So soon as I changed my course I had the Coolin for company.
Mountains have always been a craze of mine, and the blackness and
mystery of those grim peaks went to my head. I forgot all about
Fosse Manor and the Cotswolds. I forgot, too, what had been my
chief feeling since I left Glasgow, a sense of the absurdity of my
mission. It had all seemed too far-fetched and whimsical. I was
running apparently no great personal risk, and I had always the
unpleasing fear that Blenkiron might have been too clever and that
the whole thing might be a mare's nest. But that dark mountain
mass changed my outlook. I began to have a queer instinct that that
was the place, that something might be concealed there, something
pretty damnable. I remember I sat on a top for half an hour raking
the hills with my glasses. I made out ugly precipices, and glens
which lost themselves in primeval blackness. When the sun caught
them - for it was a gleamy day - it brought out no colours,
only degrees of shade. No mountains I had ever seen - not the
Drakensberg or the red kopjes of Damaraland or the cold, white
peaks around Erzerum - ever looked so unearthly and uncanny.

Oddly enough, too, the sight of them set me thinking about
Ivery. There seemed no link between a smooth, sedentary being,
dwelling in villas and lecture-rooms, and that shaggy tangle of
precipices. But I felt there was, for I had begun to realize the
bigness of my opponent. Blenkiron had said that he spun his web
wide. That was intelligible enough among the half-baked youth of
Biggleswick, and the pacifist societies, or even the toughs on the
Clyde. I could fit him in all right to that picture. But that he should
be playing his game among those mysterious black crags seemed
to make him bigger and more desperate, altogether a different kind
of proposition. I didn't exactly dislike the idea, for my objection to