Being quite incapable of emulating his companion's chamois method of cutting corners, and striking out a direct line for the summit, he did not succeed in coming up with her till the arduous feat was accomplished,--the Pisgah height attained. Here he found her established on a slab of granite, hands loosely clasped over her knee, helmet tilted a little backward, forming a halo round her head and face. He arrived in a very unheroic state of breathlessness, and she greeted him with a frankly forgiving smile. "That last bit came rather hard on you, I'm afraid. But surely all this makes ample amends." She included in a wide sweep of her arm the superb panorama of hill and valley and far-stretching plain, robed in a haze of its own tierce breath, through which a silver network of rivers could be faintly discerned in the crescent light. Uprising from this blue interminable distance, the first crumplings of the foothills showed like purple velvet, and from these again the giant Himalayas--the "home of the greater gods"--sprang aloft, in a medley of lovely lines and hues, till they reached the uttermost north where the hoar head of Nanga Parbat soared twenty-five thousand feet into the blue. Quita motioned her companion to another rock, a little distance behind her own. "Sit down there, and recover your lost breath," she commanded, gently. "I would rather not talk for the present, if you don't mind. It would jar somehow. I daresay you understand what I mean." He was many leagues removed from understanding: but he obeyed in silence, wondering at himself, no less than at her. And straightway Quita forgot all about him, in the mere rapture of looking, and of feeling in every fibre the incommunicable thrill of dawn. A passionate nobility, freedom, and power breathed from the wide scene. Already a pearly glimmer pulsed along the east; already the mountains were awake and aware. Peak beyond peak, range beyond range, a shadowy pageant of purple and grey, they swept upwards to the far horizon, where the still wonder of the snows shone pale and pure against the dovelike tones of the sky. Away across the valley, where night still brooded, Kalatope ridge, serrated and majestic of outline, made a massive incident of shadow amid the tenderer tints around. The great hushed world seemed holding its breath in expectation of a miracle--the unconsidered miracle of dawn. A Himalayan dawn is brief, as it is beautiful. One after one, the snow-peaks passed from the pallor of death to the glow of life. Then, sudden as an inspiration, the full splendour of morning broke, sublime as the eternity from which it came. Rapier-like shafts of light pierced the purple lengths of shadows that engulfed the valley. Threading their way through fir and deodar and pine, they flung all their radiant length across a rock-studded carpet of fir-needles and moss, and rested, like a caress, upon Quita's face and figure.