the added sense of desolation
one gets passing an empty house on the side of a road.

When I turn back again the air has got stuffy and heavy and calm,
with a cloud still down upon the glen; there is a dead heat in the
air that is not natural so high up, and the silence is so great
three or four wrens that are singing near the lake seem to fill the
valley with sound. In most places I can see the straight ending of
the cloud, but above the lake grey fingers are coming up and down,
like a hand that is clasping and opening again. One longs for rain
or wind or thunder. The very ewes and lambs have stopped bleating,
and are slinking round among the stacks of turf.

I have come out again on the mountain road the third day of the fog.
At first it was misty only, and then a cloud crept up the water
gullies from the valley of the Liffey, and in a moment I am cut off
in a white silent cloud. The little turfy ridges on each side of the
road have the look of glens to me, and every block of stone has the
size of a house. The cobwebs on the furze are like a silvery net,
and the silence is so great and queer, even weazels run squealing
past me on the side of the road.... An east wind is rising. Once in
every minute I see the little mounds in their natural shapes that
have been mountains for a week. I see wet cottages on the other side
of the glen that I had forgotten. Then, as I walk on, I see out over
a cloud to the tops of real mountains standing up into the sky.

There is a dense white fog around the cottage, and we seem to be
shut away from any habitation. All round behind the hills there is a
moan and rumble of thunder coming nearer, at times with a fierce and
sudden crash. The bracken has a nearly painful green in the
strangeness of the light. Enormous sheep are passing in and out of
the sky line.

There is a strange depression about the cottage to-night. The woman
of the house is taken ill and has got into bed beside her
mother-in-law, who is over ninety, and is wandering in her mind. The
man of the house has gone away ten miles for medicine, and I am left
with the two children, who are playing silently about the door.

The larches in the haggard are dripping heavily with damp, and the
hens and geese, bewildered with the noise and gloom, are cackling
with uneasy dread. All one's senses are disturbed. As I walk
backwards and forwards, a few yards above and below the door, the
little stream I do not see seems to roar out o