greetings to them before he passed on again. Once that most fierce and
lethal of tropic snakes, the giant lythra, came out of the jungle and
all down the street, the central street of Nen, and none of the
Wanderers moved away from him, but they all played sonorously on
drums, as though he had been a person of much honour; and the snake
moved through the midst of them and smote none.

Even the Wanderers' children could do strange things, for if any one
of them met with a child of Nen the two would stare at each other in
silence with large grave eyes; then the Wanderers' child would slowly
draw from his turban a live fish or snake. And the children of Nen
could do nothing of that kind at all.

Much I should have wished to stay and hear the hymn with which they
greet the night, that is answered by the wolves on the heights of
Mloon, but it was now time to raise the anchor again that the captain
might return from Bar-Wul-Yann upon the landward tide. So we went on
board and continued down the Yann. And the captain and I spoke little,
for we were thinking of our parting, which should be for long, and we
watched instead the splendour of the westerning sun. For the sun was a
ruddy gold, but a faint mist cloaked the jungle, lying low, and into
it poured the smoke of the little jungle cities, and the smoke of them
met together in the mist and joined into one haze, which became
purple, and was lit by the sun, as the thoughts of men become hallowed
by some great and sacred thing. Sometimes one column from a lonely
house would rise up higher than the cities' smoke, and gleam by itself
in the sun.

And now as the sun's last rays were nearly level, we saw the sight
that I had come to see, for from two mountains that stood on either