The child had run quite a quarter of a league, and walked another quarter, when suddenly he felt the craving of hunger.  A thought which altogether eclipsed the hideous apparition on the hill occurred to him forcibly—­that he must eat.  Happily there is in man a brute which serves to lead him back to reality.

But what to eat, where to eat, how to eat?

He felt his pockets mechanically, well knowing that they were empty.  Then he quickened his steps, without knowing whither he was going.  He hastened towards a possible shelter.  This faith in an inn is one of the convictions enrooted by God in man.  To believe in a shelter is to believe in God.

However, in that plain of snow there was nothing like a roof.  The child went on, and the waste continued bare as far as eye could see.  There had never been a human habitation on the tableland.  It was at the foot of the cliff, in holes in the rocks, that, lacking wood to build themselves huts, had dwelt long ago the aboriginal inhabitants, who had slings for arms, dried cow-dung for firing, for a god the idol Heil standing in a glade at Dorchester, and for trade the fishing of that false gray coral which the Gauls called plin, and the Greeks isidis plocamos.

The child found his way as best he could.  Destiny is made up of cross-roads.  An option of path is dangerous.  This little being had an early choice of doubtful chances.

He continued to advance, but although the muscles of his thighs seemed to be of steel, he began to tire.  There were no tracks in the plain; or if there were any, the snow had obliterated them.  Instinctively he inclined eastwards.  Sharp stones had wounded his heels.  Had it been daylight pink stains made by his blood might have been seen in the footprints he left in the snow.

He recognized nothing.  He was crossing the plain of Portland from south to north, and it is probable that the band with which he had come, to avoid meeting any one, had crossed it from east to west; they had most likely sailed in some fisherman’s or smuggler’s boat, from a point on the coast of Uggescombe, such as St. Catherine’s Cape or Swancry, to Portland to find the hooker which awaited them; and they must have landed in one of the creeks of Weston, and re-embarked in one of those of Easton.  That direction was intersected by the one the child was now following.  It was impossible for him to recognize the road.

On the plain of Portland there are, here and there, raised strips of land, abruptly ended by the shore and cut perpendicular to the sea.  The wandering child reached one of these culminating points and stopped on it, hoping that a larger space might reveal further indications.  He tried to see around him.  Before him, in place of a horizon, was a vast livid opacity.  He looked at this attentively, and under the fixedness of his glance it became less indistinct.  At the base of a distant fold of land towards the east, in the depths of that opaque lividity (a moving and wan sort of precipice, which resembled a cliff of the night), crept and floated some vague black rents, some dim shreds of vapour.  The pale opacity was fog, the black shreds were smoke.  Where there is smoke there are men.  The child turned his steps in that direction.