Before I could master my surprise, she had mastered herself: and,
turning, resumed her way. For the next twenty minutes we descended
in silence, while the dawn, breaking above the roofed pines, filtered
down to us and filled the spaces between their trunks with a brownish
haze. By-and-by, when the slope grew easier and flattened itself out
to form the bottom of the basin, these pines gave place to a chestnut
wood, and the carpet of slippery needles to a tangled undergrowth
taller than a very tall man: and here, in a clearing beside the
track, we came on a small hut with a ruinous palisade beside it,
fencing off a pen or courtyard of good size--some forty feet square,
maybe.
The Princess halted, and I halted a few paces from her, studying the
hut. It was built of pine-logs sawn lengthwise in half and set
together with their untrimmed bark turned outwards: but the most of
their bark had peeled away with age. It had two square holes for
windows, and a doorway, but no door. Its shingle roof had buckled
this way and that with the rains, and had taken on a tinge of grey
which the dawn touched to softest silver.
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