The whole of that splendid region seemed to smile, but the faces of its inhabitants are sad and mysterious.
Henrietta had a peculiar sense of anxiety during her stay among these angry looking people who spoke a language she had never heard before.

At intervals of a mile all along the road a roughly carved cross shot up, covered with clumsily carved letters, which did not in the least resemble those we are accustomed to.

Clementina once asked the coachman what these crosses might mean and repented doing so immediately afterwards, for he informed her that they marked the places where unlucky travellers had come by an untimely death; the inscriptions were the records of the tragic romances through the scene of which they were passing.
The valleys grew narrower and narrower, the road wound upward among precipices, and the loquacious coachman attached horrible stories to every rock and ruin.

Each valley seemed to have its own particular ghost.
Here and there by the roadside stood silent houses not one of which had an inviting appearance, it would never have occurred to a human soul to knock at any of them, even at midnight, to ask for a night's lodging.
They were all of them sooty dilapidated shanties, which might easily have been taken for stables, consisting of a single room in which the whole family lived, livestock and all.

The church often lay far away from the settlement as if it belonged to two villages equally.
Then the road rose again between bare and barren cliffs, where only here and there a solitary bush seemed to cling to the rocky wall.