"It is good," he answered, regarding me. "The angel spoke truth. Follow,
Monsieur."

He went off through the trees of a sudden, and I had much ado to keep
pace with him. He ran as one urged on by a sure sense of doom, looking
neither to right nor left. His mountain instincts had remained with him
when memory itself had closed around like a fog, leaving him face to face
and isolated with his one unconfessed point of terror. Swiftly we made
our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon
broke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of the
scene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted and
grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions--save
where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and
strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here no
flowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot turned his little scut with
a whistle of alarm to vanish like a red shadow. All was melancholy and
silence and the massed defiance of ever-impending ruin. Storm, and
avalanche, and the bitter snap of frost had wrought their havoc year by
year, till an uncrippled branch was a rare distinction. The very
saplings, of stunted growth, bore the air of thieves reared in a rookery
of crime.

We strode with difficulty in an inhuman twilight through this great dark
quickset of Nature, and had paused a moment where the thronging trunks
thinned somewhat, when a little mouthing moan came towards us on the
crest of a ripple of wind. My companion stopped on the instant, and
clutched my arm, his face twisting with panic.

"The Cascade, Monsieur!" he shook out in a terrified whisper.