leaving a line for 'Glenconan' in case of accidents, to say that it was just on the cards we might camp out."
"You did, did you? Happily there go two words to that bargain, and I keep my further movements under my own control. In any case, though the days be long, we had better proceed to a survey of the country. We must cross the loch and turn that shoulder."
Peter unmoored a boat fastened under a shed, and the passage was speedily accomplished. Then the game-bag, with its reserves of food, was "cached," as they say in Western America; and hampered by nothing but the rifle, a deer-stalker's glass, and a spirit-flask, the trio commenced the climb.
Neither of the gentlemen, as has been said, were novices in the mountains, and they were by no means surprised at the piece of work cut out for them. The heights that had shut in the view from the loch-margin were merely the spurs and the shoulders of higher hills behind. Wilder and grander became the scenery as they mounted upwards – more difficult and more circuitous the walking. Sometimes the turn of a ledge brought them face to face with an insurmountable obstacle; frequently they had to descend into a ravine, that they might scramble up the opposite face, at a considerable expenditure of homespun and knee-leather. Many a time did Venables execrate the costume of the Celt in which he had draped the delicate limbs of a Saxon.
But as hunting-men will risk their necks for a bag-fox, or even a red herring, so the ostensible object of the walk was nothing to them. One was a poet, the other an artist, and artist and poet were ravished alike. The burning sun had drawn the damp from the soil, and the hills were wreathed in fantastic vapours. The very rocks were smoking and steaming, as if there were smouldering volcanic fires underneath. And now and again, when they looked down into unknown depths, they might well have been poising themselves, like Milton's Satan, on the borders of old Chaos and Eternal Night; for the billowy seas of grey shifting mists marked invisible possibilities of intensest desolation.
They had found breath enough to indulge in duets of sympathetic raptures, when Leslie, as the more practically-minded and thoughtful of the two, characteristically came back to the prose of the situation.
"I tell you what it is, my friend – should these mists begin to thicken, it may be more difficult to find our way back than you seem to fancy."
"Not a bit of it: it is only a fine-weather haze; and the vapours will vanish with the afternoon sunshine. There is a fine-weather feeling in the air: just you ask Peter."
Peter, proud of being appealed to, when the question was translated into more intelligible language, answered unhesitatingly in the affirmative. Indeed circumstances proved afterwards that he and Venables were right: and when they stood at last on the Pisgah-like summit of Ben-a-Gleish, the highest hill for a dozen of leagues around, everything was nearly as clear below as above, and the vault of heaven was of transparent azure.
It was high enough and bleak enough in all conscience. They had scared more than one pair of parent ptarmigan – the young broods had probably scuttled for refuge beneath the stones. A pile of Cyclopean blocks, pitched carelessly together, rose from a small square plateau of slate and shingle.
