THE STONE

The Stone hung on a jutting crag of Purple Hill. On one side of it, far
beneath, lay the village, huddled together as if, through being close
compacted, its handful of humanity should not be a mere dust in the
balance beside Nature's portentousness. Yet if one stood beside The
Stone, and looked down, the flimsy wooden huts looked like a barrier at
the end of a great flume. For the hill hollowed and narrowed from The
Stone to the village, as if giants had made this concave path by
trundling boulders to that point like a funnel where the miners' houses
now formed a cul-de-sac. On the other side of the crag was a valley
also; but it was lonely and untenanted; and at one flank of The Stone
were serried legions of trees.

The Stone was a mighty and wonderful thing. Looked at from the village
direct, it had nothing but the sky for a background. At times, also, it
appeared to rest on nothing; and many declared that they could see clean
between it and the oval floor of the crag on which it rested. That was
generally in the evening, when the sun was setting behind it. Then the
light coiled round its base, between it and its pedestal, thus making it
appear to hover above the hill-point, or, planet-like, to be just
settling on it. At other times, when the light was perfectly clear and
not too strong, and the village side of the crag was brighter than the
other, more accurate relations of The Stone to its pedestal could be
discovered. Then one would say that it balanced on a tiny base, a toe of
granite. But if one looked long, especially in the summer, when the air
throbbed, it evidently rocked upon that toe; if steadily, and very long,
he grew tremulous, perhaps afraid. Once, a woman who was about to become
a mother went mad, because she thought The Stone would hurtle down the