Lord Peter hesitated. Recollections of what he had heard and read surged up in his mind to tell him that uphill or downhill seems much the same thing in a fog. But man walks in a vain shadow. It is hard to believe that one is really helpless. The cold was icy. "We might try," he said weakly.
"I have heard it said, my lord, that in a fog one always walked round in a circle," said Mr. Bunter, seized with a tardy diffidence.
"Not on a slope, surely," said Lord Peter, beginning to feel bold out of sheer contrariness.
Bunter, being out of his element, had, for once, no good counsel to offer.
"Well, we can't be much worse off than we are," said Lord Peter. "We'll try it, and keep on shouting."
He grasped Bunter's hand, and they strode gingerly forward into the thick coldness of the fog.
How long that nightmare lasted neither could have said. The world might have died about them. Their own shouts terrified them; when they stopped shouting the dead silence was more terrifying still. They stumbled over tufts of thick heather. It was amazing how, deprived of sight, they exaggerated the inequalities of the ground. It was with very little confidence that they could distinguish uphill from downhill. They were shrammed through with cold, yet the sweat was running from their faces with strain and terror.
Suddenly—from directly before them as it seemed, and only a few yards away—there rose a long, horrible shriek—and another—and another.
"My God! What's that?"
"It's a horse, my lord."