To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.  The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim.  Who can say of a particular sea that it is old?  Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour.  The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.  Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits.  With the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to—­themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance—­even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.

The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath, from one horizon to another.  In many portions of its course it overlaid an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western road of the Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by.  On the evening under consideration it would have been noticed that, though the gloom had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the heath, the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.

II

Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble

Along the road walked an old man.  He was white-headed as a mountain, bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect.  He wore a glazed hat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons bearing an anchor upon their face.  In his hand was a silver-headed walking-stick, which he used as a veritable third leg, perseveringly dotting the ground with its point at every few inches’ interval.  One would have said that he had been, in his day, a naval officer of some sort or other.

Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white.  It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.

The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tract that he had yet to traverse.  At length he discerned, a long distance in front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle, and it proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself was journeying.  It was the single atom of life that the scene contained, and it only served to render the general loneliness more evident.  Its rate of advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly.