Though escape was impossible, had it been a foe, he started instinctively to fly, when a voice hailed him friendly in the familiar Saxon tongue. "Ho! brother Saxon, this is thou, then, is it?" "I know not who thou art," replied Eadwulf, "nor thou me, I'll be sworn." "Ay! but I do, though, bravely. Thou art the Saxon with the price of blood on thy head, whom the Normans have chased these three days, from beyond Rotherham. They lie five miles hence on the hither side the Lon, and inquired after thee at twilight. But fear not for me. Only cross the sands early; the tide will answer with the first gray glimmer; and thou art safe in Westmoreland. And so God speed thee, brother." A mile or two farther brought him to the verge of the wet sands, and there in the last brushwood he laid him down, almost too weary to be anxious for the morrow. CHAPTER XVIII. THE SANDS. Splendor in heaven, and horror on the main! Sunshine and storm at once--a troubled day; Clouds roll in brightness, and descend in rain. Now the waves rush into the rocky bay, Shaking the eternal barriers of the land; And ocean's face is like a battle-plain, Where giant demons combat hand to hand. EBENEZER ELLIOTT. It was a wild and wicked morning, in the first red light of which, Eadwulf, awakening from the restless and uneasy sleep into which he had last night fallen, among the scattered brushwood growing on the seaward slope of the sand hills of Lancashire, looked across the wide sands, now left bare by the recess of the tide, stretching away to the bleak coasts of Westmoreland and Cumberland, and the huge mountain ridges, which might be seen indistinctly looming up blue and massive in the distance inland, distinguishable from clouds only by the hard abruptness of their outlines, as they cut sharp and clean against the lurid sky of the horizon. Along the sea line, which lay grim and dark in ominous repose, the heaven's glared for a span's breadth, as it appeared to the eye, with a wild brassy light, above which brooded a solid belt of purple cloud, deepening into black as it rose upward, and having a distinct, solid-looking edge, scolloped, as it were, into huge rounded masses, as material as if they had been earthy hills, instead of mere piles of accumulated vapor. These volumed masses lay motionless, as yet, in the brooding calm; but, all upward to the zenith, the sky was covered with tortured and distracted wrack-wreaths, some black as night, some just touched by the sun, which was arising unseen by mortal eyes behind the cloud-banks which mustered so thick to the eastward, and some glowing with a fiery crimson gleam, as if they issued from the mouth of a raging furnace.