He was the one strong human thing
in this place of remote skies and dumb unfeeling earth.
It was late afternoon when the Fort came in sight. A flicker of
animation burst up in them as they saw the square of its long, low
walls, crowning an eminence above the stream. The bottom lay wide at
its feet, the river slipping bright through green meadows sprinkled
with an army of cattle. In a vast, irregular circle, a wheel of life
with the fort as its hub, spread an engirdling encampment. It was
scattered over plain and bottom in dottings of white, here drawn close
in clustering agglomerations, there detached in separate spatterings.
Coming nearer the white spots grew to wagon hoods and tent roofs, and
among them, less easy to discern, were the pointed summits of the
lodges with the bunched poles bristling through the top. The air was
very still, and into it rose the straight threads of smoke from
countless fires, aspiring upwards in slender blue lines to the bluer
sky. They lifted and dispersed the smell of burning wood that comes to
the wanderer with a message of home, a message that has lain in his
blood since the first man struck fire and turned the dry heap of sticks
to an altar to be forever fixed as the soul of his habitation.
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