ome human
being. A man who is accustomed to solitude gets this extra sense which
announces like an alarm-clock the approach of one of his kind.

But I could hear nothing. There was a scraping and rustling on the
moor, but that was only the wind and the little wild things of the
hills. A fox, perhaps, or a blue hare. I convinced my reason, but not
my senses, and for long I lay awake with my ears at full cock and every
nerve tense. Then I fell asleep, and woke to the first flush of dawn.

The sun was behind the Coolin and the hills were black as ink, but far
out in the western seas was a broad band of gold. I got up and went
down to the shore. The mouth of the stream was shallow, but as I moved
south I came to a place where two small capes enclosed an inlet. It
must have been a fault in the volcanic rock, for its depth was
portentous. I stripped and dived far into its cold abysses, but I did
not reach the bottom. I came to the surface rather breathless, and
struck out to sea, where I floated on my back and looked at the great
rampart of crag. I saw that the place where I had spent the night was
only a little oasis of green at the base of one of the grimmest corries
the imagination could picture. It was as desert as Damaraland. I
noticed, too, how sharply the cliffs rose from the level. There were
chimneys and gullies by which a man might have made his way to the
summit, but no one of them could have been scaled except by a
mountaineer.

I was feeling better now, with all the frowsiness washed out of me, and
I dried myself by racing up and down the heather. Then I noticed
something. There were marks of human feet at the top of the deep-water
inlet--not mine, for they were on the other side. The short sea-turf
was bruised and trampled in several places, and there were broken stems
of bracken. I thought that some fisherman had probably landed there to
stretch his legs.

But that set me thinking of the Portuguese Jew. After breakfasting on
my last morsels of food--a knuckle of braxy and a bit of oatcake--I set
about tracking him from the place where he had first entered the glen.
To get my bearings, I went back over the road I had come myself, and
after a good deal of trouble I found his spoor. It was pretty clear as
far as the stream, for he had been walking--or rather running--over
ground with many patches of gravel on it. After that it was difficult,
and I lost it entirely in the rough heather below the crags. All that