They paused for a moment, breathless.
“It is like Naudheim himself,” she declared. “This is the land he spoke of. This is the place to which he climbed. It is wonderful!”
“Come,” Rochester said. “We must be up before the darkness.”
Slowly they made their way along the mountain road, which their guide in front was doing all he could to make smooth for them. And then at the corner they found a log hut, to which their guide pointed triumphantly.
“It is there!” he exclaimed—“there where they live, the two madmen. Beyond, you see, is the village of the woodhewers.”
Rochester nodded. They struggled a few steps upwards, and then paused to look with wonder at the scene below. The one log cabin before which they were now standing, had been built alone. Barely a hundred yards away, across the ravine, were twenty or thirty similar ones, from the roofs of which the smoke went curling upwards. It seemed for a moment as though they had climbed above the world of noises—climbed into the land of eternal silence. Before they had had time, however, to frame the thought, they heard the crashing of timber across the ravine, and a great tree fell inwards. A sound like distant thunder rose and swelled at every moment.
“It is the machinery,” their guide told them. “The trees fall and are stripped of their boughs. Then they go down the ravine there, and along the slide all the way to the river. See them all the way, like a great worm. Day and night, month by month—there is never a minute when a tree does not fall.”
Again they heard the crashing, and another tree fell. They heard the rumble of the slide in the forest. The peculiar scent of fresh sap seemed like a perfume in the air. Then suddenly the snow began to fall again. They could not see across the ravine.
The guide knocked at the door and opened it. Rochester and Pauline passed in....