"
There was something already suggested about the steep scenery
through which I went as I thought about these things; a sense
of silent catastrophe and fundamental cleavage in the deep
division of the cliffs and crags. They were all the more
profoundly moving, because my sense of them was almost as
subconscious as the subconsciousness about which I was reflecting.
I had fallen again into the old habit of forgetting where I was going,
and seeing things with one eye off, in a blind abstraction.
I awoke from a sort of trance of absentmindedness in a landscape
that might well awaken anybody. It might awaken a man sleeping;
but he would think he was still in a nightmare. It might wake
the dead, but they would probably think they were in hell.
Halfway down the slope the hills had taken on a certain pallor which had
about it something primitive, as if the colours were not yet created.
There was only a kind of cold and wan blue in the level skies which
contrasted with wild sky-line. Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrary
condition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene;
but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world about
the quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape.
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