The next day we tracked across a glacier-like expanse littered with large blocks of sandstone.

It was a grim spot.

A horrible, stony, treeless waste which might have been the birthplace of the earth and the scene of Creation--a tableland between great mountains, full of masses of rhodonite contorted into grotesque shapes of stone images; a place where our lightest whispers came shouting back out of the profound stillness from the huge castellated black rocks bristling on the edge of a precipice which slit the valley from end to end.
"It was there we found Doyne, staggering along the lip of the gorge.

He had gone mad in the solitude, and was wandering along bareheaded, tossing his arms in the air as he walked.

When I saw him I thought of Cain trying to escape from the wrath of God after killing Abel.