the slopes of the jungle rose before us, like a carpet that is gradually being drawn upward. Soon, however, tall trees emerged from the low undergrowth, the thick leafy masses of a virgin forest rose dome-like one above another, and in a dark glade foamed an unruly brook, the same stream in whose silently flowing waters we had a short time before bathed.
The whole day through, the air had been sultry and the sky overcast. Here, however, we were met by a fresh breeze, and the landscape grew ever clearer as though one veil after another were being lifted before our eyes.
Huge walls of rock towered skyward above the woods, and higher yet like a roof above them were piled green mountain-tops—forest-clad peaks, they must have been, though they looked like so many mossy cushions—and ever higher, till they seemed to disappear in Heaven itself.
One solitary far-stretching cloud of soft red hue—one, and only one—floated above.
Even as we gazed at it this cloud began to glow strangely. It recalled the past when I had seen my father take a piece of purified gold out of the furnace with the pincers and, after cooling, lay it on a background of light-blue silk, for so did this luminous air-picture now shine forth in sharply defined surfaces of burnished gold; while, in between, vaporous strips of bright green deepened and shot downward in fan-shaped patches until, becoming gradually paler, they plunged into the colourless stratum of air beneath, as though desirous of reaching the verdure-clad mountain-tops that lay below. Ever redder grew the golden surfaces, ever greener the shadows.
That was no cloud.
"The Himavat," whispered Medini, overawed and deeply moved, as her hand tremblingly sought my arm.
