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Forsooth there was a track that led through the stony tangle of the wilderness; so they took to the road with a good heart, and went all day, and saw no living thing, and not a blade of grass or a trickle of water: nought save the wan rocks under the sun; and though they trusted in their road that it led them aright, they saw no other glimpse of the Glittering Plain, because there rose a great ridge like a wall on the north side, and they went as it were down along a trench of the rocks, albeit it was whiles broken across by ghylls, and knolls, and reefs.
The trees no longer sighed and moaned with the wind; on the stiffening firs lay beads of frozen snow, and the wind as it passed through them soughed. The ghylls were fuller and louder, and seemed to come from every hill; the gullocks overflowed, but silence was stealing over the streams, and the deeper rivers seemed scarcely to flow. Ralph and Rotha walked side by side to Shoulthwaite Moss.
In a few moments the flock vanished, and he breathed hard as he followed their track up hill. Now and then the dogs barked, but for the most part he heard nothing except the roar of the wind in the crags. He hoped the dogs could find the path across the narrow tableland between two branching ghylls, because it was obvious that his judgment might be at fault.
Of fells and ghylls it consists, of becks and lakes; with here a scattered hamlet and there a solitary hill sheep-farm. It is a country in which sheep are paramount; and every other Dalesman is engaged in that profession which is as old as Abel.
Some cup of dim hills, where a white moon lies, Dropt out of weary skies without a breath In a great pool; a slumb'rous vale beneath, And blue damps prickling into white fire-flies." No sweet-lipped, low-browed Madonnas, no rapt Cecilias, no holy Johns nor meek Stephens, no reeling Satyrs nor vine-clad Bacchantés relieved the eye, weary of mountain ghylls, red-ribbed deserts, and stormy surfage.
The sea was like a hilly country with troughs between the rollers like broad ghylls, Biorn said. He would be a bold man who tried to land there from a boat. The country looked to be low-lying, with a sandy shore blown into small pointed hills.
He wondered how she would choose and his step got slower until he stopped and, sitting on a broken wall, looked up the valley. The day was calm and the sun shone on smooth pasture and yellow corn. The becks had shrunk in the shady ghylls and a thin white line was all that marked the fall where the main stream leaped down the Force Crag.
Mounted on the young horse, he galloped after the mare along the long range of the pikes, in and out of their deep cavernous alcoves, up and down their hillocks and hollows, over bowlders, over streams, across ghylls, through sinking sloughs and with a drizzling rain overhead.
This was well-nigh encompassed by a wall of sheer cliffs; toward the East and the great mountains they drew together till they went near to meet, and left but a narrow path on either side of a stony stream that came rattling down into the Dale: toward the river at that end the hills lowered somewhat, though they still ended in sheer rocks; but up from it, and more especially on the north side, they swelled into great shoulders of land, then dipped a little, and rose again into the sides of huge fells clad with pine-woods, and cleft here and there by deep ghylls: thence again they rose higher and steeper, and ever higher till they drew dark and naked out of the woods to meet the snow-fields and ice-rivers of the high mountains.
A presentiment that he came too late took the joy out of the long-expected sight. Was the sky gloomy? Did a storm threaten? Were the murmuring rivers and the roaring ghylls telling to Robbie's ear the hopeless tale that lay cold and silent at his heart? No! The sun arose and sparkled over the white landscape.
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