The general savage character of the ravine was relieved by some spots of exquisite beauty, where the traveller might have lingered with delight, if apprehension of assault from robber, or visit from Hobthurst, had not urged him on.  Numberless waterfalls, gushing from fissures in the hills, coursed down their seamy sides, looking like threads of silver as they sprang from point to point.  One of the most beautiful of these cascades, issuing from a gully in the rocks near the cavern called the Earl’s Bower, fell, in rainy seasons, in one unbroken sheet of a hundred and fifty feet.  Through the midst of the gorge ran a swift and brawling stream, known by the appellation of the Calder; but it must not be confounded with the river flowing past Whalley Abbey.  The course of this impetuous current was not always restrained within its rocky channel, and when swollen by heavy rains, it would frequently invade the narrow causeway running beside it, and, spreading over the whole width of the gorge, render the road almost impassable.

Through this rocky and sombre defile, and by the side of the brawling Calder, which dashed swiftly past him, Nicholas took his way.  The hawks were yelling overhead; the rooks were cawing on the topmost branches of some tall timber, on which they built; a raven was croaking lustily in the wood; and a pair of eagles were soaring in the still glowing sky.

By-and-by, the glen contracted, and a wall of steep rocks on either side hemmed the shuddering traveller in.  Instinctively, he struck spurs into his horse, and accelerated his pace.

The narrow glen expands, the precipices fall further back, and the traveller breathes more freely.  Still, he does not relax his speed, for his imagination has been at work in the gloom, peopling his path with lurking robbers or grinning boggarts.  He begins to fear he shall lose his gold, and execrates his folly for incurring such heedless risk.  But it is too late now to turn back.

It grows rapidly dusk, and objects became less and less distinct, assuming fantastical and fearful forms.  A blasted tree, clinging to a rock, and thrusting a bare branch across the road, looks to the squire like a bandit; and a white owl bursting from a bush, scares him as if it had been Hobthurst himself.  However, in spite of these and other alarms, for which he is indebted to excited fancy, he hurries on, and is proceeding at a thundering pace, when all at once his horse comes to a stop, arrested by a tall female figure, resembling that seen near the mountain cairn at the entrance of the gorge.

Nicholas’s blood ran cold, for though in this case he could not apprehend plunder, he was fearful of personal injury, for he believed the woman to be a witch.  Mustering up courage, however, he forced Robin to proceed.

If his progress was meant to be barred, a better spot for the purpose could not have been selected.  A narrow road, scarcely two feet in width, ran round the ledge of a tremendous crag, jutting so far into the glen that it almost met the steep barrier of rocks opposite it.  Between these precipitous crags dashed the river in a foaming cascade, nearly twelve feet in height, and the steep narrow causeway winding beside it, as above described, was rendered excessively slippery and dangerous from the constant cloud of spray arising from the fall.