So she came to the foot of Heleval itself, and started to climb the steep slope of short grass, slippery as polished board, which led up to the rock pinnacle above; the hillside twinkled with the white scuts of rabbits racing up before her to their holes, as round the side of the mountain came their enemy, perhaps the last kite in the island, glittering in the sun as only a glede can, till the beautiful cowardly creature caught sight of Fiona and swept away across the valley. She passed the great cairn where the hill foxes live, and began the last climb to the pinnacle of rock that fronts the flat crest of the mountain. And now something white on the rock, which she had noticed from below without taking account of, began to become insistent. It could not possibly be a patch of snow yet, she thought. Perhaps the shepherd had hung a sheepskin there. But no sheepskin was ever so white.
Then she came up near the pinnacle, and saw. Standing upright against it was a girl, not much older than herself. Her long dark hair blew back over the rock; her white body was half hidden in a trembling veil of white light, which shimmered and played all about her, waving with every breath of the wind. Her face was beautiful and cold, like a frosty moonrise; her eyes shone like the drip of phosphorescent water under the stars.
"You have come at last," said the girl. "Every day for many days I have watched for you."
"Who are you, you beautiful girl?" asked Fiona.
"I am an Oread," said the girl. "I am the spirit of Heleval."
"I have heard," said Fiona, "that long ago people used to believe that everything had a spirit of its own, mountains and rivers and trees. Is it true then?"
"It _was_ true," said the girl. "The world was full of my sisters, once. There were the Naiads in the streams, and the Hamadryads in the woods, and we, the Oreads, in the mountains. Men were wiser and simpler in those days. But now my sisters are nearly all gone. When a tree has become so many cubic feet of timber, how can it shelter a Dryad? When a stream is merely so many units of waterpower, how can a Naiad dwell there? Only the barren mountains, if they contain neither gold nor iron, have been left unappraised and unexploited; and a few Oreads still linger here and there. Once in a while a man fancies that he sees one of us; then he must climb and climb till the day he dies, hoping to see her indeed; down in your world people call him mountain mad."