Page:Letters from England.djvu/120

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A JOURNEY TO SCOTLAND

locks of wool, and black masks on their faces; nobody tends them, only a small stone wall along the bare slopes indicates the presence of man; as far as this wall is my pasture.

And now the place is so deserted that there is neither flock nor property, only a ruined cottage and a tumbledown mound on the brown undulation of the mossy slope. The end of life, here nothing has changed for at least ten thousand years; people have only made roads and built railways, but the earth has not changed; nowhere a tree or a shrub; only cold lakes, whins and ferns, unending brown gorse-land, endless black stones, ink tinted mountain summits slit by silvery threads of torrents, black marshes of peat,

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