But this thought was, in a sense, as superficial as her fears; for in
her soul there lived a perfect faith. Through all her grief and
jealousy and anger and despair she had never entirely lost the pure
light of her star. She never doubted deeply that her love would
triumph, even when reason told her that it had already failed; and the
very words with which she had consented to leave the Park by the last
stage were hollow, though they contained a prayer. She had prayed for
a miracle; and the miracle had happened. Why should she be afraid?
So she was not surprised when the Twin Sisters welcomed her without so
much as a gentle puff of wind upon her cheek; when the Devil's Chair,
though she held her breath at sight of what lay below, was scarce more
difficult than the ridge in Paradise Park; and when the central
waste, where the storm had leaped on Haig, held no evil in store for
her. The only obstacles encountered were those presented by the trail
itself; and these, as Smythe had told her, though by no means trivial,
were not insurmountable to one with a clear eye and steady nerves. It
was never the trail itself that was deadly; it was the wind that would
blow her into a chasm, the mist that would decoy her from the path,
and the storm that would beat her down among the stones. But there was
no wind, no mist, no storm; and if that was not a miracle--
Several times, to be sure, she missed the trail: once in the second
field of loose stones, before she had become accustomed to the signs;
once on a wide floor of solid rock, where Tuesday slipped and fell,
and she rose a little stunned, and in a brief confusion; and once, the
most alarming of all, when she was for half an hour lost in that
granite wilderness that to Haig had suggested a cemetery of the gods.
But faith sustained her, and her purpose stood in the stead of courage
that might have faltered and even failed. The one moment when
something like despair struck at her heart was that when she found the
bruised and dirty saddle cast aside by the runaway, and thought at
first that it was Philip's; and the one moment of real terror was that
in which, on the summit of the last ridge, she looked back and saw
that dark gray vapors were surging up out of the chasm below the
Devil's Chair.
It chanced that in following the trail from the sharp turn on the last
rock floor to the brink of the cliff (the last pyramid stands some
fifty yards back from it), Marion arrived at about the same distance
to the left of the drop-off as Haig had brought up at the right of
it. From this point even less of the meadow was visible than Haig had
seen at the first view, and the mass of fallen and tumbled granite
appeared even more formidable. Her immediate sensation was of tragic
despair, as the evidence of her eyes for one instant overwhelmed her
faith. But where was Philip? And Sunnysides?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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