shimmer of the white snow-capped peaks, of which he had often heard
warriors talk.

The country between the two mountain ranges was rich and fruitful, and
from the heights waterfalls and torrents rushed into the valley. Many
villages and towns lay on his road, but most of them had been damaged in
the war. The peasants had been robbed of their teams of cattle, the
flocks had been driven off from the shepherds, and when a vine-dresser,
who was training his vine saw the little troop approaching, he fled to
the ravines and forests.

The traces of the plough and the spade were everywhere visible, but the
fields were for the most part not sown; the young peasants were under
arms, the gardens and meadows were trodden down by soldiers, the houses
and cottages plundered and destroyed, or burnt. Everything bore the
trace of the devastation of the war, only the oak and cedar forests
lorded it proudly over the mountain-slopes, planes and locust-trees grew
in groves, and the gorges and rifts of the thinly-wooded limestone hills,
which bordered the fertile low-land, were filled with evergreen
brushwood.

At this time of year everything was moist and well-watered, and Pentaur
compared the country with Egypt, and observed how the same results were
attained here as there, but by different agencies. He remembered that
morning on Sinai, and said to himself again: "Another God than ours rules
here, and the old masters were not wrong who reviled godless strangers,
and warned the uninitiated, to whom the secret of the One must remain
unrevealed, to quit their home."

The nearer he approached the king's camp, the more vividly he thought of