What had been a torment became a torture. She
turned Sarchedon homeward, but scarcely had faced that way when she wheeled
him again. She rode slowly and she rode swiftly. The former was hateful
because it held her back--from what she no longer dared think; the latter was
fearful because it hurried her on swiftly, irresistibly to her fate.
Lin Slone had changed his camp and had chosen a pass high up where the great
walls had began to break into sections. Here there was intimacy with the sheer
cliffs of red and yellow. Wide avenues between the walls opened on all points
of the compass, and that one to the north appeared to be a gateway down into
the valley of monuments. The monuments trooped down into the valley to spread
out and grow isolated in the distance. Slone's camp was in a clump of cedars
surrounding a spring. There was grass and white sage where rabbits darted in
and out.
Lucy did not approach this camp from that roundabout trail which she had made
upon the first occasion of her visiting Slone. He had found an opening in the
wall, and by riding this way into the pass Lucy cut off miles.
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