Читать книгу Knock at a Venture онлайн

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Beyond the gate to the Moor rises a steep road of broken granite and flint. It climbs upward, straight and dogged, into the world of the heather and, pursued a little, reveals the solemn sweep and dip of the circumambient waste. To the skyline tumbles this billowy ocean, and the ripples upon the crest of each mighty wave are granite. Here rise the tors, adorned at this August season with purple ling to their footstools of stone; here subtend wildernesses between the high hills; and the sheep bells jangle upon them, and the red kine bellow from the watercourses. A rook, his feathers blown awry, hops thrice, then ascends heavily; but the kestrel, with greater distinction of flight, glides away from his perch upon a stone, ere he swoops aloft with long reaches, to hang motionless in the air, like a brown star afar off. The moorland world extends in vast, undulating mosaic of olive and dun, thinly veiled by the bloom of the ling and splashed with golden furze and grey granite. The expanse is touched to umber and velvet warmth in sunshine; is enriched with the pure, cool purple of cloud-shadows; is brightened into sheer emerald-green, where springs burst from their peat-moss cradles amid seeding cotton-grass; is lightened throughout its sombre heath tones with glistening sheets of polished fern, where the tracts of the bracken stand under direct sunlight. There is warmth of colour in its breezy interspaces—warmth, won from the ruddiness of ripe rush-heads and manifold grasses all bending and swaying in waves under the wind.