So their road led them up and down the gentle slopes that filled the valley with ripples of green. Sleepy old farmsteads they passed, nestling in dense knots of verdure, and villages with their brilliant little strips of garden. The day’s work was over, and in the clear air rose the song of peace and rest. Only far above, over the nearing mass of the mountains, rose stormy ranges of cloud, flushed and splendid in purple and gold. And so at last they had done with the broad lowland, and the road set itself to mount up towards the high glen of their destination. Now the country changed. Below lay the wooded, feathery richness of copse and hedgerow, meadow and pasture. Stone walls began to replace the hedges, stiff wiry moor-grass the lush growth of the valleys; the framework of the earth was near the surface; the soil became a thin stretched skin, no longer a warm soft coat of flesh; here and there the film broke, and the limestone bones protruded. So the road wound its way to the upper levels, and climbed at last to the glen between the hills. Far ahead of them it streamed away up towards Ivescar--an undulating stripe of whiteness. Above, to their right, rose, stiff and stark, a wall of white rock, shutting out from sight the mountain above. To their left lay the narrow desolation of the defile, a stream meandering among sparse meadows, with here and there a bare barn or a farm surrounded by a few wind-tormented trees. And beyond these again, towered the farther wall of the valley, another escarpment of long limestone cliffs, which could be seen rising tier upon tier to the first brown and violet slopes of Carnmor. The road, hugging the western precipice, commanded a full view of the valley’s eastern rampart, but of the cliffs overhead revealed only the first and lowest range. This, in the sunset-light, was radiantly pink, but the sheer rocks across the stream, cut off from the light, were grey and grim, rising up in bank upon bank towards the moors above. No colour touched them, no softness made them lovable. Their inhospitable, irreconcilable sternness foreshadowed the abomination of desolation, and gave the valley a stony, lifeless melancholy that recalled the land that once flowed with milk and honey, but is now a wilderness of sterile stone.