Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/25

  less harsh—the elevating effect of a cannibal upon a Covenanter!—another inversion in this hallucinating country where the only actuality seemed the rapping of our little hammers.

"This girl, as I say, implored MacFarlane not to go on; for Vinckers and me she did not care; none of the women had much fancied us, while MacFarlane's lack of comeliness was almost bizarre; they were obedient, of course—but that was about all.

"MacFarlane leered up at the great forbidding mountain as it thrust against the dome of the sky its summit of snowy quartz, a-glisten in the bright sunlight thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. A cauld slope yon—too cauld for a lass in naething but a kiltie. Ye'd best bide here 'til I come.' He spoke to her in the vernacular, with which we were all three familiar, and told her to await his return.

"It was hot in that valley—a stewpan, withering, stifling with the equatorial reek which [ 9 ]