The acclivity was now climbing over open moorland. Away to right and left fell the slopes of the hill towards the rich levels far beneath. Evening was shedding its glamour over the country, and all the details of the way were transfigured by the magic of twilight. Straight ahead, over the edge of the pass, the sun was setting in a splendour of scarlet that spread a solid beam of fire from pole to pole, beneath the solid purple of the cloud-banks that rolled and towered up towards the zenith. The air beneath was a-quiver with fire, and the earth was kindled to a fierce and lucent tone of violet, hot, yet solemn, mysterious, almost tragic in the breathless stillness of the evening. Against the glare beyond, the climbing road shone cold and ghastly under the unbroken cloud-masses overhead, grey as a rain-washed bone by contrast with the amethyst of the earth and the sudden furious glory of the sky. Leading up over darkness to that scarlet furnace in the west, it might have been the very way to Hell. Terrible ghosts might be mounting its straight, still stretch. As the motor gradually rolled up its slopes, Kingston saw that there was indeed a wayfarer upon the road. Far away as yet, hardly discernible, a black speck was nearing the summit of the pass. A quick, fantastic terror suddenly seized on Kingston; he shrank from overtaking the wanderer, from passing him, from seeing his face. Even from afar that solitary figure had a malign influence. It was some ominous and evil thing, that remote point of darkness on the ghostly pallor of the road. The moments, as they throbbed by, seemed big with terrible events about to be born. A dreadful hush of expectation filled the world. And still the motor climbed pitilessly, gaining on the pedestrian so far ahead. Kingston encouraged his foolish instincts so as the better to laugh at them. It was this strange evening that had given him such a start--this strange evening, filled with an immemorial, awful loneliness. This light was mysterious and haunting--the deep sombre purples of the moorland, the grim, cold whiteness of the road--and then, at the end of the gloom, that abrupt, ferocious glare beyond, that terrifying blaze of the sunset between the two rims of darkness above and beneath. The whole effect was unearthly, almost crushing. And the world seemed holding its breath; nothing stirred, no leaf, no zephyr; the cry of no bird could be discerned, and even the dry susurrence of the heather-bells was stilled in the blank immobility of the atmosphere. And through the uncanny hush the throbs and pantings of the motor broke obtrusively, like the agonies of some great monster in travail, intensifying by contrast the vast loneliness of the silence. And there, arriving at the crown of the pass, moved on the one sign of life that occurred anywhere in the desolate prospect. That sign of life added a strangely jarring, menacing note.