"Why didn't we, then?"
"It would have been too simple and you would not have valued the skill of the climb if we made it without the hardship and sweat. Climbing this escarpment is much the same as striving for a goal in life — you do understand what I am trying to say?" Lloyd finished.
"Yes, Lloyd, I do! You are teaching me things that you haven't promised my father you would teach to me. Nevertheless, I am grateful."
The two men spent the day on the escarpment looking at the land that stretched for miles on each side of the precipice, but their main interest was in the land that was set directly ahead.
The Krolalin Mountain Range was before them, with the chain of desolate old mountains at the head of the Virgin Mountains.
They sat on the southern part of the escarpment and stared at the awesome sight. It was a mammoth forest canopied by clouds.
There was the river before them, flowing through a channel that it dug out of solid rock over its many years of erosion. Its banks sloped up from there, on each side, with short underbrush on this side of the river and the forbidding Dark Forest, on the other side.
Lloyd had Boyce hand him a pack and from it he took a dark cylindrical case that he opened. He pulled out from it an instrument of glass and light metal.
He pulled the instrument apart and put it up to his eye, pointing it in the direction of the river.
Boyce quietly watched him for a while.