jet-diggers and quarrymen. In the cave lay a small herd of cattle,
though for what purpose put there I cannot guess; and in the
jet-excavations I found nothing. A little further south is the chief
alum-region, as at Sandsend, but as soon as I saw a works, and the great
gap in the ground like a crater, where the lias is quarried, containing
only heaps of alum-shale, brushwood-stacks, and piles of cement-nodules
extracted from the lias, I concluded that here could have been found no
hiding; nor did I purposely visit the others, though I saw two later.
From round Whitby, and those rough moors, I went on to Darlington, not
far now from my home: but I would not continue that way, and after two
days' indecisive lounging, started for Richmond and the lead mines
about Arkengarth Dale, near Reeth. Here begins a region of mountain,
various with glens, fells, screes, scars, swards, becks, passes,
villages, river-heads, and dales. Some of the faces which I saw in it
almost seemed to speak to me in a broad dialect which I knew. But they
were not numerous in proportion: for all this country-side must have had
its population multiplied by at least some hundreds; and the villages
had rather the air of Danube, Levant, or Spanish villages. In one, named
Marrick, I saw that the street had become the scene either of a great
battle or a great massacre; and soon I was everywhere coming upon men
and women, English and foreign, dead from violence: cracked heads,
wounds, unhung jaws, broken limbs, and so on. Instead of going direct to
the mines from Reeth, that waywardness which now rules my mind, as
squalls an abandoned boat, took me somewhat further south-west to the
village of Thwaite, which I actually could not enter, so occupied with
dead was every spot on which the eye rested a hundred yards about it.
Not far from here I turned up, on foot now, a very steep, stony road to
the right, which leads over the Buttertubs Pass into Wensleydale, the
day being very warm and bright, with large clouds that looked like
lakes of molten silver giving off grey fumes in their centre, casting