OF THE FURTHERANCE GIVEN BY QUEEN SOPHONISBA, FOSTERLING OF THE GODS, TO LORD JUSS AND LORD BRANDOCH DAHA; WITH HOW THE HIPPOGRIFF’S EGG WAS HATCHED BESIDE THE ENCHANTED LAKE, AND WHAT ENSUED THEREFROM.
NEXT day the Queen came to Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha and made them go with her, and Mivarsh with them to serve them, over the meadows and down a passage like that whereby they had entered the mountain, but this led downward. “Ye may marvel,” she said, “to see daylight in the heart of this great mountain. Yet it is but the hidden work of Nature. For the rays of the sun, striking all day upon Koshtra Belorn and upon her robe of snow, sink into the snow like water, and so soaking through the secret places of the rocks shine again in this hollow chamber where we dwell and in these passages cleft by the Gods to give us our goings out and our comings in. And as sunset followeth broad day with coloured fires, and moonlight or darkness followeth sunset, and dawn followeth night ushering the bright day once more, so these changes of the dark and light succeed one another within the mountain.”
They passed on, ever downward, till after many hours they came suddenly forth into dazzling sunlight. They stood at a cave’s mouth on a beach of sand white and clean, that was lapped by the ripples of a sapphire lake: a great lake, sown with islets craggy and luxuriant with trees and flowering growths. Many-armed was the lake, winding everywhere in secret reaches behind promontories that were spurs of the mountains that held it in their bosom: some wooded or green with lush flower-spangled turf to the water’s edge, some with bare rocks abrupt from the water, some crowned with rugged lines of crag that sent down scree-slopes into the lake below. It was mid-afternoon, sweet-aired, a day of dappled cloud-shadows and changing lights. White birds circled above the lake, and now and then a kingfisher flashed by like a streak of azure flame. That was a westward facing beach, at the end of a headland that ran down clothed with pine-forests with open primrose glades from a spur of Koshtra Belorn. Northward the two great mountains stood at the head of a straight narrow valley that ran up to the Gates of Zimiamvia. Vaster they seemed than the Demons had yet beheld them, showing at but six or seven miles’ distance a clear sixteen thousand feet above the lake. Nor from any other point of prospect were they more lovely to behold: Koshtra Pivrarcha like an eagle armed, shadowing with wings, and Koshtra Belorn as a Goddess fallen a-dreaming, gracious as the morning star of heaven. Wondrous bright were their snows in the sunshine, yet ghostly and unsubstantial to view seen through the hazy summer air. Olive trees, gray and soft-outlined like embodied mist, grew in the lower valleys; woods of oak and birch and every forest tree clothed the slopes; and in the warmer folds of the mountain sides belts of creamy rhododendrons straggled upwards even to the moraines above the lower glaciers and the very margin of the snows.
The Queen watched Lord Juss as his gaze moved to the left past Koshtra Pivrarcha, past the blunt lower crest of Gôglio, to a great lonely peak many miles distant that frowned over the rich maze of nearer ridges which stood above the lake. Its southern shoulder swept in a long majestic line of cliffs up to a clean sharp summit; northward it fell steeplier away. Little snow hung on the sheer rock faces, save where the gullies cleft them. For grace and beauty scarce might Koshtra Belorn herself surpass that peak: but terrible it looked, and as a mansion of old night, that not high noon-day could wholly dispossess of darkness.
“There standeth a mountain great and fair,” said Lord Brandoch Daha, “which was hid in cloud when we were on the high ridges. It hath the look of a great beast couchant.”
Still the Queen watched Lord Juss, who looked still on that peak. Then he turned to her, his hands clenched on the buckles of his breast-plates. She said, “Was it as I think?”
He took a great breath. “It was so I beheld it in the beginning,” he said, “as from this place. But here are we too far off to see the citadel of brass, or know if it be truly there.” And he said to Brandoch Daha, “This remaineth, that we climb that mountain.”
“That can ye never do,” said the Queen.
“That shall be shown,” said Brandoch Daha.
“List,” said she. “Nameless is yonder mountain upon earth, for until this hour, save only for me and you, the eye of living man hath not looked upon it. But unto the Gods it hath a name, and unto the spirits of the blest that do inhabit this land, and unto those unhappy souls that are held in captivity on that cold mountain top: Zora Rach nam Psarrion, standing apart above the noiseless lifeless snow-fields that feed the Psarrion glaciers; loneliest and secretest of all earth’s mountains, and most accursed. O my lords,” she said, “Think not to climb up Zora. Enchantments ring round Zora, so that ye should not get so near as to the edges of the snow-fields at her feet ere ruin gathered you.”