Out there men toiled at fishing; the woods echoed with the ring of
their axes and the thin twanging of their saws; there would be the
clank of machinery and the hiss of steam. But it was all hidden and
muffled in those vast distances. He swung on his heel. Far below, the
houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of
smoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself,
winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip of
level, fertile, timbered land, abutted upon by mountains that shamed
the Alps for ruggedness,--mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomy
crevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewed
foaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer.
"Where the hill-heads split the tide
Of green and living air,
I would press Adventure hard
To her deepest lair.
I would let the world's rebuke
Like a wind go by,
With my naked soul laid bare
To the naked sky."
Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves long
before, those lines rose to Hollister's lips.
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