Croagh Mahon had been winding himself with scarves of mist all the day before, and he had come up so close to Drumgool that you might have hit him with a biscuit, to use Moriarty's expression.
The weather kept the great mountain for ever in fantastic movement, now retreating, now advancing. He grew and shrank in a wizard way with the changes of the atmosphere. To-day he would be immense, slate-coloured, strewn with dim ravines standing beneath the subdued beauty of the quiet winter daylight, a sure sign that on the morrow he would be blotted out. Fine weather would cast him far away, and he would stand, heather purple in the blue distance, but still calling you to come to him.
When Mr. French departed for the station the weather was clear, and Miss Grimshaw, having watched him drive away, strolled down the garden, then through a little wicket she passed into the kitchen garden, and from there along the uphill path to the cliffs.
There was little wind on the cliffs, and the sea was coming in unruffled, yet hugely stirring in league-long lapses of swell.
Boom!
The whole coast answered with a deep organ note to the leisurely breaking of the billows.
Boom!
You could hear the voice of the Devil's Kitchen, the voices of the Seven Sisters, the voices of the long Black Strand, the voices of the headlands, as billow after billow struck the coast—great waves from the very heart of the ocean; and the snarl of the pebbles to the undertow on the strand beneath could be heard shrill like the voice of each dying wave, "I have come from afar—afar—afar!"
No other sound.