He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from _Mars V_, too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings. The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship--horizontally. Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal. He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal. "You loved her?" "Once," Bruce said. "She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her." He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it. "'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'" He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back. "They've all been dead quite a while," Bruce said wonderingly. "Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are--are the climbers still climbing--somewhere, Helene?" "Who knows?" Helene answered softly. "Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that." They entered the city. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Highest Mountain, by Bryce Walton