Free Chiffon Scarf by Mignon Good Eberhart Page B

horizons. It was like a great plate spread out below.
    There ought to be the shapes of trees. There ought to be towns and lights and blotches of shadow that marked vegetation. New Orleans ought to be somewhere near, or the bayou stretching silver fingers inland.
    She caught her breath abruptly. The sun had tipped over the horizon, and it was behind them. And there were jagged peaks lifting up into the sky ahead of them.
    Peaks which, when the sun touched them, leaped into crimson—a soft crimson, red as blood against the pale sky.
    Mountains?
    They looked like something out of a phantasmagory. Out of magic. Out of fairy tales. An enchanted range, shimmering crimson against the sky.
    The shining crimson peaks were unutterably beautiful. They were at the same time a little terrifying.
    The main thing was, however, that they ought not to have been there.

Chapter 7
    W HERE WERE THEY, THEN ; above all, what had happened while they slept?
    She turned again, anxiously, wondering why no one else stirred and shared her alarm.
    But no one moved: no one was awake. Pace was still hunched in his rug behind her; Dorothy an inert mass across the aisle. Averill, Creda in the seat beyond Averill; Noel opposite Creda with his adventurer’s profile sunk in the collar of his coat—none of them moved. Even the boyish steward slept, with his curly blond head tipped back and his mouth open.
    Jim must be in front with the pilot.
    She looked out the window again and the mountains were still there, except the plane must have changed direction a little for their position had moved and they were much nearer.
    The plane must be going very fast. She tried to estimate roughly the speed of the engine and could not; to her untutored ears there was merely a smooth steady drone.
    There was still desert below and they must be very high; but once when the light struck just right, she caught a glimmer of reflected light as from water in a crisscross, checkerboard pattern. Irrigation ditches—it must be.
    What could have happened during the night? They must be miles off their course.
    Again she turned to seek some explanation and again no one stirred.
    She must arouse them, find Jim.
    She was cold; absently she pulled her heavy coat closer around her; she’d lost the chiffon scarf—she groped for it and forgot it.
    For the mountains vanished. They had turned, then, southward. Or were they simply flying in a great circle?
    She glued her face to the window; they must be flying at considerable speed, for when next she saw the mountains they had changed—they were no longer chimerical, beautiful, magical. They were now rocky peaks dotted halfway up with green scrub pine, all brown and green except those bare , rocky peaks which still had a kind of crimson glow. They were clearly discernible now as mountains, mountains of the earth and of the three dimensions. But Eden was never to forget her first, poignant impression of unearthliness, of beauty and, oddly, of terror.
    They rose again, high into the clear sky; the air was dry and there was not too much of it; she had an impulse to gulp for breath; her nose felt dry and her throat stung. They were crossing some of those peaks now.
    She must rouse the others; she must go forward and find Jim.
    Undoubtedly the pilot knew where they were going. There was certainty in the speed with which they drove ahead. Jim, who must be with the pilot—who perhaps was piloting the plane—must know, then, too. And that circle, she thought suddenly, had meant that the pilot was looking for an opening, a pass, and had found it.
    The peaks were like a wall, like a barrier. She had a fantastic notion that when they crossed that crimson, jagged wall they crossed from a known world where there were rules into a world that was strange and where anything might happen.
    Moments must have passed; she felt suspended, as if in a spell, as if she dared not move while they crossed that barrier. She liked flying and was accustomed to it. But