He did not recognize the features of this
melancholy landscape; they had all changed since his last visit; nay,
they were changing under his very eyes, as this or that far mountain-top
receded behind a veil of gray, or a shadow of greater darkness advanced
with stealthy tread along one of those lonely glens. There was something
threatening in the aspect of both earth and sky; something louring,
conspiring, as if some dread fate were awaiting this intruding stranger;
at times he fancied he could hear low-murmuring voices, the first
mutterings of distant thunder. What if some red bolt of lightning were
suddenly to sever this blackness in twain and reveal its hidden and
awful secrets? But no; there was no such friendly or avenging glare; the
brooding skies lay over the sombre valleys, and the gloomy
phantasmagoria slowly changed and changed in that unearthly twilight, as
the mists and the wind and the rain transformed the solid hills and the
straths into intermingling vapors and visions. A spectral world, unreal,
and yet terrible; apparently voiceless and tenantless; and yet somehow
suggesting that there were eyes watching, and vaguely moving and
menacing shapes passing hither and thither before him in the gloom.
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