So they wandered carefully on across the plane of the summit, till suddenly, ahead of them, grim and mysterious, rose a long grey barrier fading to right and left in the profundities of darkness. It was the old boundary wall of the summit, built by Celtic kings in the lost ages when the hill-top was the last great British outpost in the north. Humped, shapeless, an indistinguishable mound of stone, the old wall remained intact, running round the plateau in a solid ring, unbroken except at the point where the beacon tower stood. Knowing that outside its precinct cliffs and pitfalls awaited the unwary, Kingston and Isabel turned, and set themselves to follow it on its circuit, hoping to find an outlet or a path. At one point they came on a small stone chamber built into its bulk, but no sign of gateway or track could they discover. Now they were crossing a bare part of the summit, a wilderness of rocky wreckage. Here and there, at short intervals, great rings and semicircles of half-buried stone could be divined in the level of the soil, foundation-lines to show where the huts and palaces of the Celtic kings had stood. Now they were but dim ridges, grown with dwarf sedge and sorrel, through which roughly burst the gritstone bones of their fabric. Adventurous climbers of the mountain had had their fun of the rocks that former occupants had made their houses and defence. Often the flat, hewn blocks had been lugged from their places by modern hands, to be arranged in some riddle or motto. One ambitious tourist had perpetrated a great design. Kingston and Isabel came suddenly upon it. It stretched bravely across the earth, a device of big boulders, carefully arranged. ‘I love you,’ it said to them, in its audacious, solid letters. ‘I’ and ‘you’ at either end of the legend faded away into the white obscurity beyond, and at their feet lay ‘love,’ obtrusive, unconquerable, built of sound stones so square and firm as to defy the enmities of time and weather. ‘I love you,’ read Isabel slowly. Hitherto few words had passed. Words, in that blanched silence, seemed futile and impertinent. There was in that vast loneliness of the mist a sense of intimacy too close to be profaned by speech; man and woman were alone, two halves of one primitive creature, in a primitive, floating chaos, where nothing else, as yet, had taken shape. How could such a drifting void hold anything so formal as speech? Speech belonged to that forgotten world of things visible and tangible, that world where other human beings lived, and there was light, sound, movement. Here, in the level, immovable silence of the primeval twilight, Kingston and Isabel found the intervening ages swept away. They had gone back into the dim time before the dawn of the world, when there was nothing more than this poised existence, vague, voiceless, pervasive. ‘I love you,’ repeated Isabel, studying the tourist’s device--the blatant modern cry breaking into the abysmal stillness of old chaos.