For I consider
that scenery depends not so much on height as on abruptness.
It is an evil, depressing place. Far as the eye can reach up the glen
and to the right it is one horrid waste of grey granite; here and there
a streak of yellow grass or a patch of black bog; not a tree nor a
shrub within the sky-line. On a hot summer's day it is wearisome enough
for the lonely angler to listen to the river crawling lazily through
the rocks that choke his bed, mingled with the clocking of some
water-moved boulder, and the chick-chick of the stonechat, or the scream
of the golden plover overhead. But on a wild winter's evening, when day is
fast giving place to night, and the mist shrouds the hill, and the wild
wind is rushing hoarse through tor and crag, it becomes awful and
terrible in the extreme.
On just such a night as that, at that time when it becomes evident that
the little light we have had all day is about to leave us, a lonely
watcher was standing by the angry swelling river in the most desolate
part of the pass, at a place where a vast confusion of formless rocks
crosses the stream, torturing it into a hundred boiling pools and
hissing cascades.
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