Devil's Tor Read Online Free Page A

encouraged his cousin.
    "Did it stop you too?"
    "It was certainly a vivid moment."
    "And I suppose you are going to overwhelm me for dragging you out here!"
    "Not at all, for I was a party."
    "No, you were complaisant, I was perverse, and some demon in me has led us both by the noses. However, why worry? We can't get any wetter, so let's take our ease now."
    He accommodated himself to her reduced step, and almost at once Ingrid pointed her finger ahead.
    "There's Devil's Tor."

Chapter II
UNDER THE DEVIL'S HEAD
    The rain had nearly ceased, but the immense lowering black clouds above augured nothing good. The moor immediately around was intensely green and purple. On the left, across the valley, the hills rose dark and uncoloured, but with all their details very clear. Where they terminated, however, (the end of a mighty buttress set in the lowland plain, sloping downwards to the sea), a magic picture was afforded of the soft distant landscape, all localised rain-showers and areas of shadow, wisps of moor-mist, and isolated shafts of sunlight emphasising the fields and woods from behind gold-rimmed cumulus vapour masses. The heart of the storm was crawling up ominously from the south-east, across the heights which recommenced still further to the left, directly behind them.
    Just as Ingrid pointed and spoke, a dazzling fork suspended itself in mid-sky straight ahead, enduring without change like a phenomenon while they could count. Its lower extremity was behind a rocky peak of no great height, but so singular in shape and of such sinister unrelieved blackness that Drapier as he sighted it, involuntarily came to a standstill.
    The hill rose up sharply no more than a few hundred yards away, just round the shoulder of the slope they were traversing. It was a steep, imperfectly-symmetrical sugar-loaf, with a truncated top, carrying an upright granite mass that had become strangely weathered into the rude form of a human or inhuman, head, supported by a narrower neck-stem. The rock, which had been segmented presumably by exposure to the elements during countless ages, was about thirty feet high and projected from the perpendicular at a dangerous-looking angle. The overhanging side was that which contained the so-styled Devil's face. Seen in profile from where they stood it appeared a true gargoyle. The nose shot forward, the mouth was a deep black cleft between two flat layers of granite, while the one cavernous eye visible was represented by a circular hollow in the rock, showing where water was accustomed to accumulate. It was a grinning and unpleasant natural statue carved by time and accident, which seemed all the while to be meditating a plunge to earth.
    Some seconds after the lightning had vanished, there came a long crackling cannonade in the sky, ending in a loose and hollow roar, as though a mighty load of solid matter were being discharged from above. Manifestly the storm was now all round them. The rain commenced to descend again heavily.
    "At least you've now seen it at its characteristic best," laughed Ingrid, as they resumed the way. "That fork surely completed the picture like a positive improvisation of genius. For five seconds it was a real Witches' Heath—and now alas! never can it be the same to me again. Hereafter it will always lack that never-to-be-repeated coup de théâtre!'
    Her cousin remarked how her spirits were risen with their experience.
    "But its name seems quite intelligible from the shape of that pile, without adducing the more fantastic derivation," he suggested thoughtfully.
    "I suppose so."
    "But you stick to your intuition of a strangeness there?"
    "I must."
    ''Of course you have run up against nothing tangible?"
    "No, Hugh. It is all feelings." She was grave again. "No doubt you will go on believing with all the rest that that monument is natural, even after I have assured you that I'm sure it is artificial. But it is my firm faith."
    "Made by men?"
    She replied by a nod, and he asked