It was sunset. The great mountain shapes of glittering, red gold were clear as the profiles of goddesses, against a sky of rose. One--the grandest goddess of all--wore on her proud head a crown of snow which sparkled with diamond coruscations, rainbow-tinted in the pink light. Below her golden forehead hovered a thin cloud-veil, of pale lilac; and we had gone a long way down the mountain before the ineffable colour burned to ashes-of-rose. Then darkness caught and engulfed us, in the Valley of Death. The rushing of the river in its ravine was like the voice of night, not a separate sound at all, for hearing it was to hear the silence. By-and-bye we grew conscious of a faint, gradual revealing of the mountain-tops, which for a time had been black, jagged pieces cut out from the spangled fabric of a starry sky. A ripple of pearly light wavered over them, like the reflection of the unseen river mirrored for the Lady of Shalott. It was a strange, living light, beating with a visible pulse, and it slowly grew until its white radiance had extinguished the individual lamps of the stars. Waterfalls flashed out of darkness, like white, laughing nymphs flinging off black masks and dominoes; silver goblets and diamond necklaces were flung into the river bed, and vanished forever with a mystic gleam. "If there's a heaven, can there be anything in it better than this, Little Pal?" I asked. "There can be God," he said. "I'm a pagan sometimes in the sun, but never on a night like this. Then one _knows_ things one isn't sure of at other times. Why, I suppose there isn't really a world at all! God is simply thinking of these things, and of us, so we and they seem to be. We are his thoughts; the mountains, and the river, and the wild-flowers are his thoughts. It's just as if an author writes a story. In the story, all the people and the things which concern them are real, but you close the volume and they simply don't exist. Only God doesn't close the volume, I think, until the next is ready." "I wonder whether we'll both come into the next story?" "Who knows? Perhaps you'll wander into one story, and I'll get lost in another."