The Hill of Dreams

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]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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, beneath leaden and
motionless clouds, it was strange to hear such a tumult of gurgling and
rushing water, and he stood for a while on the quivering footbridge and

watched the rush of dead wood and torn branches and wisps of straw,
all hurrying madly past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the
barmy froth that had gathered against a fallen tree.
Then he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher
and higher, till the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming
of swarming hives in summer. He walked some distance on level
ground, till there was a break in the banks and a stile on which he could
lean and look out. He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn;
he had strayed into outland and occult territory. From the eminence of
the lane, skirting the brow of a hill, he looked down into deep valleys
and dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare
hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately
beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside
of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there
with stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and
silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and
bracken and thorns and woods, all were brown and grey beneath the
leaden sky, and as Lucian looked he was amazed, as though he were
reading a wonderful story, the meaning of which was a little greater
than his understanding. Then, like the hero of a fairy-book, he went on
and on, catching now and again glimpses of the amazing country into
which he had penetrated, and perceiving rather than seeing that as the
day waned everything grew more grey and somber. As he advanced he
heard the evening sounds of the farms, the low of the cattle, and the
barking of the sheepdogs; a faint thin noise from far away. It was
growing late, and as the shadows blackened he walked faster, till once
more the lane began to descend, there was a sharp turn, and he found
himself, with a good