should believe my word. For some of the facts I can bring no other
testimony than my own. If you do not wish to believe me, so be it. I
can scarce believe it all myself.

The strange occurrences began in the western part of our great
American State of North Carolina. There, deep amid the Blueridge
Mountains rises the crest called the Great Eyrie. Its huge rounded
form is distinctly seen from the little town of Morganton on the
Catawba River, and still more clearly as one approaches the mountains
by way of the village of Pleasant Garden.

Why the name of Great Eyrie was originally given this mountain by the
people of the surrounding region, I am not quite Sure It rises rocky
and grim and inaccessible, and under certain atmospheric conditions
has a peculiarly blue and distant effect. But the idea one would
naturally get from the name is of a refuge for birds of prey, eagles
condors, vultures; the home of vast numbers of the feathered tribes,
wheeling and screaming above peaks beyond the reach of man. Now, the
Great Eyrie did not seem particularly attractive to birds; on the
contrary, the people of the neighborhood began to remark that on some
days when birds approached its summit they mounted still further,
circled high above the crest, and then flew swiftly away, troubling
the air with harsh cries.

Why then the name Great Eyrie? Perhaps the mount might better have
been called a crater, for in the center of those steep and rounded
walls there might well be a huge deep basin. Perhaps there might even
lie within their circuit a mountain lake, such as exists in other
parts of the Appalachian mountain system, a lagoon fed by the rain
and the winter snows.