The Hill of Dreams
by Arthur Machen
Contents
| I. |
| II. |
| III. |
| IV. |
| V. |
| VI. |
| VII. |
I.
There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.
But all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed infairyland. The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone outresolved to lose himself, to discover strange hills and prospects that he hadnever seen before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted after heavy rain,and the clouds looked as if they had been moulded of lead. No breeze blew uponthe hill, and down in the well of the valley not a dry leaf stirred, not abough shook in all the dark January woods.
About a mile from the rectory he had diverged from the main road by an openingthat promised mystery and adventure. It was an old neglected lane, little morethan a ditch, worn ten feet deep by its winter waters, and shadowed by greatuntrimmed hedges, densely woven together. On each side were turbid streams, andhere and there a torrent of water gushed down the banks, flooding the lane. Itwas so deep and dark that he could not get a glimpse of the country throughwhich he was passing, but the way went down and down to some unconjecturedhollow.
Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before itsdescent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very far,all the long way from the known to the unknown. He had come as it were into thebottom of a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods shut out the world. Fromthe road behind him, from the road before him, from the unseen wells beneaththe trees, rivulets of waters swelled and streamed down towards the center tothe brook that crossed the lane. Amid the dead and wearied silence of the air,beneath leaden and motionless clouds, it was strange to hear such a tumult ofgurgling and rushing water, and he stood for a while on the quiveringfootbridge and watched the rush of dead wood and torn branches and wisps ofstraw, all hurrying madly past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the barmyfroth that had gathered against a fallen tree.
Then he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher and higher,till the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming of swarming hivesin summer. He walked some distance on level ground, till there was a break inthe banks and a stile on which he could lean and look out. He found himself, ashe had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had strayed into outland and occultterritory. From the eminence of the lane, skirting the brow of a hill, helooked down into deep valleys and dingles, and beyond, across the trees, toremoter country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey stillsky. Immediately beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, ahillside of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and therewith stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and silent,and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and bracken and thornsand woods, all were brown and grey beneath the leaden sky, and as Lu