Here more remains of the old fortress were to be seen. The various outbuildings that straggled down towards the loch had all once formed part of old block-houses or outlying towers; and, as the path descended farther down the hill, the detective found himself walking round the precipitous rock from which the single great tower still standing--the one in whose massive shell the room had been cut which was now the library--dominated the scene from every side.

It had been built at the very edge of the hill which here fell almost sheer to the level of the lake, and the old McConachans had no doubt chosen their site for its unscalable position. Indeed, the place must always have been impregnable from that side, the rock offering no foothold to a goat till within twenty feet of the base of the tower, where the surface was broken and uneven, and had, in places, been built up with solid masonry. In the crevices up there, seeds had germinated and grown to tall plants and bushes. Ivy hung about the face of the escarpment like a scarf, and in one place a good-sized tree, a beech, had established itself firmly upon a ledge and leant forward over the path below in a manner that turned the beholder giddy. Its great roots had not been able to grow to their full girth within the cracks and crannies of the rocks; some of them had pushed their way in through the gaps in the masonry, and the others curled and twisted in mid air, twining and interlacing in an outspread canopy.

Beyond the tower ran the battlemented wall of the enclosed garden, its foundations draped in the thrifty vegetation of the rocks.

At Gimblet's feet, on the other side of the path, brawled a burn, hurrying on its way to the loch, and he followed its course slowly down to the place where it mingled with the deep waters. A little beyond he saw the point of a fir-covered peninsula, and wandered on under the trees till he came to the end of it; there he sat down to think over what he had heard and seen that afternoon. The wild beauty of the place soothed and delighted him, and he felt lazily in his pocket for a chocolate.

Below him, grey lichen-grown rocks jutted into the loch in tumbled, broken masses, piled heedlessly one on the other, as if some troll of the mountain had begun in play to make a causeway for himself. The great stones, so old, so fiercely strong, stood knee-deep in the waters, over which they seemed to brood with so patient and indifferent a dignity that human life and affairs took on an aspect very small and inconsiderable. They were like monstrous philosophers, he thought, oblivious alike to time and to the cold waves that lapped their feet; their heads crowned here and there with pines as with scattered locks, the little tufts of heather and fern and grasses, that clung to them wherever root hold could be found, all the clothing they wore against the bitter blasts of the winds.




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