our eyes filled with fine dust that made it
most difficult to avoid the clinging, prickly network of branches and
creepers. Coarse white grass that caught our feet like string grew here
and there in patches. It crowned the lumps of peaty growth that stuck up
like human heads, fantastically dressed, thrusting up at us out of the
ground with crests of dead hair. We stumbled and floundered among them.
It was hard going, and I could well conceive it impossible to find a way
at all in the night-time. We jumped, when possible, from tussock to
tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among heads on a
battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes that turned
to stare as we passed.

Here and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light,
dazzling the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by
contrast. And on two occasions we passed dark circular places in the
grass where fires had eaten their mark and left a ring of ashes. Dr.
Silence pointed to them, but without comment and without pausing, and
the sight of them woke in me a singular realisation of the dread that
lay so far only just out of sight in this adventure.

It was exhausting work, and heavy going. We kept close together. The
warmth, too, was extraordinary. Yet it did not seem the warmth of the
body due to violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that
laid glowing hands of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind of
steady blaze. When my companion found himself too far in advance, he
waited for me to come up. The place had evidently been untouched by hand
of man, keeper, forester or sportsman, for many a year; and my thoughts,
as we advanced painfully, were not unlike the state of the wood
itself--dark, confused, full of a haunting wonder and the shadow of
fear.

By this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. No single
gleam penetrated. We might have been groping in the heart of some
primeval forest. Then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and
stringlike grass came to an end; the trees opened out; and the ground
began to slope upwards towards a large central mound. We had reached the
middle of the plantation, and before us stood the broken Druid stones
our host had mentioned. We walked easily up the little hill, between the
sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered boulders, looked
round upon a comparatively open space, as large, perhaps, as a small
London Square.

T