“But my name is Tony after all,” he said to himself as he went home, full of sad memories of the Mace and the Great Seal. “I wonder where the Blue Mountain is?”
Young Tony thought a good deal about poor Henry Birkbeck’s prophecy. Perhaps the Great Seal had stamped it on his memory. Anyway he could not forget it, and all the next day he was wandering about on the steep edge of the town, looking out over the landscape below. It was not an interesting landscape. All round the brown hill where the town was lay the vast forests of green trees, something like bamboos, whose fruit the people ate; and beyond that one could see the beginnings of a still larger forest, where none of the people of Antioch had ever dared to go—the forest, whose leaves were a hundred times as big as the King himself, and the trunks of the trees as big as whole countries. Above all was the blue sky—but, look as Tony would, he could see no blue mountain.
Then suddenly he saw the largest forest shake and shiver—its enormous leaves swaying this way and that.
“It must be an earthquake,” said Tony, trembling, but he did not run away. And his valour was rewarded as valour deserves to be.
