When they came within sight of the ancient boundary line, they left the road, struck across a swampy piece of land where there were a few straggling sheep, and then set to work to climb the bare and rocky hill-side. It was an arduous climb; but both the young women were active and lithe and agile; and they made very fair progress—stopping now and again to recover their breath. Indeed, it was not the difficulty of the ascent that was present to their mind; it was the terribly bleak and lonely character of this domain they were entering. Higher and higher as they got, they seemed to be leaving the living world behind them; and then, when they reached a level plateau, and could look away across this new world, there was nothing but an endless monotony of brown and purple knolls and slopes, covered with heather and withered grass, and then a series of hills along the horizon, with one or two lofty mountain-peaks, dark and precipitous, and streaked here and there with snow. There was no sign of life; nor any sound. As they advanced further and further into this wilderness, a strange sense of intrusion came over them; it was as if they had come into a land peopled by the dead—who yet might be regarding them; they looked and listened, as if expecting something, they knew not what. They did not speak the one to the other; indeed, they were some little way apart—those two small figures in this vast moorland solitude. Then they came to a tarn—the water black as night—not a bush nor the stump of a tree along its melancholy shores. Nor even here was there the call of a curlew, or the sudden whirr of a wild-duck’s wings. At this point the girls had come together again. "Who can wonder at the superstitions of the Highlanders?" said Käthchen, half absently. Mary’s answer was a curious one. She was looking at the black and oozy soil around her, with its scattered knobs of yellow grass. "I suppose," she said, meditatively, "they send the sheep up here later on? But it must be wretched pasture even at its best." All this time they had been shut out of sight of the sea by the higher ranges on their right; but by and by, when they had surmounted the ridge in front of them, they came in view of at least one new feature in the landscape—the river Garra, lying far below them, in a wide and empty valley. No hanging birch woods here, or deep pools sheltered by lofty banks, as in the neighbourhood where they had surprised the ghostly fisherman; but a treeless expanse of rather swampy-looking ground, with the river for the most part rushing over stony shallows. "Did it occur to you, Käthchen, that we should have to cross that stream?" Mary asked, as they were descending the hill. "Where is the difficulty?" said Käthchen, coolly. "We shall simply have to do as the country girls do, take off our shoes and stockings, wade over, and put them on again on the other side."