For sundry nights and days abode Gro and Mevrian in that place, hunting at whiles to get their sustenance, drinking of the sweet spring-water, sleeping a-nights she in her cave beneath the holly bushes and the rowans beside the waterfall, he in a cleft of the rocks a little below in the gully, where the moss made cushions soft and resilient as the great stuffed beds in Carcë. In those days she told him of her farings since that night of April when she escaped out of Krothering: how first she found harbourage at By in Westmark, but hearing in a day or two of a hue and cry fled east again, and sojourning awhile beside Throwater came at length about a month ago upon this cave beside the little fountain, and here abode. Her mind had been to win over the mountains to Galing, but she had after the first attempt given over that design, for fear of companies of the enemy whose hands she barely escaped when she came forth into the lower valleys that open on the eastern coast-lands. So she had turned again to this hiding place in the hills, as secret and remote as any in Demonland. For this dale she let him know was Neverdale, where no road ran save the way of the deer and the mountain goats, and no garth opened on that dale, and the reek of no man’s hearthstone burdened the winds that blew thither. And that gable-crested peak at the head of the dale was the southernmost of the Forks of Nantreganon, nursery of the vulture and the eagle. And a hidden way was round the right shoulder of that peak, over the toothed ridge by Neverdale Hause to the upper waters of Tivarandardale. On an afternoon of sultry summer heat it so befell that they rested below the hause on a bastion of rock that jutted from the south-western slope. Beneath their feet precipices fell suddenly away from a giddy verge, sweeping round in a grand cirque above which the mountain rose like some Tartarian fortress, ponderous, cruel as the sea and sad, scarred and gashed with great lines of cleavage as though the face of the mountain had been slashed away by the axe-stroke of a giant. In the depths the waters of Dule Tarn slept placid and fathomless.