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All the ambition in the adventurer's soul warmed to the prospect. To be high in authority among this fine race, part-ruler over this splendid country, sport in abundance, and that of the most enthralling kind war occasionally; to dwell, too, in the strong revivifying air of these grand uplands! Why, a man might live forever under such conditions. And the other side of the picture what was it?
That is better, is it not, to people the fat meadows of the Thames valley and the healthy downs and uplands of Sussex and Berkshire than to go hunting for elbow-room among the flies and fevers of the tropics? We have somewhere to go to, now, better than the scrub and the veldt and the thorn-jungles."
Nearer, it fell on the rich gold of ripening wheat that lay in the valley or gleamed like golden crowns on the level space at the very summits of high hills; nearer still it touched with spring-like brilliancy the level green of meadows that clothed other uplands, where groups of Jersey cattle grazed beneath the shade of graceful elms; yet nearer it caught the rich foliage of blossoming chestnut trees and lit them up like crowns of ermine.
Once on the plateau I would be inside the white man's lines. Down here in the plains I was in the country of my enemies. Arcoll meant to fight on the uplands when it came to fighting. The black man might rage as he pleased in his own flats, but we stood to defend the gates of the hills. Therefore over the Berg I must be before morning, or there would be a dead man with no tales to tell.
As we rode on, and from the top of a hill got a fair view of the great sea off at the east, Robert Pike bade me notice a little bay, around which I could see four or five small, peaked huts or tents, standing just where the white sands of the beach met the green line of grass and bushes of the uplands.
Let us therefore suffer the old Norman chronicler to transport our imaginations to the fair Sussex scenery, north-west of Hastings, with its breezy uplands, its grassy slopes, and ridges of open down swelling inland from the sparkling sea, its scattered copses, and its denser glades of intervening forests, clad in all the varied tints of autumn, as they appeared on the morning of the fourteenth of October, seven hundred and eighty- five years ago.
One evening, at last, as I sat outside my hut, gazing over the rolling emerald uplands, I had my reward. I almost fainted when first I realized it in the extremity of my joy and thankfulness. Very faintly, just as I had heard it that night when first I came to the hermitage, I heard now the mystic, bell-like music that had guided my footsteps thither.
The river Ouse meanders through a wide, fertile flat, or what the Scotch would call a strath, which gently rises on each side into pleasantly undulating uplands.
This was not only a happy temperamental trait, but it also had a distinct advantage, for in the moments of deepest self-invited degradation he never forgot that somewhere ahead, his trail would surely lead to the uplands once again. He was what the doctors called "normal human," muscled far above the average, heart action strong and regular.
Yet into the cauldron of boiling water a little stream of cold water, from the melting snow of the uplands, ran unceasingly. Since 1888 this great geyser has been inactive.
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