“I see,” said I, and after we had rested and talked and smoked together for some time, the Shoshi man rose leisurely to go. The man of Pultit rose instantly, with him, and each cast a searching glance over the valley before them. Then they hitched more comfortably over their shoulders the woven woolen straps that held their rifles, ran an alert hand over the knives and pistols in their sashes, threw away the butts of their cigarettes.
“Long life to you,” they said, politely.
“And to you long life,” we responded. “Go on a smooth trail.”
In a moment the last glimpse of their heads had disappeared as they made their way down the steep path. The forest was very still, the sunlight on the wet rocks very golden, and for a hundred miles the mountains stretched into the distance, frozen waves of a sea of purple and gray and green and bronze brown, with foam of smoke-colored clouds floating on them. It was all very peaceful and beautiful, and we sang as we took the trail again, but for a long time, whenever the sharp bark of a rifle was answered by a hundred cliffs, I wondered. It was nothing, probably; some one firing his gun at the sky in sheer exuberance of spirit. It happens all the time, in these mountains.
It was on this day that we passed the Wood of the Ora, and, even though I had not heard the stories of them, I should have felt an uncanny sensation while going through that narrow, dark defile between gray cliffs. The trees stood thickly there, climbing the bowlder-strewn slope; they were cut, like all the trees of the mountains, to mere limbless stumps, and they were very old. They seemed for centuries to have writhed under the blows of the shepherds’ axes; they were contorted as if in pain; their few half-amputated branches were like mutilated arms. Beyond them rose rocks, perhaps five hundred feet high, evil-looking cliffs contorted like the trees, and these faced, above our heads, a smooth, sheer wall of tilted gray limestone that overhung the trail.
Our men stopped singing and Cheremi’s mirth-wrinkled face became solemn; his eyes were awed and listening. “The Wood of the Ora,” he said, in a hushed voice.
“Of course,” said Alex, cheerfully, in an everyday voice that was like a ray of daylight in a cave, “it’s simple enough. These cliffs repeat far-away echoes, and that’s how the superstition started.”
“One can explain everything,” said Frances.
“And then explain the explanations,” said I.
“And still most of the learning of every age seems to consist in proving most of the learning of the other ages wrong,” said Frances.