Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/281

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where we are going. Do you see?" She pointed before them to where the landscape of another planet seemed to make its appearance in the distant sky of this one. High over the haze of the plain and poised upon blue ether, there hung a fixed apparition of shining white precipices and snow and ragged colossi of gray rock.

"Yonder is where we shall sleep to-night," she said. "That is the Djurdjurra, and now you are going to see how an automobile turns itself into a chamois."

As a matter of fact, they had already begun the long and steep ascent of the foothills. Etienne was busy shifting his gears; and within twenty minutes, as Ogle looked down from the window beside him, the plain seemed to be a long, long distance below. On the road and upon the hillsides, they began now to see people whom he perceived to be more and more unlike those of the plain, for these were of a white-skinned race; there were reddish glints in the hair of some of them, and the faces of the women were tattooed upon brow and chin, but unveiled. Moreover, except for the tattooing, a few of the women were comely in the shabby, gypsy brilliance of their wind-blown draperies; and the shifting groups of them, moving at ease along the skyward edge of the precipi-