“He does,” said the landlord simply.
Cartaret rose. He pushed the gold-piece across the table.
“That sentiment earns it,” said he. “Bring my mare, please. And you might point out the way to this castle. I’ve a mind to run up there.”
The innkeeper looked at him oddly, but, when the mare had been brought around, pointed a lean brown finger across the lake toward the mountains that ended in twin white peaks: the peaks that Cartaret had seen a few hours since and that now seemed to him to be the crests of which he had dreamed when first he saw the Azure Rose.
“The road leads from the head of the lake, monsieur,” said the innkeeper: “you cannot lose your way.”
Cartaret followed the instructions thus conveyed. After three miles’ riding, a curved ascent had shut the lake and the cottages from view, had shut from view every trace of human habitation. He rode among scenery that, save for the grassy bridle-path, was as wild as if it had never before been known of man.
It was a ravishing country, a fairy-country of blue skies and fleecy clouds; of acicular summits and sharp-edged crags; of mist-hung valleys shimmering in the sun; of black chasms dizzily bridged by scarlet-flowered vines. The road ran along the edges of precipices and wreathed the gray outcropping rock; thick ropes of honeysuckle festooned the limbs of ancient trees and perfumed all the air. Here a blue cliff hid its distant face behind a bridal-veil of descending spray, broken by a dozen rainbows; there, down the terrifying depths of a vertical wall, roared a white and mighty cataract. The traveler’s ears began to listen for the song of the hamadryad from the branches of the oak; his eyes to seek the flashing limbs of a frightened nymph; here if anywhere the gods of the elder-revelation still held sway.
Evening, which comes so suddenly in the Cantabrians, was falling before the luxuriant verdure lessened and he came to a break in the forest. Below him, billow upon billow, the foothills fell away in rolling waves of green. Above, the jagged circle of the horizon was a line of salient summits and tapering spires of every tint of blue—turquoise, indigo, mauve—mounting up and up like the seats in a Titanic amphitheater, to the royal purple of the sky.
Cartaret had turned in his saddle to look at the magnificent panorama. Now, turning forward, he saw, rising ahead of him—ten miles or more ahead, but so gigantic as to seem bending directly above him and tottering to crush him and the world at his feet—one of the peaks that the innkeeper had indicated. It was a mountain piled upon the mountains, a sheer mountain of naked chalcedonous rock, rising to a snow-topped pinnacle; and, at its foot, almost at the extreme edge of the timber-line, a broad, muricated natural gallery, stood a vast Gothic pile, a somber, rambling mass of wall and tower: the castle of the Eskurolas.
Almost as Cartaret looked, the sun went down behind that peak and wrapped the way in utter darkness. The traveler regarded with something like dismay the last faint glow that vanished from the west.