Contents
I
Drifting Leaves
Chapter I
THE MOUNTAIN OF VANISHED MEN
High among the snow-tipped ranges of Afghanistan, there is a peak notable for its peculiar rocky crown. Unlike its lordly neighbors, it is dominated not by crags and glaciers, but by a projection which seems almost to bear the impress of human hands. From the southern valley, five thousand feet beneath, the traveler will observe a gigantic steel-gray figure carved in the image of a woman; and he will notice that the woman's hands are uplifted in an attitude of prayer, and that she stands with one foot slanted behind her and one foot slightly upraised, as though prepared to step into the abyss. How this lifelike form came to be perched on that desolate eminence is a mystery to the observer; but he assumes that it is a product of some prank of nature, for it is far too large to have been made by man. Yet he must be unimaginative indeed not to be awe-stricken at thought of the forces which gave that colossus birth.
I, for one, shall never forget my first glimpse of the stone Titan. As a member of an American geological expedition studying the mountain strata of Northern India, Afghanistan and Tibet, I had been tramping for hours through a winding rock-defile in company with nine scientific colleagues and the native guides. Suddenly, coming out through a break in the canyon, I looked down into a deep basin densely mantled in deodar and pine. Beyond this valley, to the north, a succession of jagged peaks shot skyward, their lower slopes dark-green with foliage, their upper altitudes bare and brown, and streaked here and there with white. Almost precisely in their center, as though in the acknowledged place of honor, one summit loomed slightly higher and less precipitous than the others, and on its tip the singular statue-like image.