The rutted road, dipping and climbing toilfully against the shouldering
of great tumbled boulders, or winning for itself but narrow foothold over
slippery ridges, was thawed clear of snow; but the cold soft peril yet
lay upon its flanks thick enough for a wintry plunge of ten feet, or may
be fifty where the edge of the causeway fell over to the lower furrows
of the ravine. It was a matter of policy to go with caution, and a thing
of some moment to hear the thud and splintering of little distant
icefalls about one in the darkness. Now and again a cold arrow of wind
would sing down from the frosty peaks above or jerk with a squiggle of
laughter among the fallen slabs in the valley. And these were the only
voices to prick me on through a dreariness lonely as death.

I knew the road, but not its night terrors. Passing along it some days
before in the glory of sunshine, broad paddocks and islands of green had
comforted the shattered white ruin of the place, and I had traversed it
merely as a magnificent episode in the indifferent history of my life.
Now, as it seemed, I became one with it--an awful waif of solemnity, a
thing apart from mankind and its warm intercourse and ruddy inn doors, a
spectral anomaly, whose austere epitaph was once writ upon the snow
coating some fallen slab of those glimmering about me. I thought the
whole gorge smelt of tombs, like the vault of a cathedral. I thought, in
the incomprehensible low moaning sound that ever and again seemed to eddy
about me when the wind had swooped and passed, that I recognised the
forlorn voices of brother spirits long since dead and forgotten of the
world.

Suddenly I felt the sweat cold under the knapsack that swung upon my
back; stopped, faced about and became human again. Ridge over ridge
to my right the mountain summits fell away against a fathomless sky; and
topping the furthermost was a little paring of silver light, the coronet