Page 435 - tess-of-the-durbervilles

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment be-
low which stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying
misty and still in the dawn. Instead of the colourless air of
the uplands, the atmosphere down there was a deep blue.
Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred acres in which
she was now accustomed to toil, there were little fields below
her of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they
looked from this height like the meshes of a net. Here the
landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Val-
ley, it was always green. Yet it was in that vale that her sorrow
had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly. Beauty
to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what
the thing symbolized.
Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily west-
ward; passing above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles
the high-road from Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and
skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy, with the dell between
them called ‘The Devil’s Kitchen”. Still following the elevat-
ed way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where the stone pillar
stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a miracle,
or murder, or both. Three miles further she cut across the
straight and deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane;
leaving which as soon as she reached it she dipped down
a hill by a transverse lane into the small town or village of
Evershead, being now about halfway over the distance. She
made a halt here, and breakfasted a second time, heartily
enough—not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided inns,
but at a cottage by the church.
The second half of her journey was through a more gentle

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