I had on this day a very full view of the arrangement of the valley from end to end. You remember the large square in which on the second day we had seen the men drilled, and in which on the day after we had witnessed our host’s wonderful disappearance and reappearance. You remember also the broad walk which led from the eastern stairway to the square. Very well; at the further end of the square that walk was continued. It was the same breadth all the way through, and it was planted with trees and with flowering shrubs, mostly of a kind which I had never seen elsewhere. On each side of it narrower ways branched off, leading to houses of the same style as those in which Jack and I were lodged. There was an air of trimness and regularity about the whole but no beauty. I can imagine one looking at the scene and pronouncing it stiff and formal and nothing more. But as I looked I felt that if there was no beauty there was at least an eerie suggestiveness that took the place of beauty. Seen from above, as we saw, even trimness and regularity have an odd look. But after all the trimness and regularity of the scene were its least remarkable characteristics. The frowning hills with rampart-like ridges between them that might be walls or that might be natural embankments; the silence broken only by the whirr of our motion through the air, for there was no bird in the valley from end to end, and indeed no living creature of any sort except its human (if they were human) inhabitants, and I think a few snakes; the uncouth aspect of the chimneyless and smokeless houses; the absence of every object that might remind one of the cares and pleasures of life: no garden, or orchard, or playground, no child or woman;—all this formed altogether a picture as unearthly and inhuman as the barren surface of the moon. The odd-looking trees and shrubs which, as I have told you, were planted along the roadway, made this worse and not better. Their approach to naturalness made the unnaturalness of all the rest only the more apparent. Besides, their very presence made you feel that it was not nature, as on the surface of the moon, which caused the silence and desolation, but some foul and maleficent influence which was external to nature. The broad walk and the rows of houses both ended abruptly, abutting upon a belt of timber artificially planted. The trees were like the blue gum, they were so close together that no passage between them was possible, and as far as I could judge the intervals from tree to tree were quite equal and regular. This plantation extended a good way up the cliff on both sides, and it was a hundred yards across, or more. Beyond it was a space of about twenty feet, and then another row of trees of quite a different kind, and like nothing that I had ever seen. But as far as I could guess from such a height the leaves were as thick as the gum leaves, but in other ways much larger. This row of trees was nearly of the same depth as