Page:The last of the Mohicans (1826 Volume 2).djvu/46

 boundary of the narrow plain, he led his followers, with swift steps, deep within the dense shadows, that were cast from their high and broken summits. Their route was now painful; lying over ground ragged with rocks, and intersected with ravines, and their progress proportionately slow. Bleak and black hills lay on every side of them, compensating, in some degree, for the additional toil of the march, by the sense of security they imparted. At length the party began slowly to rise a steep and rugged ascent, by a path that curiously wound among rocks and trees, avoiding the one, and supported by the other, in a manner that showed it had been devised by men long practised in the arts of the wilderness. As they gradually rose from the level of the valleys, the thick darkness which usually precedes the approach of day, began to disperse, and objects were seen in the plain and palpable colours with which they had been gifted by nature. When they issued from the stinted woods which clung to the barren sides of the mountain, upon a flat and mossy rock,