There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any
great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray. Here the
mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of
the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to
it. But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I
had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me. My recollection
of Winnie's words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such
overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to
the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the 'wail' of Sir
John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which
appalled Winnie as it appalled me.
The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which
had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.
It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was
turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully
realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every
precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was
bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh,
or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.
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