Page:Dellada - The Woman and the Priest, 1922.djvu/150

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THE WOMAN AND THE PRIEST

stop too, rigid on his four paws, snuffing the wind and quivering from ears to tail. Luckily all was serene on that windy afternoon, the only moving things in sight being the agile goats climbing on distant rocks, black silhouettes against the blue sky and rosy clouds.

At last they came to a sort of declivity covered with masses of granite, a regular waterfall of rocks balanced one upon another with marvellous precision. Antiochus recognized the place, as he had once been there with his father, and whilst the priest kept to the path, which wound some considerable way round, and the keeper followed him as in duty bound, the boy scrambled down from rock to rock and was the first to reach the hut of the old hunter.

The hut was a ramshackle erection of logs and boughs surrounded by a partly natural enclosure of great boulders, against which the old man, in order to complete this sort of prehistoric fortress, had piled other stones in large numbers. The sun slanted down into this enclosure as into a well: the view was

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