English fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, English
Beyond the gate to the Moor rises a steep road of broken granite and
flint. It climbs upward, straight and dogged, into the world of the
heather and, pursued a little, reveals the solemn sweep and dip of the
circumambient waste. To the skyline tumbles this billowy ocean, and the
ripples upon the crest of each mighty wave are granite. Here rise the
tors, adorned at this August season with purple ling to their footstools
of stone; here subtend wildernesses between the high hills; and the sheep
bells jangle upon them, and the red kine bellow from the watercourses. A
rook, his feathers blown awry, hops thrice, then ascends heavily; but the
kestrel, with greater distinction of flight, glides away from his perch
upon a stone, ere he swoops aloft with long reaches, to hang motionless
in the air, like a brown star afar off. The moorland world extends in
vast, undulating mosaic of olive and dun, thinly veiled by the bloom of
the ling and splashed with golden furze and grey granite. The expanse is
touched to umber and velvet warmth in sunshine; is enriched with the
pure, cool purple of cloud-shadows; is brightened into sheer
emerald-green, where springs burst from their peat-moss cradles amid
seeding cotton-grass; is lightened throughout its sombre heath tones with
glistening sheets of polished fern, where the tracts of the bracken stand
under direct sunlight. There is warmth of colour in its breezy
interspaces—warmth, won from the ruddiness of ripe rush-heads and
manifold grasses all bending and swaying in waves under the wind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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