Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/270

Rh black peaks of cypress-topped hills, as the hollow booming matin-bell of the monks swung wearily through the heavy air. "There is no fortress here; is the dog in error?" he thought, as he entered on the dreary desert of the level marshy land, with no sound in it except the echo of the tolling bell and the noise of the moor-fowls startled from their rest among the reeds and sedges. But the hound held on, growing keener and hotter as the scent grew stronger and the wheel marks plainer in the damp sodden ground than they had been on the dusty roads and the traversed highways. With his muzzle to the ground, he dashed onward mile on mile across the country at a speed that taxed the Border fleetness of his companion. There were quagmires, morasses, hidden pools, sponges of mud, small lagunes hidden under treacherous grasses or rushes, unseen pools where the water-birds brooded by hundreds, swamps where a single false step would be death for any sinker under the yielding, soaking, nauseous mass; but the hound never missed his footing or erred in his going, and Erceldoune followed him through the grey of the morning; his heart beat to suffocation, the brown lonely waste reeled before his eyes, the hot noxious air seemed to weigh down his breath