From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which I am now going to describe.  When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South Africa, he made use of the expression “the illimitable veldt.”  The word “veldt” is Dutch, and the word “illimitable” is Double Dutch.  But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England.  Well, if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for it in England.  In England there is an illimitable number of illimitable veldts.  I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many different hills.  One cannot find anything more infinite than a finite horizon, free and lonely and innocent.  The Dutch veldt may be a little more desolate than Birmingham.  But I am sure it is not so desolate as that English hill was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe.

I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as if at a round mirror.  It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for on that freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold.  A deathly frost fastened every branch and blade to its place.  The sinking and softening forests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into an abyss which seemed unfathomable.  One fancied the world was soundless only because it was bottomless:  it seemed as if all songs and cries had been swallowed in some unresisting stillness under the roots of the hills.  I could fancy that if I shouted there would be no echo; that if I hurled huge stones there would be no noise of reply.  A dumb devil had bewitched the landscape:  but that again does not express the best or worst of it.  All those hoary and frosted forests expressed something so inhuman that it has no human name.  A horror of unconsciousness lay on them; that is the nearest phrase I know.  It was as if one were looking at the back of the world; and the world did not know it.  I had taken the universe in the rear.  I was behind the scenes.  I was eavesdropping upon an unconscious creation.

I shall not express what the place expressed.  I am not even sure that it is a thing that ought to be expressed.  There was something heathen about its union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does in some of the great pagan poems.  I understood one of the thousand poetical phrases of the populace, “a God-forsaken place.”  Yet something was present there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression.  Then suddenly I remembered the right word.  It was an enchanted place.  It had been put to sleep.  In a flash I remembered all the fairy-tales about princes turned to marble and princesses changed to snow.  We were in a land where none could strive or cry out; a white nightmare.  The moon looked at me across the valley like the enormous eye of a hypnotist; the one white eye of the world.