Here the
heath was blasted and scarred with summer fires. Great patches of the waste
had been eaten naked by past flames, and Men-an-tol--the
"crick-stone"--past which she progressed, stood with its lesser granite
pillars in a dark bed of scorched earth and blackened furze-stems stripped
bare by the fire. She stood in a wide, desolate cup of the Cornish moor. To
the south Ding-Dong Mine reared its shattered chimney-stack, toward the
northwest Carn Galvas--that rock-piled fastness of dead giants--reared a
gray head against the blue. A curlew piped; a lizard rustled into a tussock
of grass where pink bog-heather and seeding cotton grasses splashed the
sodden ground; a dragon-fly from the marsh stayed a moment upon Men-an-tol,
and the jewel of his eyes was a little world holding all the colors of the
larger.
Joan, keeping her way to where Carn Galvas rose over the next ridge, walked
another few hundred yards, crossed a disused road, climbed a stony bank,
and then stood in the little croft sacred to Men Scryfa. At the center,
above a land almost barren save for stunted heath and wind-beaten fern it
rose--a tall stone of rough and irregular shape. The bare black earth, in
which shone quartz crystals, stretched at hand in squares. From these raw
spaces, peat had been cut, to be subsequently burned for manure; and it
stood hard by stacked in a row of beat-burrows or little piles of
overlapping pieces, the cut side out.
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