to thrive. The road is caked with moss that breaks like pie-crust
under my feet, and in corners where there is shelter there are sheep
loitering, or a few straggling grouse.... The fog has come down in
places; I am meeting multitudes of hares that run round me at a
little distance--looking enormous in the mists--or sit up on their
ends against the sky line to watch me going by. When I sit down for
a moment the sense of loneliness has no equal. I can hear nothing
but the slow running of water and the grouse crowing and chuckling
underneath the band of cloud. Then the fog lifts and shows the white
empty roads winding everywhere, with the added sense of desolation
one gets passing an empty house on the side of a road.

When I turn back again the air has got stuffy and heavy and calm,
with a cloud still down upon the glen; there is a dead heat in the
air that is not natural so high up, and the silence is so great
three or four wrens that are singing near the lake seem to fill the
valley with sound. In most places I can see the straight ending of
the cloud, but above the lake grey fingers are coming up and down,
like a hand that is clasping and opening again. One longs for rain
or wind or thunder. The very ewes and lambs have stopped bleating,
and are slinking round among the stacks of turf.

I have come out again on the mountain road the third day of the fog.
At first it was misty only, and then a cloud crept up the water
gullies from the valley of the Liffey, and in a moment I am cut off
in a white silent cloud. The little turfy ridges on each side of the
road have the look of glens to me, and every block of stone has the
size of a house. The cobwebs on the furze are like a silvery net,
and the silence is so great and queer, even weazels run squealing
past me on the side of the road.... An east wind is rising. Once in