The ground falls away rapidly on all sides.

Was there ever such turf in the whole world?
You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious.

There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and here it lies, just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by her Majesty's corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys for the ordnance map of Berkshire.

It is altogether a place that you won't forget, a place to open a man's soul, and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind, and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway" ("the Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest back of the hills--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath.

And he could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.
And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on the Ashdown.