and shadowed by great untrimmed hedges, densely woven together. On each
side were turbid streams, and here and there a torrent of water gushed
down the banks, flooding the lane. It was so deep and dark that he could
not get a glimpse of the country through which he was passing, but the
way went down and down to some unconjectured hollow.

Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before its
descent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very
far, all the long way from the know to the unknown. He had come as it
were into the bottom of a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods shut
out the world. From the road behind him, from the road before him, from
the unseen wells beneath the trees, rivulets of waters swelled and
streamed down towards the center to the brook that crossed the lane. Amid
the dead and wearied silence of the air, beneath leaden and motionless
clouds, it was strange to hear such a tumult of gurgling and rushing
water, and he stood for a while on the quivering footbridge and watched
the rush of dead wood and torn branches and wisps of straw, all hurrying
madly past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the barmy froth that had
gathered against a fallen tree.

Then he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher and
higher, till the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming of
swarming hives in summer. He walked some distance on level ground, till
there was a break in the banks and a stile on which he could lean and
look out. He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had
strayed into outland and occult territory. From the eminence of the
lane, skirting the brow of a hill, he looked down into deep valleys and
dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare
hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately
beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside