That was a picture Polaris never forgot—the rocky walls of the pass, the sledge and the wild dogs, the strange figure of the Sardanian, the girl and the red rose.
She had removed her heavy coat and cap, and now walked on ahead of them, her long blue sweater clinging to her lissom form, the sunshine glinting in the coiled masses of her chestnut hair. They rounded another turn, and Rose Emer gave a little gasp and stopped, and stood transfixed.
"Oh, here is, indeed, a garden of the gods!" she cried.
There the rock ledges ended, and they stood at the lip of a long green slope of sward, spangled with flowers. A valley lay before them, of which they were at the lower end. Ringed by the smoking mountains, it stretched away, some ten miles in length. From the lower hill slopes at either side it was perhaps a short mile and a half across. Adown its length, nearly in the middle, ran the silvery ribbon of a little river, which bore away to the right at the lower end of the valley, and was lost to sight in the base of the hills.
At either side of the river the land lay in rolling knolls and lush meadows, with here and there a tangle of giant trees, and here and there geometrical squares of tilled land—the whole spread out, from where the travelers stood, in an immense patchwork pattern, riotous with the colors of nature, and dotted with the white dwellings of men, built of stone.
On the higher slopes of the mountains at each side thick forests of mighty trees grew. Above the line of vegetation, the bare earth gave forth vapor from the inner heat, and farther up the naked rocks jutted to the peaks, half hidden in their perpetual mists and smoke.
There were twenty-one mountains, all of the same general appearance, with one exception. One great hill alone, which towered over to the left of them, was wooded thickly to its summit.
Everywhere in the valley was the sound of life. Birds flashed back and forth among the foliage; goats leaped among the rocks; small ponies grazed in the meadows; men tilled the fields. From the distance up the valley came the hum and splashing of a small waterfall. A couple of miles away, at the right of the river, was a large square of buildings that gleamed white in the sunlight, where many people were moving about.
"Behold, Sardanes!" said Kard the Smith, advancing to the edge of the rock.