Falk's yellow eyes lit up suddenly, and his face became intense. "Below the white is blue, and below that the—the lines—the hills far away—"

Parth looked at him, saying nothing. A great part of all he knew had come straight from her, for she had always been the one who could teach him. The remaking of his life had been an effect and a part of the growth of her own. Their minds were very closely interwoven.

"I see it—have seen it. I remember it," the man stammered.

"A projection, Falk?"

"No. Not from a book. In my mind. I do remember it. Sometimes going to sleep I see it. I didn't know its name: the Mountain."

"Can you draw it?"

Kneeling beside her he sketched quickly in the dust the outline of an irregular cone, and beneath it two lines of foothills. Garra craned to see the sketch, asking, "And it's white with snow?"

"Yes. It's as if I see it through something—a big window, big and high up…Is it from your mind, Parth?" he asked a little anxiously.

"No," the girl said. "None of us in the House have ever seen high mountains. I think there are none this side of the Inland River. It must be far from here, very far." She spoke like one on whom a chill had fallen.

Through the edge of dreams a sawtooth sound cut, a faint jagged droning, eerie. Falk roused and sat up beside Parth; both gazed with strained, sleepy eyes northward where the remote sound throbbed and faded and first light paled the sky above the darkness of the trees. "An aircar," Parth whispered. "I heard one once before, long ago…" She shivered. Falk put his arm around her shoulders, gripped by the same unease, the sense of a remote, uncomprehended, evil presence passing off there in the north through the edge of daylight.

The sound died away; in the vast silence of the Forest a few birds piped up for the sparse dawn-chorus of autumn.