I must describe this Oread-Valley more particularly, I believe. East and west, above it, runs the old road we call the Race-Plain--the highest ground hereabouts, rising from Harnham by Salisbury to end at Shaftesbury in Dorset. North of this ridge is Chesilbury Camp; immediately south of that is the valley. Here the falling flood as it drained away must have sucked the soil out sharply at two neighbouring points, for this valley has two heads, and between them stands a grass-grown bluff. The western vale-head is quite round but very steep. It faces due south and has been found grateful by thorns, elders, bracken and even heather. But the eastern head is sharper, begins almost in a point. From that it sweeps out in a huge demi-lune of cliff, the outer cord being the east, the inner hugging the bluff. Facing north from the valley, facing these two heads, you see the eastern of them like a great amphitheatre, its steep embayed side so smooth as to seem the work of men's hands. It is too steep for turf; it is grey with marl, and patchy where scree of flint and chalk has run and found a lodgment. Ice-worn it may be, man-wrought it is not. No red-deer picks have been at work there, no bright-eyed, scrambling hordes have toiled their shifts or left traces through the centuries as at the Devil's Dyke. This noble arena is Nature's. Here I saw her people more than once. And the first sign I had of them was this.
I was here alone one summer's night; a night of stars, but without a moon. I lay within the scrub of the western valley-head and looked south. I could just see the profile of the enfolding hills, but only just; could guess that in the soft blackness below me, filling up the foreground like a lake, the valley was there indeed; realise that if I stepped down, perhaps thirty yards or so, my feet would sink into the pile of the turf-carpet, and feel the sharp benediction of the dew. About me surged and beat an enormous silence. The only sound at all--and that was fitful--came from a fern-owl which, from a thorn-bush above me, churred softly and at intervals his content with the night.
The stars were myriad, but sky-marks shone out; the Bear, the Belt, the Chair, the dancing sister Pleiades. The Galaxy was like a snow-cloud; startlingly, by one, by two, meteors flared a short course and died. You never feel lonely when you have the stars; yet they do not pry upon you. You can hide nothing from them, and need not seek to hide. If they have foreknowledge, they nurse no after-thought.