It was a wide flat stretch of grass, a miniature table-land, set high up overlooking the broken territory of the Bell River forge. It was bleak. A sharp breeze played across it with a chill bitterness which suggested little enough mercy when winter reigned. It was an outlook upon a world quite new to Bill. To John Kars the scene was by no means familiar.
These men gazed out with a profound interest not untouched by awe. Their eyes sought in every direction, and no detail in the rugged splendor was lost. For long minutes they stood silently reading the pages of the new book opened to them.
It was, in Kars' own words, a "fierce" country. It suggested something like desperation in the Creator of it all. It seemed as though imagination must have deserted Him, and He was left only with the foundations, and the skeleton walls of a vast structure upon His hands.
The horizon was approached by tier on tier of alternating glacier and barren hill. What lay hidden in the hollows could only be conjectured. In every direction, except the southeast, whence they had come, the outlook was the same. Hills, and more hills. Glacial stretch, followed by glacial stretch. Doubtless the hollows contained vast primordial woods, and fiercely flooding mountain streams, scoring their paths through wide stretches of miry tundra, quaking and treacherous.
This was the distance, than which nothing could have been more desolate. But the nearer view was their chief concern.
The gorge yawned almost at their feet. It was tremendous, and its vastness set the mind dizzy. Great circling patches of mist rose up from below and added a sense of infinity to its depths. So wide. So deep. The broad river in its bowels was reduced to something like a trickling streamlet. The woodlands crowding the lower slopes, dim, vague in the distance, became merely a deepening of the shadows below. Forests of primordial immensity were lost in the overwhelming nature of their setting.
The air of sterility, in spite of the woodlands so far down below, in spite of the attenuated grass on which they stood, inspired a profound sense of repugnance. To the mind of Bill Brudenell, at least, it was a land of hopelessness, a land of starvation and despair.
He turned to his companion at last, and his voice rang with deep feeling.
"Fierce? Gee! There's not a word in the whole vocabulary of a white man that gets nearer than ten miles of describing it," he exclaimed. "And the neches, here, figger to scrap to hold it. Well, it certainly needs attractions we can't locate from here."
Kars nodded agreement.