“This is very strange,” thought Deborah. “I thought they were real.”
But no one answered, unless silence answered—no one at all.
And, looking on the ground, she saw that it was all covered with soft black dust, before and after.
“It is easy to walk upon,” said she. “And the flowers look pretty as they grow, but the silence and the gloom frighten me just a little.”
And then suddenly black rocks rose in the path with little jagged edges. They cut into your shoes and hurt you ever so much, and instead of getting better the road became worse.
Presently from between two black rocks shot out a crimson fountain across the path.
Deborah stood still.
“It looks like blood,” she said, and shuddered. “And it kills all the flowers as it passes on. I don’t like this wood, I think I’ll go back.”
But when you looked behind briars had grown across the path, and the silence was so terrible that it seemed to say “Go on.” And there was only one way to tread, and that was through the path of blood.
So Deborah went on, and the red stream soaked through the thin shoes, and sent a strange kind of pain to her heart.