approaching each other so closely at their towering summits that trees
growing in opposite clefts of the rock intermingled their branches and
pointed the soaring Gothic arch of a stupendous gateway. She raised her
eyes with a quickly beating heart. She knew that the interlacing trees
above her were as large as those she had just quitted; she knew also
that the point where they met was only half-way up the cliff, for she
had once gazed down upon them, dwindled to shrubs from the airy summit;
she knew that their shaken cones fell a thousand feet perpendicularly,
or bounded like shot from the scarred walls they bombarded. She
remembered that one of these pines, dislodged from its high foundations,
had once dropped like a portcullis in the archway, blocking the pass,
and was only carried afterwards by assault of steel and fire. Bending
her head mechanically, she ran swiftly through the shadowy passage, and
halted only at the beginning of the ascent on the other side.
It was here that the actual position of the plateau, so indefinite
of approach, began to be realized. It now appeared an independent
elevation, surrounded on three sides by gorges and watercourses, so
narrow as to be overlooked from the principal mountain range, with which
it was connected by a long canyon that led to the ridge. At the outlet
of this canyon--in bygone ages a mighty river--it had the appearance of
having been slowly raised by the diluvium of that river, and the debris
washed down from above--a suggestion repeated in miniature by the
artificial plateaus of excavated soil raised before the mouths of mining
tunnels in the lower flanks of the mountain. It was the realization of a
fact--often forgotten by the dwellers in Eagle's Court--that the valley
below them, which was their connecting link with the surrounding world,
was only reached by ascending the mountain, and the nearest road was
over the higher mountain ridge. Never before had this impressed itself
so strongly upon the young girl as when she turned that morning to look
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