White heart of a mountain - tarn. There is no 

 Weather, soundlessness like it. And yet the silence is 

 relative ; is, in a word, but an imagination laid 

 upon an illusion. If there is no wind on the 

 moor, there may be a wandering air among 

 the lower heights. If so, many hollows of 

 rocks, caverns lost in bracken, caves of hill- 

 fox and badger, sudden ledges haunted by the 

 daw and the hoodie and filled with holes as 

 though the broken flutes of the dead forgotten 

 giants of old tales, will make a low but audible 

 music : a lifting and falling sighing, with 

 singular turnings upon itself of an obscure 

 chant or refrain, that just as one thinks is 

 slipping into this side knowledge and is almost 

 on the edge of memory, slides like rain along 

 that edge and vanishes, vague as an unre- 

 membered fragrance. Or if the suspense be 

 so wide that not a breath moves lower than 

 where the corries climb towards the very 

 brows of the mountains, one will surely hear, 

 far up among the time-hollowed scarps and 

 weather-sculptured scaurs, that singular sound 

 which can sink to a whimpering, as of 

 unknown creatures or lost inhuman clans 

 strayed and bewildered, or can be as though 

 unseen nomads were travelling the mountain- 

 way with songs and strange flutes and thin 

 wailing fifes, or can rise to a confused tumult 

 328 



