Suddenly as he lay there, with Isabel silent and watchful at his side, the glory of the world shivered coldly and vanished. A black shadow swooped over the mountain-top, and soon only the uttermost distance retained the glimmer of gold. Down, down upon the old cairn sank, like the portcullis of a fairy castle, a heavy curtain of darkness, shutting out all that was left of the gleaming distance. The cloud was upon them. And, as their gaze was fixed on the gloom descending from above, no less abruptly, no less silently, in grey coils and whirling streamers the mist curled up at them from beneath, rippling and foaming over the rim of the mountain, as a devouring wave sweeps round an islet and over its crown. In an instant the world was blotted out by the white darkness. Uniform, monotonous, it obliterated everything. Only the old cairn and a few yards of ground around it could now be seen. Kingston and Isabel were cut off from the earth, set alone as Deucalion and Pyrrha in a new sphere, one solid point amid a vast ocean of chaos.... ‘So much for the glory of life,’ said Isabel. Kingston rose. ‘I don’t like this,’ he replied. ‘It will be the very mischief to get down again. Come and help me find a way.’ Together they moved away from the old cairn into the mist. As they went it widened before them, revealing a few dim feet of distance, then closed in again behind. Through the drifting pearly gloom objects were strangely magnified, made mysterious, portentous; rocks became monsters looming through the darkness, the level crown of the mountain, shifting fantasy of vapour. The ground beneath their feet seemed to swirl and shift with the movement of the fog, and, now that shape and colour had vanished from the world, an enormous crushing silence dominated the air. Faint and melting before their eyes stretched away the few visible yards of the flat soil, covered with short sedges, and, among the loose piles of grit, with a thick growth of little mountain-sorrel, whose brilliant reds and yellows had been levelled by the blank twilight into a sombre note, as of stale blood spilled out among the stones. Then, beyond, the solid earth wavered away into a phantom, revealing here and there a rock or a patch of grass, uncertainly, evanescently, as a faint, half-guessed shape, as the mist lightened or lowered.