Behold him, entered on his last three weeks, toiling up a mountain pass, his shirt open at the chest and his tightly strapped trousers somewhat the worst for dust--a fine figure of a man in a thin, fiery way, with singularly child-like eyes set in a network of wrinkles--the result of having spent his thirty odd years with a lavish though fastidious hand. Sickened suddenly of the ordered olive slopes, he went on and up till he had left the sleek country behind him, and entered the region that looks like a burnt-out landscape of the moon. At last he came to the mouth of a gorge, one side of it rising up sheer into the sunlight, while the other seemed to hang to the earth like a dark curtain. Looking up, Bernardy saw, perched at the rim of the sunlit cliff, a little town. In some places its sloping flanks were built right over the edge, as though they had been poured out, while molten, from a giant spoon. It was so many hundred feet above him that he could only just distinguish it was a town, and not a mere huddle of pale-hued boulders; so high it gave the effect of being on the edge of the world. Bernardy knew, beyond a doubt, that he must attain this town, and he cast about to find a way. Obviously there must be a track on the other side, as the cliff was bare of so much as a shrub, and yet no path was to be discerned on its scarred and abrupt surface. Eventually Bernardy made his way round a fold of gorge and up a steep, winding track to a gently sloping stretch of country that led up to the town from behind. Throwing himself upon the short, thorn-entangled grass, he locked his hands behind his head and gazed under half-shut lids at the little town which he now saw dark against the sky. He lay, idly counting the towers of it, till his lids grew too heavy to stay open, and his fingers fell apart, and with his head pillowed on his arm, he slept. When he awoke the day was at its brief height, and he scrambled to his feet with an odd feeling that was more than a mere sense of rest. It was as though a sponge had been deftly passed over his mind, leaving it a clean, smooth surface, ready to receive new impressions, unbiased by anything that was past, the confiding, expectant attitude of a young child. He had forgotten nothing, it was rather that all his old arrangement of values had been swept aside, leaving him free to assess things anew. And, although, for all he could remember, his sleep had been dreamless, yet he was haunted by half-recollections which pricked at and eluded him. As he went towards the town something in the sweeping lines of the fortifications seemed vaguely familiar, and again fragments of a dream, at which he snatched in vain, floated by him.