It stood to the left with a space of perhaps six feet between it and the perpendicular wall against which the path was cut. A huge detached mass of white quartz, at least five feet in height and eight or ten in length, it offered some slight shelter from the storm.
There, in that narrow space, sat a young woman with a sheepskin drawn about her, bending over another sheepskin which lay at her feet, half buried in the snow. It covered a human form—a man. There was the grey head resting in her lap, and the feet projecting below that woolly covering. Still and silent it lay, and I seemed to know intuitively that all hope was idle. Truly death stalketh in the storm.
Not that my mind dwelt upon this—not that it was even remembered in the instant that followed.
As the adept’s lantern was flashed behind the rock and his voice spoke words of cheer, the woman’s eyes were raised and her face turned upward.
“Merciful powers! ” cried Maurice; “it’s that same girl we met on the road back from Ballambong!”
CHAPTER XIII.
AT PSAM-DAGONG.
“Yes, it was she.”
Walla Benjow was the name we came to know her by from that fearful night.
Fate had again thrown her in our path.
Now in these later days, when I have learned to believe in an all-wise protecting Providence, I feel certain it was foreordained that we should meet.
Three days passed. We were still at the guard house. At last the storm spent its fury and the sun rose upon a wondrous scene. As far as the eye could reach in every direction the whole face of the country lay buried under a covering of snow deeper than the height of an ordinary man.
Never have I viewed a grander sight. It was as though we had been raised above Nature and could look down with a calm and critical eye. Here we saw her exhibited on a
