Kate looked around, and saw other figures something the same moving over hillside, some so distant that she could se nothing but movement, but all going, it seemed, towards one goal. The old wife was past her and up the hill before she moved. Her first impulse was to flee down the hillside and back to the safety of the Castle and the room where Katherine lay; but some strange impulse of her blood drew her one. The whole hillside seemed stirring with life, and her pulses hammered to the same tune. She went swiftly and stealthily up the hill in the bright moonlight. It was rough going through heather, with some boggy ground to skirt, but she was not very long in breasting the first shoulder of Criffel. Just before her head cleared the right, however, she heard sounds which made her crouch down in the heather and crawl up to the top, so that she did not show against the sky. The sounds were louder when she got to the top and peered down into a little cup among the hills. It was the common talk of the countryside that Criffel was the great haunt of the witches for miles around, and now she saw that rumour did not lie. The hollow was full of movement and fitful light, and a wild mouth music came up to her, broken with shrieks and queer, cat-like howls. She had always cfancied that the witches would dance at the top of Criffel, but if they had done so the lights that they carried would have made them conspicuous to the whole countryside. Kate now knew herself to be in deadly peril, for the life of every witch there might be endangered by a spy. They could not afford to let any neutral observer return alive from their orgies. Yet she felt the pull of music so strongly that she crept down the hillside to where a large rock lay, behind which she could take cover. From that shelter she watched the scene eagerly.

Not all the hundred witches she saw were doing the same thing, though a sense of common ritual came to her from the scene. Some were working before a large fire, turning a sheep on a spit, but even they danced and sang as they worked. Those with torches seemed to be winding in and out in a long hey. There were circles too, some dozen dancing together with a figure in the middle. These were turned outwards, back to back, and leaping and capering as they went round. They were naked and grotesquely masked, so that they were horrible to see in the moonlight and the shifting light of the fire. Beyond the fire and sheltering it from the moonlight was a big, square rock which the children called the Devil's Pulpit. There was more reason for the name Kate had known, for a great black figure stood on it with a horned head, and his shadow streamed out over the crowd. Kate stared at the scene in a trance. It would have been horrible and grotesque beyond words to Katherine, but it stirred some sympathetic excitement in Kate. Here were people, she felt, to whom ecstasy was ecstasy. There religion was no passive sitting under a sour minister but an active, wild delight, something that drove them out in contempt of death and danger. She stole down towards them, almost irresistibly tempted to strip off her clothes and join that fantastic mob.

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