Here begins a region of mountain,
various with glens, fells, screes, scars, swards, becks, passes,
villages, river-heads, and dales. Some of the faces which I saw in it
almost seemed to speak to me in a broad dialect which I knew. But they
were not numerous in proportion: for all this country-side must have had
its population multiplied by at least some hundreds; and the villages
had rather the air of Danube, Levant, or Spanish villages. In one, named
Marrick, I saw that the street had become the scene either of a great
battle or a great massacre; and soon I was everywhere coming upon men
and women, English and foreign, dead from violence: cracked heads,
wounds, unhung jaws, broken limbs, and so on. Instead of going direct to
the mines from Reeth, that waywardness which now rules my mind, as
squalls an abandoned boat, took me somewhat further south-west to the
village of Thwaite, which I actually could not enter, so occupied with
dead was every spot on which the eye rested a hundred yards about it.
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