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Updated: May 29, 2025
It was on that same morning that the news reached Cliff Castle, where similar stories had floated about witches and warlocks having taken possession of the shivering hills, where the slatey rocks were always falling, and forming what the country people called screes, which, at a distance, when wet and shiny, looked in the sunshine like cascades descending from on high.
At least, so it struck me then: and, thinking it, there was a hiss in my breath, as I went up into what more and more acquired the character of a mountain pass, with points of almost Alpine savagery: for after I had skirted the edge of a deep glen on the left, the slopes changed in character, heather was on the mountain-sides, a fretting beck sent up its noise, then screes, and scars, and a considerable waterfall, and a landscape of crags; and lastly a broad and rather desolate summit, palpably nearer the clouds.
There is not a young man or graybeard in the village but can tell of the crags and crests of the mountain, of its crevasses and caves, of its torrents and screes, whether now he knows it from his own experience or from hearsay.
"Wheariver there's screes There's mair stones nor trees." The further sally provoked a louder laugh. Just then another gust came down the chimney and sent a wave of mingled heat and cold through the room. The windows rattled louder with the wind and crackled sharper with the pelting sleet. The dogs rose and growled. "Be quiet there," cried Ralph. "Down, Laddie, down."
The rocks and screes with their steep beds of withered heather made dark scrawls and scratches on the white; the smoke from the farmhouses rose bluish against the snowy wall of fell; and the river, amid the silence of the muffled roads and paths, seemed the only audible thing in the valley.
If I could only keep my lead till I reached a certain corner I knew of, I could outwit my enemy; for it was possible from that place to make a detour behind a waterfall and get into a secret path of ours among the bushes. I flew up the steep screes, not daring to look round; but at the top, where the rocks begin, I had a glimpse of my pursuer. The man could run.
The old gentleman, he said, went louping over wet spots and great stones, and scraffling over crags and screes, till you would have thought he was some kin to a Herdwick sheep. Charlotte laughed heartily at this point. "It is just the way Sedgwick goes on. He led father and me exactly such a chase one day last June." "I dare say he did. I remember you looked like it. Go on."
The discovery brought me to my feet, and set me running towards the end of the shaft of sunlight. I left the heather, scrambled up some yards of screes, and had a difficult time on some very smooth slabs, where only the friction of tweed and rough rock gave me a hold. Slowly I worked my way towards the speck of sunlight, till I found a handhold, and swung myself into the crack.
The great muscular fellow dropped at once, seating himself upon the slope and digging his heels into the loose screes to keep from sliding down. "There y'are," he growled. "Now, then," said Aleck, "what do you want to say?" "Only about you coming along here to-day. You warn't trying to spy out nowt, was yer?" "No," cried Aleck; "of course I wasn't.
After a while the way grew better, though here and there, where the cliffs lowered, were wide screes of loose stones that they must needs climb up and down.
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