Page:Through South Westland.djvu/30

2 again, and when it grew unbearably hot we sought shelter at a little sun-baked place called Kirwee: just a few houses beside the inn, and a cabin of a railway station alongside the road—for railways and roads share the same wide tracks in the plains. Here we dawdled away the mid-day hours till tea-time, and then as a little breeze sprang up we started to finish the forty-two miles to Mt. Torlesse. The mountains had come into sight now. At first blue and featureless, then blacker and browner, the deeper valleys like splashes of purple. The first sight of their snowy tops made one forget the plains and the dusty road; our spirits rose, and we cantered fast along the wide, grassy margin. But we had lingered too long, and as we rode over an endlessly straight stretch, marked by clumps of black fir trees at regular intervals, the sudden-falling dusk came about us. The plain spread like a tawny sea to the foot-hills pushing out their purple headlands in cape and promontory:

Beyond lay a dead-white wall—a ghostly barrier of snow—between two purple ranges. All nearer objects became black and indistinct. Suddenly, behind the dead-white wall an orange light grew up, palpitating up and up past the zenith, till the night clouds overhead blazed out