About nine o'clock
About eight in the evening the fog lifted and showed us a well-worn path which led up a very steep rise to the left . We took it , and as soon as we had got far enough from the railway to render the finding it again an impossibility , the fog shut down on us once more . We were in a bleak , unsheltered place , now , and had to trudge right along , in order to keep warm , though we rather expected to go over a precipice , sooner or later . About nine o'clock we made an important discovery -- that we were not in any path . We groped around a while on our hands and knees , but we could not find it ; so we sat down in the mud and the wet scant grass to wait . We were terrified into this by being suddenly confronted with a vast body which showed itself vaguely for an instant and in the next instant was smothered in the fog again . It was really the hotel we were after , monstrously magnified by the fog , but we took it for the face of a precipice , and decided not to try to claw up it .