In spite of everything, Hawk-Eye and Limberleg had held on to their meat, and now they felt the need of food. They cut Limberleg’s load into four great chunks, and each took one. They ate as they walked. They ran along past the place where the mammoths were feeding and then turned their backs on the river and plunged into the deep forest toward the east. The ground began to rise a little, and Hawk-Eye said, “If we keep on climbing in the direction of the rising sun, we are bound to reach the blue hills at last.”
All that day they journeyed, and that night they spent in a tree. The next morning found them still climbing. At last, about noon of the second day, they reached the crest of the range and climbed out upon the high, bald summit of the highest hill.
No one of their clan had ever been so far from the cave, and no one of them had ever seen what Hawk-Eye and Limberleg and the Twins now saw. There was the world spread out before them! They looked back far away in the blue distance toward the west, and there they saw a little silver thread. That silver thread was their river. They looked toward the south, and far, far away they saw more water than they had ever dreamed there was in the whole earth. They didn’t know what it was. They were not even sure that it was water. They had never heard of the sea. They stood silent and breathless with wonder and gazed at it. At last Hawk-Eye said in an awestruck tone, “It’s the end of the world.”
“Let’s go to the very edge and look over it,” said Limberleg. “Maybe we can find out where the sun hides during the darkness.”
You see what a brave woman she was.
“Then are these the blue hills?” asked Firetop. “They don’t look blue a bit.”
“The blueness is all around us, though,” cried Firefly, pointing down into the valley. “And beyond the end of the world, it’s all blue too, with sparkles on it! And the sky is blue. The only place that isn’t blue is right around us.”
“We will surely go through the blue country to get to the end of the world then,” said Firetop.