It came to pass, on the very day that Uther spoke with Merlin in the forest, that Igraine rode over a stretch of hills by a sheep-track, and came down into a valley not many leagues from Caerleon. The place stood thick with woodland, ranged tier on tier with the peaked bosses of huge trees. That impenetrable mystery of solitude that abides where forests grow was deeply hallowed in this silent dale. The infinite majesty of nature had cast a spell there, and the vast oaks, like pyramids of gloom, caverned a silence that was utter and divine. Glimmering beneath the huge, stupendous boughs, through darkling aisles and the colossal piers that held the innumerable roofing of the leaves, Igraine passed down through umbrage and still ecstasies of green, by colonnade and gallery,--interminable tunnels, where stray light struck slantwise on her armour, that it seemed a moving lustre in the solemn shade. Deep in the woodland lay a valley, a pastureland girt round with trees, and where the meadows, painted thick with flowers, seemed all enamelled white and azure, green, purple, pink, and gold. A peace as from the sun shone over it like saffron mist. A pool gleamed there, tranquil and deep with shadows; all the trees that Britain knew seemed girdled round it--oak, beech and holly, yew, thorn and cedar, the elfin pine, the larch, whose delicate kirtle shames even broidery of silk. No sound save the cuckoo's cry, and the uncertain twittering of birds, disturbed the sanctuary of that forest solitude. Igraine, halting on the brink of the meadowland, looked down over wood and water. The quiet of the place, the clear glint of the pool, the scent of the meadows, brought back the valley in Andredswold, and the manor in the mere. She loved the place on the instant. Even a blue plume of smoke rising straight to the sky, and the grey-brown backs of a few sheep in the meadows, evidencing as they did the proximity of man, failed to disenchant the solitary grandeur of the scene.