Sara Jeannette Duncan

“ There, without moving, they could watch that magical drifted white picture in the sky, so pure as to be beyond all painting, so lifted up as to be beyond all imagination. A ragged walnut-tree clung to the edge of the cliff; the wind shook the last of its blackening leaves; the vast, wheeling sky was blue and empty, except of the Snows, and the dahlias had trooped to the verge to look, so that the sun shone through their petals with the light of wine. It is their remoteness, their unapproachableness, that make these Himalayan Snows a sanctuary. ”

“ It seemed to close again upon the world. They were in an undulating waste that had once been a stately pleasure-ground, and it had a visible soul that lived upon its memories and was content in its abandonment. It was so still that the great teak leaves, twisted and discoloured and full of holes like battered bronze, dropping singly and slowly through the mellow air, fell at their feet with little rustling cracks.
“What a perfection of silence!” Judith exclaimed softly; and then some vague perception impelled her to talk of other things—of her dinner-party and Nellie Vansittart. ”

“ The luggage was piled and corded on three ekkas behind, and their cross-legged drivers, too, were ready.
‘Chellao!’ she cried, crisply, and Ram Singh imperturbably lifted the reins. The little procession clanked and jingled along the hillside, always tending down, and broke upon the early grey melancholy with a forced and futile cheerfulness, too early, like everything else. As it passed the last of Simla’s little gardens, spread like a pocket-handkerchief on the side of the hill, the lady leaned forward and looked back as if she wished to impress the place upon her memory. ”