Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/104

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THE ISLE OF SEVEN MOONS
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always harsh they were, though garbed in the raiment of Paradise, always striking the discordant, unholy note, and profaning this shrine of Nature as gargoyles the pure façade of some old-world cathedral. To the wanderer it seemed not only impious but a foreshadowing of impending evil.

He followed the cataract's thunder and came upon a gorge as regularly cleft as though cut by some Olympian battle-axe, and separating Cathedral Woods, on the West, from the last short climb to the summit of the mountain.

Over its edge leapt a white streak of waterfall with a sheer drop of four hundred feet. The almost supernatural beauty of the place, the lack of human companionship, and his lonely lover's dreams, had set the boy to the making of poetic figures, which would have surprised even Captain Fairwinds, and further increased the distrust of Captain Bluster, who with a pachydermic matter-of-factness would have despised such "loony" tendencies. At any other time, in any other place, the boy would have been equally ashamed of himself as a sentimental fool, but he had been transported back a thousand years, his fancy quickened and equipped with all the rich imagery of races in the dawn of the world. So when he gazed down the sheer side of the cliff, with a sudden catch in his throat he saw her face, on the wedding day that was to be, misted in the white wonder of the ever-falling water, and with the vision was born the sobriquet. Not for worlds would he have told it to a soul, had there been any to receive his confidences, nevertheless as "Sally's Bridal Veil" it went down on the chart.

Over the gorge stretched another trace of human occupa-