.

"THE DRUMS OF DESTINY".
Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction.

Of human life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none.
Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and home--Norhala had stamped flat.

She had crushed them within the rock--even as she had promised.
The tremendous tragedy had absorbed my every faculty; I had had no time to think of my companions; I had forgotten them.

Now in the painful surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength.