My breathing, laboured in the thinning air, of a mountain pass by man forgotten, rasped forth across bleak fields of stones which were not softened by the roseate kiss of morning's sun. Up I climbed on paths not trodden by human foot in a span of time that defies the use of years. My prececessors in this climb were not men but antedeluvian priests with snake-like scales and wattles like an ancient hen. Basilisks were the remotest derivations of the potent evil that they were. Yet they are gone. After the priests were man-like reptiles and after them were dwarves with yellow eyes and beards like bramble bushes. More man-like were the elves that followed them and less man-like the goblins that supplanted them.

     Ancient peoples knew this place, a garden of glittering stone pillars atop a windswept mountain plateau, but never had a man walked there. . . but me. Across the windy steppe dust blew that glittered as if stars themselves bound to orbit about that earthly place. My eyes burned with the beauty of it and teared that I alone of all men had seen this sight. Vast was the plateau and clouded in its sparkling mantle it hid its sights from me.

     Far distant at the end of a line of obelisks which marched into the West and were like unto pillars that might hold up the very firmament were to great broken heaps like the feet of an impossible colossus that might have reared itself half again as high as the peak upon which it stood... upon which it never stood... nothing built by any race could have been so great.

     To the South there rose a wall that seemed composed of jewel-like tile with threads of ivory that streamed between creating images that were not quite murals, pictures that subtly changed even as I watched. Endless it seemed, time-worn but untouched by the ravaging hand of age as well, a paradox, beautiful, mystifying and somehow chilling. North there stood a great tree with branches asymetrical and somehow unnatural as though they were man-made or made by nature before it fled the realm of rigid mathematical regularity. But how great was the tree. I peered and could not decide. Was it near and rather smaller than the gigantic architecture that reared itself at the other compass points? Was it far and more immense than my vision could accommodate? The glittering motes that swirled about me confounded my vision that I might never know.

     And to the East of me there reared a pyramid? So vast a construction upon this lofty peak? Was all illusion or were our predecessors, our forbears, so much greater than we?

     I turned to leave a place so far beyond my scope of understanding and found the path vanished behind me. Poised there upon the knife's edge between an ancient world and the one I had always known I found myself paralyzed. I knew that if I should turn again that I never could turn back and knew that I might stand here for then thousand centuries, as timeless as this place, and still not take a step.