A wild longing seized him; he would escape up thither; up into those clouds, up anywhere to be alone--alone with his miserable self.

That was dreadful enough: but less dreadful than having a companion,--ay, even a stone by him--which could remind him of the scene which he had left; even remind him that there was another human being on earth beside himself.

Yes,--to put that cliff between him and all the world! Away he plunged from the high road, splashing over boggy uplands, scrambling among scattered boulders, across a stony torrent bed, and then across another and another:--when would he reach that dark marbled wall, which rose into the infinite blank,--looking within a stone-throw of him, and yet no nearer after he had walked a mile?
He reached it at last, and rushed up the talus of boulders, springing from stone to stone; till his breath failed him, and he was forced to settle into a less frantic pace.

But upward he would go, and upward he went, with a strength which he never had felt before.

Strong?
How should he not be strong, while every vein felt filled with molten lead; while some unseen power seemed not so much to attract him upwards, as to drive him by magical repulsion from all that he had left below?
So upward and upward ever, driven on by the terrible gad-fly, like Io of old he went; stumbling upwards along torrent beds of slippery slate, writhing himself upward through crannies where the waterfall splashed cold upon his chest and face, yet could not cool the inward fire; climbing, hand and knee, up cliffs of sharp-edged rock; striding over downs where huge rocks lay crouched in the grass, like fossil monsters of some ancient world, and seemed to stare at him with still and angry brows.