She led him a hundred yards upstream to where a footbridge slung upon steel cables spanned the Toba, crossed that and a little flat on the north side, and climbed up the flank of a slide-scarred hill until she came out on a little plateau.
"Look," she waved her hand, panting a little from the steepness of the climb.
Five hundred feet below, the valley of the Toba spread its timbered greenness, through which looped in sweeping curves the steel-gray of the river. In a great bend immediately beneath them lay the houses of the settlement, facing upon the stream. Farther along were isolated homesteads which he had not seen. Back of these spread little gardens, and the green square of cultivated fields, and beyond in greater expanse the stump-dotted land that was still in the making.
The smoke of the donkey-engines was vanished, fires grown cold with the end of the day's work. But upriver and down the spoil of axe and saw lay in red booms along the bunk. He could mark the place where he had stood that afternoon and watched a puffing yarder bunt a string of forty-foot logs into the booming-ground. He could see figures about in the gardens, and the shrill voices and laughter of children echoed up to them on the hill.
"It is a great view, and there is more in it than meets the eye," Thompson said. "Eh, little woman? The greatest war of all, the biggest struggle. One that never ends. Man struggling to subdue his environment to his needs."
Sophie smiled understandingly. She looked over the valley with a wistful air.
"Did you ever read 'The Sons of Martha'?" she asked. Do you remember these lines:
"'Not as a ladder to reach high Heaven,
Not as an altar to any creed,
But simple service simply given