Part 11 (2/2)
The song, of course, makes them fall on the far side of the summit, upon the fields of Roncesvalles, with the sun setting right at them along the hills. And that is as it should be, for it is evident that (in a poem) the hero fighting among hills should die upon the enemy's side of the hills. But that is not the place where Roland really died. The place where he really died, he and Oliver and Turpin and all the others, was here in the very recess of the Northern Valley. It was here only that rocks could have been rolled down upon an army, and here is that narrow, strangling gorge where the line of march could most easily have been cut in two by the fury of the mountaineers. Also Eginhard says very clearly that they had already pa.s.sed the hills and seen France, and that is final. It was from these cliffs, then, that such an echo was made by the horn of Roland, and it was down that funnel of a valley that the noise grew until it filled Christendom; and it was up that gorge that there came, as it says in the song--
The host in a tide returning: Charles the King and his Barony.
This was the place. And any man who may yet believe (I know such a discussion is pedantry)--any man who may yet believe the song of Roland to have been a Northern legend had better come to this place and drink the mountains in. For whoever to-day
High are the hills and huge and dim with cloud, Down in the deeps, the living streams are loud,
had certainly himself stood in the silence and majesty of this valley.
It was already nearly dark when we two men had clambered down to that place, and up between the walls of the valley we had already seen the early stars. We pushed on to the French frontier in an eager appet.i.te for cleanliness and human food.
The last Spanish town is called Val Carlos, as it ought to be, considering that Charlemagne himself had once come roaring by. When we reached it in the darkness we had completed a forced march of forty-two miles, going light, it is true, and carrying nothing each of us but a gourd of wine and a sack, but we were very tired. There, at the goal of our effort, one faint sign of Government and of men at last appeared. It was in character with all the rest. One might not cross the frontier upon the road without a written leave. The written leave was given us, and in half an hour Spain was free.
THE SLANT OFF THE LAND
We live a very little time. Before we have reached the middle of our time perhaps, but not long before, we discover the magnitude of our inheritance. Consider England. How many men, I should like to know, have discovered before thirty what treasures they may work in her air? She magnifies us inwards and outwards; her fields can lead the mind down towards the subtle beginning of things; the tiny irridescence of insects; the play of light upon the facets of a blade of gra.s.s. Her skies can lead the mind up infinitely into regions where it seems to expand and fill, no matter what immensities.
It was the wind off the land that made me think of all this possession in which I am to enjoy so short a usufruct. I sat in my boat holding that tiller of mine, which is not over firm, and is but a rough bar of iron. There was no breeze in the air, and the little deep vessel swung slightly to the breathing of the sea. Her great mainsail and her baloon-jib came over lazily as she swung, and filled themselves with the cheating semblance of a wind. The boom creaked in the goose-neck, and at every roll the slack of the mainsheet tautened with a kind of little thud which thrilled the deck behind me. I saw under the curve of my headsail the long and hazy line, which is the only frontier of England; the plain that rather marries with than defies her peculiar seas. For it was in the Channel, and not ten miles from the coastline of my own country, that these thoughts rose in me during the calm at the end of winter, and the boat was drifting down more swiftly than I knew upon the ebb of the outer tide. Far off to the south sunlight played upon the water, and was gone again. The great s.h.i.+ps did not pa.s.s near me, and so I sat under a hazy sky restraining the slight vibration of the helm and waiting for the wind.
In whatever place a man may be the spring will come to him. I have heard of men in prison who would note the day when its influence pa.s.sed through the narrow window that was their only communion with their kind.
It comes even to men in cities; men of the stupid political sort, who think in maps and whose interest is in the addition of numbers. Indeed, I have heard such men in London itself expressing pleasure when a south-west gale came up in April from over the pines of Hamps.h.i.+re and of Surrey and mixed the Atlantic with the air of the fields. To me this year the spring came suddenly, like a voice speaking, though a low one--the voice of a person subtle, remembered, little known, and always desired. For a wind blew off the land.
The surface of the sea northward between me and the coast of Suss.e.x had been for so many hours elastic, smooth, and dull, that I had come to forget the indications of a change. But here and there, a long way off, little lines began to show, which were indeed broad s.p.a.ces of ruffled water, seen edgeways from the low free-board of my boat. These joined and made a surface all the way out towards me, but a surface not yet revealed for what it was, nor showing the movement and life and grace of waves. For no light shone upon it, and it was not yet near enough to be distinguished. It grew rapidly, but the haze and silence had put me into so dreamy a state that I had forgotten the ordinary anxiety and irritation of a calm, nor had I at the moment that eager expectancy of movement which should accompany the sight of that dark line upon the sea.
Other things possessed me, the memory of home and of the Downs. There went before this breeze, as it were, attendant servants, outriders who brought with them the scent of those first flowers in the North Wood or beyond Gumber Corner, and the fragrance of our gra.s.s, the savour which the sheep know at least, however much the visitors to my dear home ignore it. A deeper sympathy even than that of the senses came with those messengers and brought me the beeches and the yew trees also, although I was so far out at sea, for the loneliness of this great water recalled the loneliness of the woods, and both those solitudes--the real and the imaginary--mixed in my mind together as they might in the mind of a sleeping man.
Before this wind as it approached, the sky also cleared: not of clouds, for there were none, but of that impalpable and warm mist which seems to us, who know the south country and the Channel, to be so often part of the sky, and to shroud without obscuring the empty distances of our seas. There was a hard clear light to the north; and even over the Downs, low as they were upon the horizon, there was a sharp belt of blue. I saw the sun strike the white walls of Lady Newburgh's Folly, and I saw, what had hitherto been all confused, the long line of the Arundel Woods contrasting with the plain. Then the boom went over to port, the jib filled, I felt the helm pulling steadily for the first time in so many hours, and the boat responded. The wind was on me; and though it was from the north, that wind was warm, for it came from the sheltered hills.
Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few moments, which had so little to do with the art of sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of the full life that goes with the governing of sails and rudders. For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind--and the boat made three. There was work to be done in pressing against the tiller and in bringing her up to meet the seas, small though they were, for my boat was also small. Life came into everything; the Channel leapt and (because the wind was across the tide) the little waves broke in small white tips: in their movement and my own, in the dance of the boat and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million faces of the waves made, music rather than laughter, and the energy which this first warmth of the year had spread all over the Channel and sh.o.r.e, while it made life one, seemed also to make it innumerable. We were now not only three, the wind and my boat and I; we were all part (and masters for the moment) of a great throng. I knew them all by their names, which I had learnt a long time ago, and had sung of them in the North Sea. I have often written them down. I will not be ashamed to repeat them here, for good things never grow old. There was the Wave that brings good tidings, and the Wave that breaks on the sh.o.r.e, and the Wave of the island, and the Wave that helps, and the Wave that lifts forrard, the kindly Wave and the youngest Wave, and Amathea the Wave with bright hair, all the waves that come up round Thetis in her train when she rises from the side of the old man, her father, where he sits on his throne in the depth of the sea; when she comes up cleaving the water and appears to her sons in the upper world.
The Wight showed clear before me. I was certain with the tide of making the Horse Buoy and Spithead while it was yet afternoon, and before the plenitude of that light and movement should have left me. I settled down to so much and such exalted delight as to a settled task. I lit my pipe for a further companion (since it was good to add even to so many). I kept my right shoulder only against the tiller, for the pressure was now steady and sound. I felt the wind grow heavy and equable, and I caught over my shoulder the merry wake of this very honest moving home of mine as she breasted and hissed through the sea.
Here, then, was the proper end of a long cruise. It was springtime, and the season for work on land. I had been told so by the heartening wind.
And as I went still westward, remembering the duties of the land, the sails still held full, the sheets and the weather shrouds still stood taut and straining, and the little clatter of the broken water spoke along the lee rail. And so the s.h.i.+p sailed on.
[Greek: 'En d thnemos presen mxson istion, thmphi de k.u.ma]
[Greek: Sseire porphureon megal' iache, neos iouses.]
THE CANIGOU
A man might discuss with himself what it was that made certain great sights of the world famous, and what it is that keeps others hidden.
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