discover that the little towns below had changed--but how, we should
not have marked them well enough to know. It would be indefinable, a
change in the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality of
their remote, small shapes.

I should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps. "It's odd," I
should say, for the tenth or eleventh time, with a motion to rise,
and we should get up and stretch ourselves, and, still a little
puzzled, turn our faces towards the path that clambers down over
the tumbled rocks and runs round by the still clear lake and down
towards the Hospice of St. Gotthard--if perchance we could still
find that path.

Long before we got to that, before even we got to the great high
road, we should have hints from the stone cabin in the nape of the
pass--it would be gone or wonderfully changed--from the very goats
upon the rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone,
that a mighty difference had come to the world of men.

And presently, amazed and amazing, we should happen on a man--no
Swiss--dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an unfamiliar
speech....


Section 4

Before nightfall we should be drenched in wonders, but still we
should have wonder left for the thing my companion, with his
scientific training, would no doubt be the first to see. He would
glance up, with that proprietary eye of the man who knows his