The Deepest Purple

"My way from Dunwich took me at first by the ruins of the GreyFriars' monastery, through a number of fields, and then to an overgrown scrubland where stunted pines, birches and rampant gorse grew so densely that the going was very hard. I was beginning to think of turning back when all of a sudden the heath opened out in front of me. Shading from pale lilac to deepest purple, it stretched away westward, with a white track curving gently through its midst. Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly, and numbed by this crazed flowering, I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before, or, as it now seemed to me, in some distant past." (p. 171)

A tangent from Poe's "The Raven":

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven

***

Incidentally (or intentionally), purple appears several times in the text:

That purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patrodus - what does it mean? (26); ...the plaster-coloured faces of the sitters mottled with scarlet and purple blotches...(36--Somerleyton); purple-coloured walls. (139)

---