Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes | Page 3

sound of rooks faintly cawing, of sea-gulls
crying far up in the sky, and of dogs barking at a great distance rose up
out of the general murmur of evening voices. Odours of farm and field
and open spaces stole to my nostrils, and everything contributed to the
feeling that I lay on the top of the world, nothing between me and the
stars, and that all the huge, free things of the earth--hills, valleys,
woods, and sloping fields--lay breathing deeply about me.
A few sea-gulls--in daytime hereabouts they fill the air--still circled and
wheeled within range of sight, uttering from time to time sharp,
petulant cries; and far in the distance there was just visible a shadowy
line that showed where the sea lay.
Then, as I lay gazing dreamily into this still pool of shadows at my feet,
something rose up, something sheet-like, vast, imponderable, off the
whole surface of the mapped-out country, moved with incredible
swiftness down the valley, and in a single instant climbed the hill
where I lay and swept by me, yet without hurry, and in a sense without
speed. Veils in this way rose one after another, filling the cups between
the hills, shrouding alike fields, village, and hillside as they passed, and
settled down somewhere into the gloom behind me over the ridge, or
slipped off like vapour into the sky.
Whether it was actually mist rising from the surface of the fast-cooling
ground, or merely the earth giving up her heat to the night, I could not
determine. The coming of the darkness is ever a series of mysteries. I
only know that this indescribable vast stirring of the landscape seemed
to me as though the earth were unfolding immense sable wings from
her sides, and lifting them for silent, gigantic strokes so that she might
fly more swiftly from the sun into the night. The darkness, at any rate,

did drop down over everything very soon afterward, and I rose up
hastily to follow my pathway, realising with a degree of wonder
strangely new to me the magic of twilight, the blue open depths into the
valley below, and the pale yellow heights of the watery sky above.
I walked rapidly, a sense of chilliness about me, and soon lost sight of
the valley altogether as I got upon the ridge proper of these lonely and
desolate hills.
It could not have been more than fifteen minutes that I lay there in
reverie, yet the weather, I at once noticed, had changed very abruptly,
for mist was seething here and there about me, rising somewhere from
smaller valleys in the hills beyond, and obscuring the path, while
overhead there was plainly a sound of wind tearing past, far up, with a
sound of high shouting. A moment before it had been the stillness of a
warm spring night, yet now everything had changed; wet mist coated
me, raindrops smartly stung my face, and a gusty wind, descending out
of cool heights, began to strike and buffet me, so that I buttoned my
coat and pressed my hat more firmly upon my head.
The change was really this--and it came to me for the first time in my
life with the power of a real conviction--that everything about me
seemed to have become suddenly alive.
It came oddly upon me--prosaic, matter-of-fact, materialistic doctor
that I was--this realisation that the world about me had somehow stirred
into life; oddly, I say, because Nature to me had always been merely a
more or less definite arrangement of measurement, weight, and colour,
and this new presentation of it was utterly foreign to my temperament.
A valley to me was always a valley; a hill, merely a hill; a field, so
many acres of flat surface, grass or ploughed, drained well or drained
ill; whereas now, with startling vividness, came the strange, haunting
idea that after all they could be something more than valley, hill, and
field; that what I had hitherto perceived by these names were only the
veils of something that lay concealed within, something alive. In a
word, that the poetic sense I had always rather sneered at, in others, or
explained away with some shallow physiological label, had apparently
suddenly opened up in myself without any obvious cause.

And, the more I puzzled over it, the more I began to realise that its
genesis dated from those few minutes of reverie lying under the
gorse-bush (reverie, a thing I had never before in all my life indulged
in!), or, now that I came to reflect more accurately, from my brief
interview with that wild-eyed, swift-moving, shadowy man of whom I
had first inquired the way.
I recalled my singular fancy that veils were lifting off the surface of the
hills and fields, and