upon the
mountain. But the wetness of it made it often appear more beautiful to
my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hill sides, there were many wet
rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even as far as Aros,
fifteen miles away.

The road that I followed was a cattle-track. It twisted so as nearly to
double the length of my journey; it went over rough boulders so that a
man had to leap from one to another, and through soft bottoms where the
moss came nearly to the knee. There was no cultivation anywhere, and not
one house in the ten miles from Grisapol to Aros. Houses of course there
were--three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other
that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large part of
the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a
two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in
between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the wind was, it was always
sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl over
all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle
with the brightness of the sea. From the very midst of the land, on a
day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the Roost roaring, like a
battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and fearful voices of the
breakers that we call the Merry Men.

Aros itself--Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it
means _the House of God_--Aros itself was not properly a piece of the
Ross, nor was it quite an islet. It formed the south-west corner of the
land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the
coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest.
When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land
river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the water
itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in the
bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you could
pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good pasture,
where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was better
because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level of the
Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was a good
one for that country, two storeys high. It looked westward over a bay,
with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch the
vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On al