"Morwen, you shall not lay the fire. I will do it—but done it must be."
CHAPTER X
THE CELL ON MALLAEN
At the back of Caio church and village stretches a vast mountain region that extends in tossed and rearing waves of moorland and crag for miles to the north; and indeed, Mynedd Mallaen is but the southern extremity of that chain which extends from Montgomeryshire and Merioneth, and of which Plinlimmon is one of the finest heads.
The elevated and barren waste is traversed here and there by streams—the Cothy, the Camdwr, the Doeth—but these are through restricted and uninhabited ravines, Mynedd Mallaen, the southernmost projection of this range, is a huge bulk united to the main mountain system by a slight connecting ridge, between the gorge of the Cothy and a tributary of the Towy.
North of this extends far the territory of Caio, over barren wilderness, once belonging to the tribe now delimited as a parish some sixteen miles in length.
On leaving the Council Hall, Pabo tarried but for a few minutes in converse with Howel, and then ascended the glen down which brawled the Annell. The flanks of mountain on each side were clothed with heath and heather now fast losing their bells, and were gorgeous with bracken, turned to copper and gold by the touch of the finger of Death.
He pursued his way without pause along the track trodden by those who visited the rock of Cynwyl, where annually the waters were stirred with his staff.
But on reaching this spot, Pabo halted and looked into the sliding water that swirled in the reputed kneeholes worn by the saint in the rocky bed. A pebble was in one, being eddied about, and, notwithstanding the distress of mind in which was Pabo, he did not fail to notice this as an explanation of the origin of the depressions. Dreamy, imaginative though he might be, he had also a fund of common sense.