Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson

between sheer walls of rock which climbed above them until the narrow slit of the sky was hundreds of feet away. The trail was rocky, and Covenant had to watch his feet constantly to keep his balance. The effort made the file seem long, but within a couple hundred yards he and Lena came to a crevice that ascended to the right away from the stream. They climbed into and along the crevice. Soon it levelled, then sloped gradually downward for a long way, but it bent enough so that Covenant could not see where he was headed.
At last, the crevice took one more turn and ended, leaving Lena and Covenant on the mountainside high above the river valley. They were facing due west into the declining sun. The river came out of the mountains to their left, and flowed away into the plains on their right. There was a branch of the mountain range across the valley, but it soon shrank into the plains to the north.
“Here is the Mithil,” said Lena. “And there is Mithil Stonedown.” Covenant saw a tiny knot of huts north of him on the east side of the river. “It is not a great distance,” Lena went on, "but the path travels up the valley and then back along the river. The sun will be gone when we reach our Stonedown. Come."
Covenant had an uneasy moment looking down the slope of the mountain- still more than two thousand feet above the valley- but he mastered it, and followed Lena to the south. The mountainside relaxed steadily, and soon the path lay along grassy slopes and behind stern rock buttresses, through dells and ravines, among mazes of fallen boulders. And as the trail descended, the air became deeper, softer, and less crystalline. The smells slowly changed, grew greener; pine and aspen gave way to the loam of the grasslands. Covenant felt that he was alive to every gradation of the change, every nuance of the lowering altitude. Through the excitement of his new alertness, the descent passed quickly. Before he was ready to leave the mountains, the trail rolled down a long hill, found the river, and then swung north along it.
The Mithil was narrow and brisk where the path first joined it, and it spoke with wet rapidity to itself in a voice full of resonances and rumours. But as the river drew toward the plains, it broadened and slowed, became more philosophical in its low, self-communing mutter. Soon its voice no longer filled the air. Quietly it told itself its long tale as it rolled away on its quest for the sea.
Under the spell of the river, Covenant became slowly more conscious of the reassuring solidity of the Land. It was not an intangible dreamscape; it was concrete, susceptible to ascertainment. This was an illusion, of course- a trick of his wracked and smitten mind. But it was curiously comforting. It seemed to promise that he was not walking into horror, chaos that this Land was coherent, manageable, that when he had mastered its laws, its peculiar facts, he would be able to travel unscathed the path of his dream, retain his grip on his sanity. Such thoughts made him feel almost bold as he followed Lena's lithe back, the swaying appeal of her hips:
While Covenant wandered in unfamiliar emotions, the Mithil valley dropped into shadow. The sun crossed behind the western mountains, and though light still glowed on the distant plains, a thin veil of darkness thickened in the valley. As he watched, the rim of the shadow stretched itself high up the mountain on his right, climbing like a hungry tide the shores of day. In the twilight, he sensed his peril sneaking furtively closer to him, though he did not know what it was.
Then the last ridge of the mountains fell into dusk, and the glow on the plains began to fade.
Lena stopped, touched Covenant's arm, pointed. “See,” she said, “here is Mithil Stonedown.”
They stood atop a long, slow hill, and at its bottom were gathered the buildings of the village. Covenant could see the houses quite clearly, although lights already shone faintly behind some of the windows.