But for occasional prostrate monsters, and the boulders of grey rock
that thrust uncouth shoulders here and there out of the ground, it might
well have been a bit of park in the Old Country. Almost, one might have
seen in it the hand of man. A little to the right, however, began the
great burnt section, miles in extent, proclaiming its real
character--_brulé_, as it is called, where the fires of the previous
year had raged for weeks, and the blackened stumps now rose gaunt and
ugly, bereft of branches, like gigantic match heads stuck into the
ground, savage and desolate beyond words. The perfume of charcoal and
rain-soaked ashes still hung faintly about it.

The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the
fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the
only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that
vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the
woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might
stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. In front,
through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of
Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip
to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped. A sky of
rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever
known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where
the islands--a hundred, surely, rather than fifty--floated like the
fairy barques of some enchanted fleet. Fringed with pines, whose crests
fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as
the light faded--about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the
heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.

And strips of colored cloud, like flaunting pennons, signaled their
departure to the stars....