The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Hill of Dreams, by Arthur Machen

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Title: The Hill of Dreams

Author: Arthur Machen

Release Date: November 7, 2004 [eBook #13969]
[This file last updated on July 21, 2010]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HILL OF DREAMS***

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THE HILL OF DREAMS

by

ARTHUR MACHEN

1907

I

There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.

But all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed in
fairyland. The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone out
resolved to lose himself, to discover strange hills and prospects that he
had never seen before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted after
heavy rain, and the clouds looked as if they had been molded of lead. No
breeze blew upon the hill, and down in the well of the valley not a dry
leaf stirred, not a bough shook in all the dark January woods.

About a mile from the rectory he had diverged from the main road by an
opening that promised mystery and adventure. It was an old neglected
lane, little more than a ditch, worn ten feet deep by its winter waters,
and shadowed by great untrimmed hedges, densely woven together. On each
side were turbid streams, and here and there a torrent of water gushed
down the banks, flooding the lane. It was so deep and dark that he could
not get a glimpse of the country through which he was passing, but the
way went down and down to some unconjectured hollow.

Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before its
descent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very
far, all the long way from the know to the unknown. He had come as it
were into the bottom of a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods shut
out the world. From the road behind him, from the road before him, from
the unseen wells beneath the trees, rivulets of waters swelled and
streamed down towards the center to the brook that crossed the lane. Amid
the dead and wearied silence of the air, ben