Utterly silent the place is! Not a breath of air is moving, and the atmosphere has become close and sultry. There is no path, for few people follow their curiosity so far. Dry ditches and stumps of old trees make the walking difficult; withered branches of pine crackle suddenly sometimes under tread; and here and there the fleshy finger of a fungus catches the eye at a tree root.
And here rises the hillock. On its bald and blasted summit, in the lurid corpse-light, according to the old story,
The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about,
when Macbeth, approaching the spot with Banquo, after victory in the west over Macdonald of the Isles, exclaims:
So foul and fair a day I have not seen!
and the hags, suddenly confronting the general, greet him with the triple hail of Glamis, Cawdor, and King.
The blasted hillock was indeed a fit spot for such a scene. Not a blade of grass grows upon it; the withered needles and cones of the pines lie about, wan and lifeless and yellow; and on one side, where the witches emptied their horrid caldron, and the contents ran down the slope, the earth remains bare, and scorched, and black. Even the trees themselves which grow on the hillock appear of a different sort from those on the heath around.
Antiquaries set the scene of fulfilment of the witches infernal promptings—Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan—variously at Inverness, Glamis, and Bothgofuane, a smithy near Forres. Popular tradition, however, points to Cawdor, and less than seven miles from the fatal heath the Thane’s great moated keep frowns yet among its woods.
But what is this? The air has grown suddenly dark; the gloom becomes oppressive; and in the close heat it is almost possible to imagine a smell of sulphur. A flash of lightning, a rush of wind among the tree-tops, and a terrible crash of thunder just overhead! A moment’s silence, a sound as if all the pines were shaking their branches together, a deluging downpour of rain, and the storm has burst. The spirits of the air are abroad, and the evil genius of the place is awake in demoniac fury. The tempest waxes terrific. The awful gloom among the trees is lit up by flash after flash of lightning; the cannon of thunder burst in all directions; and the rain pours in torrents. The ghastly hags might well revisit the scene of their orgies at such a moment.
