Presently the road became a mere track upon the heather, which, leaving the lough to the left, struck out across the hills inland--a wheel-track over a vast expanse of purple prairie, now deep-indented in the bog, now barely discernible on a plateau of rock--impression of the rude carts of the turf-cutters across the mountains. No human dwelling might be seen for miles; no human figure, save perhaps an elfish child plying knitting-needles on a stone as she watched her herd of geese for fear of foxes--an uncanny, shock-pated pixie who seemed half-sister to the herons that were scrutinising their portraits in the pools. Mountain succeeded mountain with a great heaving like that of the ocean hard-by, sometimes in an unbroken wave of black and russet; sometimes rent into a gorge where it had been torn by a strong convulsion, with overhanging crags of grey and twisted trees bent awry by the sea-blasts. Sometimes in the hazy distance might be detected a string of circular stains of a blacker colour than the rest--tarns in the moorland, home of the silver trout. Bushy and reedy some--some tawny with the paled glories of dead water-lilies. Then would the scene change to a bleak spread of stones--flat stones of monster size, with rifts like rivulets between, choked thick with feathery herbage. It was as though the rubbish left from the creation of the world had been carted and shot out there--a secluded medley of unconsidered trifles, of no value or consequence to the human race. Then again would the stones give place to water--morasses of peat sodden with salt ooze which quaked under the weight of the traveller, the hoof-marks of his horse bubbling with slimy wash as he splashed on his uncertain way; troops of scurrying fowl starting up before him, protesting loudly as they fled at the irruption into their cherished solitude. Shane and Doreen arrived by-and-by at the summit of a hill-crest, from which the northern half of the promontory lay spread like a map before them. Just below was a white speck--the village of Carndonagh--beyond, a row of lakes, tiny mirrors set in the hill-flank--on either side the jagged lines of Loughs Foyle and Swilly, varied with many a peaked headland and jutting point and shelving bay scooped out of the living rock. In front, a flat stretch on which cloud-shadows were playing hide-and-seek--a bopeep dance of subtly-chequered tones; and away still farther, looming through the mist, the bluffs of Malin Head, the extreme limit, to the north, of Ireland. As they looked, the mists melted in eddying swirls of gold, unveiling an expanse of immense and lonely sea, dotted with fairy islets strewn in a ravelled fringe--the long span of the blue-green Atlantic, marked with a line of white where it seethed and moaned and lashed without ceasing against the foot of the beetling cliff.