When the last change came, it came with a blinding abruptness after its delay. The fire of the clouds grew swiftly fiercer, their purple turned to molten bronze, their edges broadened, became red, scarlet, flaming. Kingston saw now the exact spot where the sun was to rise. Down in a cleft of the hills, where far-off Ravensber tailed away into the first slopes of Fell End, there lay the heart of the cloud-drift, and there through its sombre curtains, the sun would have to break his way. Crimson and scarlet dominated the world now, throbbing from horizon to horizon. Splashes of infernal sanguine began to streak themselves across the East, growing every moment in number and in violence. The day was hurrying up in a leaping fury of splendour, and the path of the sun was a ladder of flame, leading upwards from the ravelled veil of darkness between the hills. And then, in a moment, the curtain of the clouded East was gashed suddenly and rent asunder: the earth seemed swept by a blast of blood and fire. The sun was up. Another instant, and his awful globe had leapt free of the broken masses of bronze beneath, and was mounting on its tyrannous way through heaven. Instantly before his glory all rival splendours faded. Scarlet, crimson, gold, and orange paled and died in the glare of his presence. The magical moment was passed. Clouds, mountains, and valleys were mere clouds and mountains and valleys again; the transfiguring radiance was dead. Only the air was still pervaded by the red glow. The world was torn from dreams to reality again. Calm, clear, definite, it lay below, stripped of mystery, a world of men and women, fears and desires, eating and drinking. Kingston walked round to where the western edge of the mountain dropped away to the fells far below. Beneath those, again, lay the narrow glen where Ivescar stood. Between the Simonstone and Carnmor it cut its way southward and then sloped down into the great valley beyond. The Vale of Strathclyde stretched softly through the distance, very broad and fertile, to the remote low hills that bounded it on the farther side. From where he stood Kingston could see its whole course mapped out before him, far away, clear and rosy in the fresh daylight. In a swooping curve it flowed westward under the wall of the mountain country, westward from its source away in the east, in the heart of Yorkshire, out to where its last placid ripples passed into the indistinguishable golden glory of the western sea. And there, beyond the low cleft in the woodlands, where a faint smoky haze betrayed the town of Lunemouth, the vast, flat glitter of the bay ran farther and farther out, till it was merged in the bright opalescence of the sky, against whose gleaming softness rolled northward, in dim sapphire, the jutting ranges that passed up into the tangled mountain chaos of Cumberland and Westmoreland.