Risk had to be taken to make safety sure. I chanced another ugly fall by a quick twist of my neck. I led by twenty yards. Gradually, therefore, I diminished my pace so that at the verge of the cliff only ten feet might separate us—and just before I would have leaped out into the turbid air, I used every remaining particle of strength in a sidewise lunge downward to the grass, letting the bull flash with unconquerable momentum over the edge.

But I myself was a vessel of momentum and could not by any frantic clutching and clawing soever keep myself from sliding over the brink and slipping from an abrupt decline to a sharper one, whence with horrified mind I felt myself go over the verge of nothingness! While I fell backward with eyes staring to the lurid sky, I saw the hulk of the bull shoot out from the summit of the cliff. Never have I seen a thing as black as the mass of the beast, with limbs winnowing in the air and head and vast nose outstretched. The black body would have crushed me to pulp had I not flung myself aside a moment before. I know that I must have been still in the air when the bull struck a thrust-out ledge far below the cliff—I had caught just an instant’s glare of one eye, demoniac and hopeless—then the animal went bellowing and thumping down through the fog into unseen depths until one final crash and cry ended sound in ghastly silence.

¹ Actually Llanbadarnfynydd, nine miles away, where I had put up before. My landlord had given me a lift half-way down in his Morris. (Author’s note.) [↩︎]

III.
The House

I don’t suppose I was in the air a second, but there was time enough for me to rue my neglect of Jack Bonnet’s invitation. Why hadn’t I turned round and gone away from the Forest and let the oratory go hang?

I was aware soon afterward that I was still alive in a queer place under the shelter of the hilltop, a place all caved-in earth and half-buried squarish rock, like heavy tombstones thickly lichened, and resting, some of them, one upon the other. I was on my back with my head on a pillow of fungi; beneath the pillow, however, was a sufficiently flinty foundation. For a long time I remained supine, and listened with interest while my heart gradually resumed a normal rate. The upper tangle of the fog was just beyond and below me; yet when I looked at the dark brink above, I realized that never, never could I climb back at the spot where I had fallen. But I felt a great gladness.

I explored the place little more than was necessary to get my bearings. So upon regaining enough strength I commenced to creep along the face of the cliff, now and then dipping into the region of the mist and losing sight of the sky, which was growing desolate of light. At length I found a slope where the grass was short and turf firm, a sward. I went now at a pace between a walk and a run and congratulated myself on making headway, though the brow of the ravine was forbidding above me still. Then the bank became startlingly overgrown with trees, and the drizzle was thicker among them.

I slowed to a snail’s pace, and that was well for me. All too soon my foot gave way on the left-hand edge of a mass of undergrowth quite impenetrable to sight. I struggled to take hold of something, did, in fact, grasp stems that yielded instantly to my weight, for they were frail and grew on a perpendicular face of earth. Once more I had the exquisitely dreadful sensation of falling whither I could not tell. My body ripped down through a mesh and tangle of shrubs that availed almost nothing to stay my descent. I accelerated.

Then my ribs struck a goodly branch with a knock that did indeed break my fall, but before I could twine an arm about this saviour, I had jounced to a lower branch, thence to the ground, this time with only a moderate jar.

I was on a narrow rocky path with the densely overgrown hill on one hand and the mist of the Vale—yawning space—on the other. I thought for a flash that I had invaded the home-ledge of some unrecorded ape or gorilla. For a creature cried out in my very face, a man coming up, as it were, out of the living rock of the path before me. He was fustian-clad, heavy-set, dark-featured, scowling frightfully, and my impression was that he was almost spent of breath. His mouth gaped in a rictus of strain and fear.