somewhat, but still blocked the Wallis. For many generations the shores of the Mediterranean had been peopled in winter by tribes which had each its summer hunting quarters in this or that glen of the hinterland; tribes which had but little knowledge of, and no intercourse with, the people upon the other side of the chain in the glens which feed the headwaters of the Po.
How should they have had?—I am telling a tale of the long ago; much water has run under the bridges since, both those of Avignon and those of Padua, and every gallon of it brought down something from the southern Alps, hence, as nothing rolls uphill, century by century the passes have been growing lower than they were when our two youngsters essayed their adventure.