There was yet, then, a higher point! He would reach it, if he broke every limb in the attempt! and madly he hurried on, feeling his way from ledge to ledge, squeezing himself through crannies, crawling on hands and knees along the sharp chines of the rocks, till he reached the foot of the cairn; climbed it, and threw himself at full length on the summit of the Glyder Vawr.
An awful place it always is; and Elsley saw it at an awful time, as the glare unveiled below him a sea of rock-waves, all sharp on edge, pointing toward him on every side: or rather one wave-crest of a sea; for twenty yards beyond, all sloped away into the abysmal dark.
Terrible were those rocks below; and ten times more terrible as seen through the lurid glow of his distempered brain.

All the weird peaks and slabs seemed pointing up at him: sharp-toothed jaws gaped upward-- tongues hissed upward--arms pointed upward--hounds leaped upward-- monstrous snake-heads peered upward out of cracks and caves.

Did he not see them move, writhe?
or was it the ever-shifting light of the flashes?
Did he not hear them howl, yell at him?
or was it but the wind, tortured in their labyrinthine caverns?
The next moment, and all was dark again; but the images which had been called up remained, and fastened on his brain, and grew there; and when, in the light of the next flash, the scene returned, he could see the red lips of the phantom hounds, the bright eyes of the phantom snakes; the tongues wagged in mockery; the hands brandished great stones to hurl at him; the mountain-top was instinct with fiendish life,--a very Blocksberg of all hideous shapes and sins.
And yet he did not shrink.

Horrible it was; he was going mad before it.
And yet he took a strange and fierce delight in making it more horrible; in maddening himself yet more and more; in clothing those fantastic stones with every fancy which could inspire another man with dread.

But he had no dread.