To the north, on her
right, it narrowed and twisted; the bed of the beck lay hidden. A
thin scrub of low thorn trees covered the lower slopes of the further
hillside. Here and there was a clearing and a cottage or a farm. On
her left she had to pass the dead mining station, the roofless walls,
the black window gaps, the melancholy haunted colonnades, the three
chimneys of the dead furnaces, square cornered, shooting straight and
high as the bell-towers of some hill city of the South, beautiful and
sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow
winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks
showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines.
At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in
hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged
by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of Upthorne
lay unseen.
And hitherto, in all that immense and inhuman desolation nothing (to
Alice) had been more melancholy, more sinister, more haunted than the
house where John Greatorex had died. With its gray, unsleeping face,
its lidless eyes, staring out over the marshes, it had lost (for
Alice) all likeness to a human habitation. It repudiated the living;
it remembered; it kept a grim watch with its dead.
But Alice's mind, acutely sensitive in one direction, had become
callous in every other.
* * * * *
Greatorex was in the kitchen, smoking his Sunday afternoon pipe in
the chimney corner, screened from the open doorway by the three-foot
thickness of the house wall.
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