of a fair land there was a town or thorp in a certain valley. 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. But that was
far away from the pass by the little river into the valley; and the
said river was no drain from the snow-fields white and thick with the
grinding of the ice, but clear and bright were its waters that came
from wells amidst the bare rocky heaths.

The upper end of the valley, where it first began to open out from
the pass, was rugged and broken by rocks and ridges of water-borne
stones, but presently it smoothed itself into mere grassy swellings
and knolls, and at last into a fair and fertile plain swelling up
into a green wave, as it were, against the rock-wall which
encompassed it on all sides save where the river came gushing out of
the strait pass at the east end, and where at the west end it poured
itself out of the Dale toward the lowlands and the plain of the great
river.

Now the valley was some ten miles of our measure from that place of
the rocks and the stone-ridges, to where the faces of the hills drew
somewhat anigh to the river again at the west, and then fell aback