“Hullo!” said the passenger. “Is this the top?” And a moment later—“Good God, how remarkable!”

The mountain tops had marched away to left and right. The head of the Pass was an open square of piercing blue. As they reached it the black cloud drew back like a curtain. In a moment it was behind them and they looked down into another country.

It was a great plateau, high itself, but ringed about with mountains that were crowned in a perpetual snow. It was laced with rivers of snow water. Three lakes of a strange milky green lay across its surface. It stretched bare and golden under a sky that was brilliant as a paladin’s mantle. Upon the plateau and the foot-hills, up to the level of perpetual snow, grew giant tussocks, but there were no forests. Many miles apart, patches of Pinus insignis or Lombardy poplars could be seen and these marked the solitary homesteads of the sheep farmers. The air was clear beyond belief, unbreathed, one would have said, newly poured out from the blue chalice of the sky.

The passenger again lowered the window, which was still wet but steaming now, in the sun. He looked back. The cloud curtain lolled a little way over the mountain barrier and that was all there was to be seen of it.

“It’s a new world,” he said.

The driver stretched out his hand to a pigeon-hole in the dashboard where his store of loose cigarettes joggled together. His leather coat smelt unpleasantly of fish oil. The passenger wished that his journey was over and that he could enter into this new world of which, remaining in the car, he was merely a spectator. He looked at the mountain ring that curved sickle-wide to right and left of the plateau. “Where is Mount Moon?” he asked. The driver pointed sweepingly to the left. “They’ll pick you up at the forks.”

The road, a pale stripe in the landscape, pointed down the centre of the plateau and then far ahead forked towards the mountain ramparts.