Two Years Ago Volume Ii Part 32

The horizontal curtain of mist; gauzy below, fringed with white tufts and streamers, deepening above into the blackness of utter night. Below it a long gulf of soft yellow haze in which, as in a bath of gold, lie delicate bars of far-off western cloud; and the faint glimmer of the western sea, above long knotted spurs of hill, in deepest shades, like a bunch of purple grapes flecked here and there from behind with gleams of golden light; and beneath them again, the dark woods sleeping over Gwynnant, and their dark double sleeping in the bright lake below.

On the right hand Snowdon rises. Vast sheets of utter blackness--vast sheets of s.h.i.+ning light. He can see every crag which juts from the green walls of Galt-y-Wennalt; and far past it into the Great Valley of Cwn Dyli; and then the red peak, now as black as night, shuts out the world with its huge mist-topped cone. But on the left hand all is deepest shade. From the highest saw-edges, where Moel Meirch cuts the golden sky, down to the very depth of the abyss, all is l.u.s.trous darkness, sooty, and yet golden still. Let the darkness lie upon it for ever!

Hidden be those woods where she stood an hour ago! Hidden that road down which, even now, they may be pacing home together!--Curse the thought!

He covers his face in his hands, and shudders in every limb.

He lifts his hands from his eyes at last:--what has befallen?

Before the golden haze a white veil is falling fast. Sea, mountain, lake, are vanis.h.i.+ng, fading as in a dream. Soon he can see nothing, but the twinkle of a light in Pen-y-gwryd, a thousand feet below; happy children are nestling there in innocent sleep. Jovial voices are chatting round the fire. What has he to do with youth, and health, and joy? Lower, lower, ye clouds!--Shut out that insolent and intruding spark, till nothing be seen but the silver sheet of Cwm Fynnon, and the silver zig-zag lines which wander into it among black mora.s.s, while down the mountain side go, softly sliding, troops of white mist-angels.

Softly they slide, swift and yet motionless, as if by some inner will, which needs no force of limbs; gliding gently round the crags, diving gently off into the abyss, their long white robes trailing about their feet in upward-floating folds. "Let us go hence," they seem to whisper to the G.o.d-forsaken, as legends say they whispered, when they left their doomed shrine in old Jerusalem. Let the white fringe fall between him and the last of that fair troop; let the grey curtain follow, the black pall above descend; till he is alone in darkness that may be felt, and in the shadow of death.

Now he is safe at last; hidden from all living things--hidden it may be, from G.o.d; for at least G.o.d is hidden from him. He has desired to be alone: and he is alone; the centre of the universe, if universe there be. All created things, suns and planets, seem to revolve round him, and he a point of darkness, not of light. He seems to float self-poised in the centre of the boundless nothing, upon an ell-broad slab of stone-- and yet not even on that: for the very ground on which he stands he does not feel. He does not feel the mist which wets his cheek, the blood which throbs within his veins. He only is; and there is none beside.

Horrible thought! Permitted but to few, and to them--thank G.o.d!--but rarely. For two minutes of that absolute self-isolation would bring madness; if, indeed, it be not the very essence of madness itself.

There he stood; he knew not how long; without motion, without thought, without even rage or hate, now--in one blank paralysis of his whole nature; conscious only of self, and of a dull, inward fire, as if his soul were a dark vault, lighted with lurid smoke.

What was that? He started: shuddered--as well he might. Had he seen heaven opened? or another place? So momentary was the vision, that he scarce knew what he saw. There it was again! Lasting but for a moment: but long enough to let him see the whole western heaven transfigured into one sheet of pale blue gauze, and before it Snowdon towering black as ink, with every saw and crest cut out, hard and terrible, against the lightning-glare:--and then the blank of darkness.

Again! The awful black giant, towering high in air, before the gates of that blue abyss of flame: but a black crown of cloud has settled upon his head; and out of it the lightning sparks leap to and fro, ringing his brows with a coronet of fire.

Another moment, and the roar of that great battle between earth and heaven crashed full on Elsley's ears.

He heard it leap from Snowdon, sharp and rattling, across the gulf toward him, till it crashed full upon the Glyder overhead, and rolled and flapped from crag to crag, and died away along the dreary downs. No!

There it boomed out again, thundering full against Siabod on the left; and Siabod tossed it on to Moel Meirch, who answered from all her clefts and peaks with a long confused battle-growl, and then tossed it across to Aran; and Aran, with one dull, bluff report from her flat cliff, to nearer Lliwedd; till, worn out with the long bufferings of that giant ring, it sank and died on Gwynnant far below--but ere it died, another and another thunder-crash burst, sharper and nearer every time, to hurry round the hills after the one which roared before it.

Another minute, and the blue glare filled the sky once more: but no black t.i.tan towered before it now. The storm had leapt Llanberris pa.s.s, and all around Elsley was one howling chaos of cloud, and rain, and blinding flame. He turned and fled again.

By the sensation of his feet, he knew that he was going up hill; and if he but went upward, he cared not whither he went. The rain gushed through, where the lightning pierced the cloud, in drops like musket b.a.l.l.s. He was drenched to the skin in a moment; dazzled and giddy from the flashes; stunned by the everlasting roar, peal over-rus.h.i.+ng peal, echo out-shooting echo, till rocks and air quivered alike beneath the continuous battle-cannonade.--"What matter? What fitter guide for such a path as mine than the blue lightning flashes?"

Poor wretch! He had gone out of his way for many a year, to give himself up, a willing captive, to the melodramatic view of Nature, and had let sights and sounds, not principles and duties, mould his feelings for him: and now, in his utter need and utter weakness, he had met her in a mood which was too awful for such as he was to resist. The Nemesis had come; and swept away helplessly, without faith and hope, by those outward impressions of things on which he had feasted his soul so long, he was the puppet of his own eyes and ears; the slave of glare and noise.

Breathless, but still untired, he toiled up a steep incline, where he could feel beneath him neither moss nor herb. Now and then his feet brushed through a soft tuft of parsley fern: but soon even that sign of vegetation ceased; his feet only rasped over rough bare rock, and he was alone in a desert of stone.

What was that sudden apparition above him, seen for a moment dim and gigantic through the mist, hid the next in darkness? The next flash showed him a line of obelisks, like giants crouching side by side, staring down on him from the clouds. Another five minutes, he was at their feet, and past them; to see above them again another line of awful watchers through the storms and rains of many a thousand years, waiting, grim and silent, like those doomed senators in the Capitol of Rome, till their own turn should come, and the last lightning stroke hurl them too down, to lie for ever by their fallen brothers, whose mighty bones bestrewed the screes below.

He groped his way between them; saw some fifty yards beyond a higher peak; gained it by fierce struggles and many falls; saw another beyond that; and, rus.h.i.+ng down and up two slopes of moss, reached a region where the upright lava-ledges had been split asunder into chasms, crushed together again into caves, toppled over each other, hurled up into spires, in such chaotic confusion, that progress seemed impossible.

A flash of lightning revealed a lofty cairn above his head. There was yet, then, a higher point! He would reach it, if he broke every limb in the attempt! and madly he hurried on, feeling his way from ledge to ledge, squeezing himself through crannies, crawling on hands and knees along the sharp chines of the rocks, till he reached the foot of the cairn; climbed it, and threw himself at full length on the summit of the Glyder Vawr.

An awful place it always is; and Elsley saw it at an awful time, as the glare unveiled below him a sea of rock-waves, all sharp on edge, pointing toward him on every side: or rather one wave-crest of a sea; for twenty yards beyond, all sloped away into the abysmal dark.

Terrible were those rocks below; and ten times more terrible as seen through the lurid glow of his distempered brain. All the weird peaks and slabs seemed pointing up at him: sharp-toothed jaws gaped upward-- tongues hissed upward--arms pointed upward--hounds leaped upward-- monstrous snake-heads peered upward out of cracks and caves. Did he not see them move, writhe? or was it the ever-s.h.i.+fting light of the flashes?

Did he not hear them howl, yell at him? or was it but the wind, tortured in their labyrinthine caverns?

The next moment, and all was dark again; but the images which had been called up remained, and fastened on his brain, and grew there; and when, in the light of the next flash, the scene returned, he could see the red lips of the phantom hounds, the bright eyes of the phantom snakes; the tongues wagged in mockery; the hands brandished great stones to hurl at him; the mountain-top was instinct with fiendish life,--a very Blocksberg of all hideous shapes and sins.

And yet he did not shrink. Horrible it was; he was going mad before it.

And yet he took a strange and fierce delight in making it more horrible; in maddening himself yet more and more; in clothing those fantastic stones with every fancy which could inspire another man with dread. But he had no dread. Perfect rage, like perfect love, casts out fear. He rejoiced in his own misery, in his own danger. His life hung on a thread; any instant might hurl him from that cairn, a blackened corpse.

What better end? Let it come! He was Prometheus on the peak of Caucasus, hurling defiance at the unjust Jove! His hopes, his love, his very honour--curse it!--ruined! Let the lightning stroke come! He were a coward to shrink from it. Let him face the worst, unprotected, bare-headed, naked, and do battle, himself, and nothing but himself, against the universe! And, as men at such moments will do, in the mad desire to free the self-tortured spirit from some unseen and choking bond, he began wildly tearing off his clothes.

But merciful nature brought relief, and stopped him in his mad efforts, or he had been a frozen corpse long ere the dawn. His hands, stiff with cold, refused to obey him; as he delayed he was saved. After the paroxysm came the collapse; he sank upon the top of the cairn half senseless. He felt himself falling over its edge; and the animal instinct of self-preservation, unconsciously to him, made him slide down gently, till he sank into a crack between two rocks, sheltered somewhat, as it befell happily, from the las.h.i.+ng of the rain.

Another minute, and he slept a dreamless sleep.

But there are two men upon that mountain, whom neither rock nor rain, storm nor thunder have conquered, because they are simply brave honest men; and who are, perhaps, far more "poetic" characters at this moment than Elsley Vavasour, or any dozen of mere verse-writers, because they are hazarding their lives, on an errand of mercy, and all the while have so little notion that they are hazarding their lives, or doing anything dangerous or heroic, that, instead of being touched for a moment by Nature's melodrama, they are jesting at each other's troubles, greeting each interval of darkness with mock shouts of misery and despair, likening the crags to various fogies of their acquaintance, male and female, and only pulling the cutty pipes out of their mouths to chant s.n.a.t.c.hes of jovial songs. They are Wynd and Naylor, the two Cambridge boating-men, in bedrabbled flannel trousers, and shooting-jackets pocketful of water; who are both fully agreed, that hunting a mad poet over the mountains in a thunder-storm is, on the whole, "the jolliest lark they ever had in their lives."

"He must have gone up here somewhere. I saw the poor beggar against the sky as plain as I see you,--which I don't--" for darkness cut the speech short.

"Where be you, William? says the keeper."

"Here I be, sir, says the beater, with my 'eels above my 'ed."

"Wery well, William; when you get your 'ed above your 'eels, gae on."

"But I'm stuck fast between two stones! Hang the stones!" And Naylor bursts into an old seventeenth century ditty of the days of "three-man glees."

"They stoans, they stoans, they stoans, they stoans-- They stoans that built George Riddler's oven, O they was fetched from Blakeney quarr'; And George he was a jolly old man, And his head did grow above his har'.

"One thing in George Riddler I must commend, And I hold it for a valiant thing; With any three brothers in Gloucesters.h.i.+re He swore that his three sons should sing.

"There was d.i.c.k the tribble, and Tom the mane, Let every man sing in his own place; And William he was the eldest brother, And therefore he should sing the base.--

I'm down again! This is my thirteenth fall."

"So am I! I shall just lie and light a pipe."

"Come on, now, and look round the lee side of this crag. We shall find him bundled up under the lee of one of them."

"He don't know lee from windward, I dare say." "He'll soon find out the difference by his skin;--if it's half as wet, at least, as mine is."

"I'll tell you what, Naylor, if the poor fellow has crossed the ridge, and tried to go down on the Twll du, he's a dead man by this time."

"He'll have funked it, when he comes to the edge, and sees nothing but mist below. But if he has wandered on to the cliffs above Trifaen, he's a dead man, then, at all events. Get out of the way of that flas.h.!.+ A close shave, that! I believe my whiskers are singed."

"'Pon my honour, Wynd, we ought to be saying our prayers rather than joking in this way."

"We may do both, and be none the worse. As for coming to grief, old boy, we're on a good errand, I suppose, and the devil himself can't harm us.

Still, shame to him who's ashamed of saying his prayers, as Arnold used to say."

And all the while, these two brave lads have been thrusting their lanthorn into every crack and cranny, and beating round every crag carefully and cunningly, till long past two in the morning.

"Here's the ordnance cairn, at last; and--here am I astride of a carving-knife, I think! Come and help me off, or I shall be split to the chin!"

"I'm coming! What's this soft under my feet? Who-o-o-oop! Run him to earth at last!"

And diving down into a crack, Wynd drags out by the collar the unconscious Elsley.