thrown upwards.

"God, but the open hill's a bonny place," said McKinnon, and a shiver
went over him. In this terrible place we lay the night--a great gloomy
forbidding place in the belly of the hill. Shiver on shiver went
through me as I looked round me. The walls were rock, bare and dry,
converging high up in the gloom; for there was just the peat fire and a
cruisie alight. Once, as though disturbed in its sleep, I heard a
rock-pigeon "rookatihoo coo-a" away above me in some cranny that must
open on the hill face. The smoke curled up in a rude dry-stone chimney
for about five or six feet against the rock, and the bulk of it still
ascended in a column, although the chimney stopped, but a waving pall
hung over the cave, swaying and undulating in long waves and streamers,
and the air below was cool and fresh. There were great carvings on the
walls--warriors and ships, galleys and horses a-rearing, and on a flat
stone projecting from the chimney, and serving as the brace or
mantelpiece, were models of ships made from the breast-bones of birds,
some quite large and others very small, and needing an infinite deal of
patience. There were rough stools and a table, all of which must have
been made inside the cave, and, indeed, the bark was dry and brittle on
the legs. Great bundles of heather, fashioned like narrow beds, lay
along the wall in the firelight, and like a dark unwinking eye the
light glimmered on a pool. There were square steps cut in the rock
down to the pool, which was shaped like a horn spoon with the handle
cut off short, and the water entering it from a crack in the rock,
noiselessly as oil, trickled silently away in a little sloping gutter
to the back of the cavern. Who first discovered the cavern I never
knew, but by the fire lay, twisted and blackened, the hilt and half of
a sword, and in a corner a black and rust-pitted breastplate. The back
part of the cave narrowed, and through a passage the Nameless Man
passed to bring us meat and drink. Have you walked on a bare moor road
in the pit mirk wi' a drizzle of soft mist in a silence you could hear?
Have you felt the fear coming over you, like a cold hand on your heart,
when ye knew that a thing gibbered and mouthed at your side? Well, the
thought o' that man, the Nameless Man, brings fear to me in a lighted
room.

For he was a dead white man, his hair, lank and white, hung round his
shoulders, his beard was slimy and soft as a white hare's,