The open stretch of common which lay between him and his destination had
none of the charm of the surrounding country. It was like a dark spot
set in the midst of the rolling splendours of the moorland proper.
There were boulders of rock of unknown age, dark patches of peat land,
where even in midsummer the mud oozed up at the lightest footfall, pools
and sedgy places, the home and sometimes the breeding place of the
melancholy snipe. Of colour there was singularly little. The heather
bushes were stunted, their roots blackened as though with fire, and even
the yellow of the gorse shone with a dimmer lustre. But in the
distance, a flaming carpet of orange and purple stretched almost to the
summit of the brown hills of kindlier soil, and farther round,
westwards, richly cultivated fields, from which the labourers seemed to
hang like insects in the air, rolled away almost to the clouds.
Tallente looked at them a little wearily, impressed with the allegorical
significance of his position. It seemed to him that he was in the land
to which he belonged, the barren land of desolation and failure.
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