Chapter 11 - Page 2

that famous crag

"Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds,
Conspicuous far, winding with one ascent
Accessible from earth, one entrance high;
The rest was craggy cliff that overhung
Still as it rose, impossible to climb."

So he had poised in old days; so he poised himself now, with Cleer by
his side, an angel confessed, on those high tors of Dartmoor.

But amid all the undulations of that great stony ocean, one peak there
was that delighted Trevennack's soul more than any of the rest--a bold
russet crest, bursting suddenly through the heathery waste in abrupt
ascent, and scarcely to be scaled, save on one difficult side, like
its Miltonic prototype. Even Cleer, who accompanied her father
everywhere on his rambles, clad in stout shoes and coarse blue serge
gown--. for Dartmoor is by no means a place to be approached by those
who, like Agag, "walk delicately"--even Cleer didn't know that this
craggy peak, jagged and pointed like some Alpine or dolomitic
aiguille, was known to all the neighboring shepherds around as St.
Michael's Tor, from its now forgotten chapel. A few wild Moorland
sheep grazed now and again on the short herbage at its base; but for
the most part father and daughter found themselves alone amid that
gorse-clad solitude. There Michael Trevennack would stand erect, with
head bare and brows knit, in the full eye of the sun, for hour after
hour at a time, fighting the devil within him. And when he came back
at night, tired out with his long tramp across the moor and his
internal struggle, he would murmur to his wife, "I've conquered him
to-day. It was a hard, hard fight! But I conquered! I conquered him!"

Up in the north, meanwhile, Eustace Le Neve worked away with a will at
the idea for his viaduct. As he rightly wrote to Cleer, the need
itself inspired him. Love is a great engineer, and Eustace learned
fast from him. He was full of the fresh originality of youth; and the
place took his fancy and impressed itself upon him. Gazing at it each
day, there rose up slowly by degrees in his mind, like a dream, the
picture of a great work on a new and startling principle--a
modification of the cantilever to the necessities of the situation.
Bit by bit he worked it out, and reduced his first floating conception
to paper; then he explained it to Walter Tyrrel, who listened hard to
his explanations, and tried his best to understand the force of the
technical arguments. Enthusiasm is catching; and Le Neve was
enthusiastic about his imaginary viaduct, till Walter Tyrrel in turn
grew almost as enthusiastic as the designer himself over its beauty
and utility. So charmed was he with the idea, indeed, that when Le
Neve had at last committed it all to paper,