They passed down the garden and a sloping meadow to a brook swollen by heavy rains; over the brook on a narrow plank, and up a steep and stony pathway, almost a watercourse, between rocks, to another meadow, level with the house, that led ascending through a firwood; and there the change to thicker darkness told them light was abroad, though whether of the clouded moon or of the first grey of the quiet revolution was uncertain.  Metallic light of a subterranean realm, it might have been thought.

‘You remember everything of father,’ Carinthia said.  ‘We both do,’ said Chillon.

She pressed her brother’s arm.  ‘We will.  We will never forget anything.’

Beyond the firwood light was visibly the dawn’s.  Half-way down the ravines it resembled the light cast off a torrent water.  It lay on the grass like a sheet of unreflecting steel, and was a face without a smile above.  Their childhood ran along the tracks to the forest by the light, which was neither dim nor cold, but grave; presenting tree and shrub and dwarf growth and grass austerely, not deepening or confusing them.  They wound their way by borders of crag, seeing in a dell below the mouth of the idle mine begirt with weedy and shrub-hung rock, a dripping semi-circle.  Farther up they came on the flat juniper and crossed a wet ground-thicket of whortleberry:  their feet were in the moist moss among sprigs of heath; and a great fir-tree stretched his length, a peeled multitude of his dead fellows leaned and stood upright in the midst of scattered fire-stained members, and through their skeleton limbs the sheer precipice of slate-rock of the bulk across the chasm, nursery of hawk and eagle; wore a thin blue tinge, the sign of warmer light abroad.

‘This way, my brother!’ cried Carinthia, shuddering at a path he was about to follow.

Dawn in the mountain-land is a meeting of many friends.  The pinnacle, the forest-head, the latschen-tufted mound, rock-bastion and defiant cliff and giant of the triple peak, were in view, clearly lined for a common recognition, but all were figures of solid gloom, unfeatured and bloomless.  Another minute and they had flung off their mail, and changed to various, indented, intricate, succinct in ridge, scar and channel; and they had all a look of watchfulness that made them one company.  The smell of rock-waters and roots of herb and moss grew keen; air became a wine that raised the breast high to breathe it; an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights.  What wonder that the mountain-bred girl should let fly her voice.  The natural carol woke an echo.  She did not repeat it.

‘And we will not forget our home, Chillon,’ she said, touching him gently to comfort some saddened feeling.

The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and melted from brown to purpleblack.  The upper sky swam with violet; and in a moment each stray cloud-feather was edged with rose, and then suffused.  It seemed that the heights fronted East to eye the interflooding of colours, and it was imaginable that all turned to the giant whose forehead first kindled to the sun:  a greeting of god and king.