Nothing so clearly showed the change which had taken place in Gordon as his indifference in retraversing this ground. For although he recollected with perfect completeness every feature of that previous journey, he recollected it with no shadow of emotion, and almost without interest. The facts recurred to him, but devoid of personal application. Gordon remembered them much as a man may remember vividly the details of a death which he has mourned, when he has well-nigh lost the memory of his regret. It was barely one when he reached the cairn upon Styhead Pass, and realising that he had five hours still to wear away, he turned to the right along Esk House and ascended the central gully in the cliffs of Great End. The sky had darkened since the morning, and the air was growing heavy and still with a prophecy of a storm; so that he was not surprised, when he came out on the summit of the crags, to find the clouds brooding angrily about the tops of the fells. Far away, it is true, from one broad solitary rift, he could see the sunlight pouring on to Helvellyn and tinting its white slopes to a sheet of gold. But there were black masses clustered close above it, as if jealous of its glow, and even as he watched, the rift closed up and the snow was discoloured to a dull, cheerless grey. From that point Gordon doubled back along the edge, descended slowly to the gloomy fissure of Piers Gill, crossed the depression at its head and the neck of land between Scafell Pikes and Lingmell, and turned up to the left towards Mickledoor, the sunken ridge between the former mountain and Scafell. It was half-past five when he stood finally upon the top of the gap, and already growing rapidly dark. The cold, moreover, had become intense; so that that silent wilderness of stones, overhung by black crags, seemed to him in the dim light the most desolate spot in all the world. On both sides the ridge sloped steeply down in an incline of scree and shattered boulders, the debris of the cliffs above. Below that were rounded promontories of brown grass strewn here and there with soiled patches of snow. But as far as the eye could see there was no trace of a living thing; for the village of Wastdale itself was excluded from view by the intervening barrier of Lingmell.