* * * * * There was a slim moon in the west above the Canon Country. The skies were softly alight, high and vaulted, deep and mysterious and sweet. World-silence, profound as eternity, hung tangibly above Lost Valley and the Wall, the eastern ramparts of the shelving mountains, the rocklands at the north. There was little sound in all this sleeping wilderness. Bird life was rare. The waters that fell at seasons from the open mouths of the canyons half way up the Rockface were dried. Down in the Valley itself there could be seen the lights of Corvan which never went out from dusk to dawn. Far to the north a black blot might have been visible with a fuller moon--Courtrey's herds bedded on the range, the only stock in the Valley so privileged. Along the foot of the Rockface in the early evening a tiny procession had crawled, three burros, their pack-saddles empty save for a couple of sacks tied across each, and a weazened form that followed them--Old Pete, the snow-packer, bound on his nightly journey to the Canon Country for the bags of snow for the cooling of the Golden Cloud's refreshments. He was a little old man, grotesque and misshapen, yet he followed briskly after the burros, which were the fastest travelers of their kind in the land. He rolled on his bandy legs and kept the little animals on a constant trot with the wisp of stick he carried and the deep, harsh cries that heralded his coming for a mile ahead and sent the echoes reverberating between the canyon walls. A little north of Corvan he had followed the Rockface close for a distance, then suddenly turned back on his tracks and disappeared, burros and all. This was the invisible entrance to the Canon Country, a narrow mouth that opened sidewise into the very breast of the thousand-foot Wall and led back along a thin sheet of rock that stood between the gorge and the Valley. The floor of this cut or canyon, which was so narrow that the laden burros had a "narrow squeak" to pass, as Pete said, lifted sharply. It rose smoothly underfoot in the pitch darkness, for the cut was roofed in the living rock five hundred feet above, and climbed for a mile. It was a dead, flat place, without sound, for the footsteps of the burros and the man fell dully on the soft and sliding floor, and it seemed to have no acoustic properties.