CHAPTER V.

“I thravelled a dale when I had th’ influenzy.”

That was how a County Waterford gardener described the delirious wanderings of fever. It also describes our state when the momentary joy of receiving our luggage from the station had passed, when the long process of dressing was over, and we lay, speechless victims of headache, on our beds. To the feverishness of heat and exhaustion was added the gliding panorama of mountain and wood and glaring sky, items of our ignoble twelve miles; they became abhorrent, and yet the brain toiled to fill in any forgotten feature. Such was the result of the Indian method of dealing with hot weather.

It was dealt with that afternoon in a more efficient manner. In the first place, a parasol was bought from the leading draper, a pink silk one, reduced from three-and-nine to two shillings, on account of the places where it had faded yellow. It was certainly a bargain, and an hour afterwards the barometer began to fall, very slightly, but sufficiently to show intelligence. Next morning the heat was still supreme, but this was in order that we might spend another two shillings on puggarees, after which the barometer fell a little more.

The shops of Dolgelly have the great advantage of a street on all four sides of each house, each standing “a tower of strength, four square, to every wind that blew,” so that bread, boots, millinery, vegetables, and patent medicines can command each a window, great or small; and the shopkeeper stands, Argus-eyed, in the centre, and caters for the enigmatic needs of tourists, much as a missionary might prepare glass beads for the Central African. Each shopkeeper knows his customers, to the last farmer’s wife; they are united to him in a bond inferior only to matrimony, as the interloper, of however long standing, finds to his cost.

“If you could get it anywhere else you wouldn’t come ’ere for it,” said a shopkeeper in our hearing, apostrophising the departing figure of a casual purchaser. “I’m ’ere twenty-five years,” he went on, wiping the flies off a perspiring piece of bacon with his pocket-handkerchief, “and they ’ave as little likin’ for me as the first day I took down my shutters, because I’m English. Ah, the Welsh stand together, they do, and they ’ate the English. They’re near, too--terrible near.”

It was no more than ten o’clock in the morning, and yet when we emerged from the shop, a “Rehoboth” was sending a stentorian hymn forth through the town, and the streets were full of people hurrying to it. The tune was wild and stately, and the minor phrases followed each other unfaltering. We insensibly drew towards the door, and listened while the slow melody rose and dropped like a path in the mountains--a path washed with mountain rain and purified with mountain wind. Within, the people stood close in the hideous pews, in the naked galleries; three men in black coats, stationed in three rostrums high up against the white wall, led the singing, and evidently found the weather too hot. We observed that their eyes were upon us, and that an elder seemed to be developing a tendency to offer us a Welsh hymnal, and we retired.

The morning was obviously one to sacrifice to expeditions, and any tourist worthy of the name would no doubt have been by noon on the top of Cader Idris or the Torrent Walk. The landlady of the “Angel,” looking more than ever like Miss O’Flannigan’s aunt, urged us to these and other courses with veiled reproach, as she would have reminded the impenitent of evening service, but the hills in whose lap Dolgelly lies remain unexplored by us. Others have been more conscientious; to them be the glories of accomplishment and the fell privileges of description. The one and only thing that Miss O’Flannigan desired to see was a Welsh woman in a Welsh hat; but this, the landlady was forced to admit, was the one and only thing not procurable in Dolgelly. There was the sextoness of the church, an octogenarian, who had preserved her mother’s hat--perhaps she would do. In half an hour Miss O’Flannigan was driving the octogenarian before her, carrying a band-box as old and yellow as herself; and the rest of the morning was spent in the seclusion of the hotel garden, where, seated on an upturned bucket, the octogenarian balanced the heirloom upon her spotted cap, while Miss O’Flannigan produced studies of her that were more forcible than polite.

I, no less enjoyably to myself, sat on a wheelbarrow in the stable, and laid down the law to the landlord, the ostler, and the saddler about “chambering” the stuffing of one of the saddles so as to fit certain swellings which had appeared on Tom’s back, which might be the result of warbles, or of an ill-fitting saddle, or of the sudden

rise to the dignity of oats, but were certainly capable of unpleasant developments. Tommy’s hard, yellow hide remained unaltered by saddle, oats, curry-comb, or any other of its new conditions. Looks were not his strong point, but we already relied on him--and there was something attractive in the conscientious way in which he shied at gate-posts, cows in the field, and other startling and irregular objects.

It was already far in the afternoon when we rode out over the bridge at Dolgelly, where a single trickle of water crept through the central arch. The sky had mackerel backs in it, the trees stirred delicately to a newly awakened breeze, and the barometer was still falling. The puggarees were packed up, and the pink parasol was furled, but they were doing their appointed work, and the change came slowly nearer. In the meantime we went on and up through wooded glens, past the ideally placed little fishing hotel of Thynn-y-Groes, in clear, genial sunshine, without a horse-fly; and gradually the vague headache, _réchauffé_ from the well-cooked one of yesterday, melted away in that perfect ride. The road was lonely, more lonely than a by-road in West Galway, and, as in Galway, low hazels grew thickly behind the stone walls; the wide lowlands down on our left lay sweet and placid, and silent except for the corncrake; the mountains ran like a blue wall along the west, a wall hacked and gashed as if by a siege, but still indomitable. Cader Idris blocked the end of the valley, overlooking all things; but of what avail are names, to what purpose the narrow English language? They will not give one breath of the transcendent air, or the greenness of the leaves that the goats were tearing from the hazel twigs, or one moment out of the heavenly silence.

Descending leisurely from the heights and their crisp, ragged woods, we discovered a line of railway, and farther on a desolate hillside village, called by its inhabitants “Trowsefunneth.” How they spell it is a different affair; probably they do not try. We had tea there. The proprietor of the inn wished us to have a leg of mutton--“quite tender, yess indeed! been in the ’ouse a week”--but we thought this would be high tea with a vengeance, and accepted the inevitable in its usual form of “’am-an’-ecks.” We can no longer refrain from mentioning that there are two things in Wales, yea, three, which the traveller would do well to avoid, and yet can hardly hope to escape from--butter, bacon, coffee,--all are bad, even odious; the bacon salt, tough, stringy; the butter yellow, coarse, and, if possible, more salt than the bacon; the coffee a shade worse than the ordinary drug supplied by the British hotel-keeper--and what has already been referred to as the narrow English language holds no epithet that will fitly stigmatise British hotel coffee.

It was past seven o’clock when the reckoning was paid, and we could have wished we were going to stay on in the little parlour with the German coloured prints, and the clatter of Welsh outside in the kitchen, but it could not be. Already the ascent of Snowdon was coming into the near future, a matter of the day after to-morrow, and the mackerel backs were in the sky. The reluctant Tommies were drawn from their lair, where the village sat in conclave on them and the hold-alls, and we pushed onwards by what the proprietor described as “Mr Oakley’s privvat road through the glen.” Those who know the Dargle, in the county of Wicklow, know what a glen can be at its best, and it is hard to admit that it has a rival; but in the evening light, with the deep places of that bosky cleft showing a writhing twist of white water a hundred feet below, Mr Oakley’s glen was very hard to beat. It was as nearly dark as the summer night knew how to be when the loafers of Mahntooroch--this is again the phonetic gasp of despair--took their pipes from their mouths to point out to us the way to the Grapes Hotel. We could make out that it was a sophisticated village, hemmed in between a wooded hill and a river, and lying silent in the velvet gloom, except for the noise of running water and the irregular patter of the Tommies’ hoofs.

A scarlet face loomed in the entry of the hotel as we slid stiffly from our saddles, and afterwards, in the sitting-room, we found it burning like a red lamp at the central table. We fell into converse with its owner, while from a dark corner of the room a sickly jingle apprised us that some one was playing “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”

“My friend’s playin’ there,” explained the tourist with the roast face; “’e’s rather a shoy cha-ap.”

He further informed us that he came from Manchester and ’ad just bin up Snowdon. Perhaps he did not mean to be discouraging: his intentions were obviously of the best, and possibly his complexion had something to say to the lurid light in which he regarded our project of riding the Tommies up Snowdon. Nevertheless, as we heard how, not three years before, a pony had slipped and fallen down a precipice, how he himself had felt “that sick and giddy” at one place that on the downward path two guides had enveloped his head in a sack and carried him past the dreaded spot, and of how insuperably beset with clouds the topmost peak had been, our hearts fell into our boots, and the tune of “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” has, ever since that night, held a horror for us that is not entirely its own.

supplied the Irishman himself, when it led us past a dreary cabin whose ambition to be rectangularly frightful yielded to the prior necessity of being crooked in a manner that we thought to be achievable only by the Irish cottage architect. With squalid, squinting eyes it leered aside upon its cabbage-garden and the pigs that rooted therein, and outwards to the sea down a bare valley. We were sensible then, for the first time, of a greyness that was blunting the sunshine, and the cabin with its malign, dirty face seemed responsible for it.

The extremes of landscape met where tumbled heaps of grey rock slanted down from the sky to the flat boggy plain that runs out to Port Madoc. That the road should be protected from these suspended avalanches by a single strand of wire-fencing is a fact that no doubt admits of explanation, but at a cursory view of things its object was not apparent. The loneliness was absolute, whether we looked inland to crags and oak-woods, or seaward along the marshes, but by this time we did not expect anything except loneliness. Coventry on a memorable occasion was not more straitly penned behind its shutters than was Wales as we rode through it. The wayside villages seemed asleep, the farmhouse doors were shut, and the silence of the roads was comparable only to that supremest of earth’s silences when one is thrown out of a run, and hounds, riders, and runners have seemingly passed away into eternity.

Turning inland again among the low oak-woods, the country was rich and flowery, and always silent, and we ourselves were hot and speechless under the hot, grey sky. A discovery that one of the girths was rubbing off the skin behind Tom’s foreleg occasioned a delay fraught with gloom, difficulty, and the tongues of buckles. Miss O’Flannigan mounted a rock, and fell to sketching the unsketchable--a habit with her in moments of inglorious crisis, her sole contribution to the difficulty being a stout square of chamois leather which she wore on her chest in memory of a departed cold. With this interesting relic I padded the girth, and we proceeded in despondency. It was one of the junctures when the Tommies, and riding-tours generally, became intolerable, and we were on the dangerous verge of admitting as much, when our attention became concentrated on six black objects advancing towards us in single file along the barren perspective of road. They were a walking party, evidently engaged in record-breaking, and as with purple, streaming faces they swung past us, we accepted the object-lesson, and thanked heaven for the Tommies.

Following on this was a mile of solitude and sinuous advance through craggy places; then, suddenly, the Pass of Aberglaslyn, and the tourist by companies--especially the clerical tourist. There were four long black coats, and as many soft black felt hats, on or about Aberglaslyn bridge, each with a remarkable proportion of female adherents, to whom, guide-book in hand, or with the unaided gush of inspiration, they defined the beauties of the Pass. We are naturally modest, but we cannot refrain from mentioning that from the moment we came in sight we usurped the position of the beauties of the Pass. The adherents of the clergy turned with ecstasy from the contemplation of nature to feast their eyes upon us, our sun-burned straw hats, our equally sun-burned noses, and our bulging wallets.

We are disposed to deal leniently with an unsuccessful rival, and inured though Aberglaslyn must now be to picturesque description, we will spare it further adjectives. There was a poor woman once in the county of Cork who was shown a dazzling array of wedding-presents. Speech first failed her, and then she said: “Mother of God! it’s like a circus.” Thus, and with such a humble reverence, do we say of Aberglaslyn Pass, that it is like a circus.

There is something at once gallant and touching about the way in which the English tourist places his hand in that of convention, and is led by her, uncomplaining, through very arid places. This elderly generalisation does not, by so much as a backward glance, include Aberglaslyn, with its cliffs and fir-trees, and mountain-sides flushed with blossoming heather; it is for the moment concentrated upon the grave of Gelert, its railings and

little stone pillars, erected possibly by the Town Commissioners to supply a want long felt by tourists of an object for a short walk. The selectors of the site have been carried away by a sense of fitness probably adhering since the days when they buried their pet rabbits in the back-garden, and, with guileless convention, they have erected the tomb of Gelert under a tree, a healthy one in the prime of life, standing discreetly and yet conveniently in a roadside field. The sentiment of the back-garden has been added at a touch by the railing, and the result suffices to the tourist. Forth to it, in duteous pilgrimage, go the brides and bridegrooms, seeking in the long vague forenoons of holiday for some occupation that shall savour of the compulsory, and at all events make them glad to get home again for luncheon. The mile of road between Gelert’s grave and his village was punctuated with the newly married; and, even at the risk of supporting another conventionality, it must be recorded that the distance that separated each bride from her groom was noticeable, and seemed to indicate a desire to economise conversation.

Do the brides and bridegrooms support the venerable fraud who sits outside the Goat Hotel in full Welsh costume, selling rag-doll replicas of herself? It would seem so, for she apparently prospers, and we cannot believe that the hotel-keepers, who form the balance of the population, can buy many rag dolls.

The sky had grown grey, the air chilly, the weather was turning nasty, the saddles had perceptibly turned and were extremely nasty. These things may perhaps extenuate our bad taste in finding Beddgelert a trifle disappointing. It seemed to lack a central point; even the guide-books have to admit that its lions are not on the spot, although it seductively adds that they are within an “easy walk.” Snowdon was also included among the objects of interest within an easy walk, but a brief colloquy with the manageress of the Prince Llewellyn Hotel stamped the statement as a vicious flight of fancy.

“It’s a good four miles,” said that intelligent woman, regarding us compassionately; “but there _is_ ladies that think nothing of that.”

We hastened to assure her that we were not of such, and a few moments of confidential discussion at the bar sufficed for a programme superior to any that the guide-books had to suggest. It is in such affairs as these that the landlady and the coffee-room-maid show qualities not to be found in the landlord, or even the ostler. They can rise above convention; they have an instinctive perception of what the tourist, in his bewildered heart, prefers, but fears to acknowledge; and they are capable of giving advice with a sound disregard for the logic of precedent. Therefore it befell that our bones are not now bleaching on the “Beddgelert ascent” of Snowdon, and that, after a large cold lunch, which included a delicious but embarrassingly stony cherry-pie, we found ourselves riding slowly towards the village of Rhyddu.

This was the scheme of the manageress. We were to ride on to Rhyddu, leave the ponies at the Quellyn Arms, get a guide, and having ascended Snowdon by the shortest route, sleep on top, see the sun rise, and be back at Rhyddu for breakfast. It was almost alarming in its simplicity, and in the way in which it degraded the ascent of the highest mountain in England and Wales into a mere episode of the late afternoon. But, with a barometrical future so uncertain that, as Miss O’Flannigan’s cook is in the habit of saying, “you couldn’t tell a day from an hour,” its merit was too obvious to be disregarded.

Low as we had sunk in the social scale, we yet retained just enough self-respect to preserve us from asking the rare passer-by which of the misty bulks that confronted us was Snowdon; but none the less, we should have liked to know. Snowdon had been to our minds a lonely autocrat, unmistakable as Vesuvius or Fuji-yama; but here were four or five round-shouldered monsters, all of about the same height, and none quite as monstrous as we had expected. We settled on several, and tried successively to make the best of them, and to experience the sensations of awe which the guide-book assured us were inevitable under the circumstances; but the telegraph wire that had been given as our clue still led us onwards, and the village of Rhyddu seemed, like all our destinations, to have pitched its moving tent a mile beyond our estimate.

At length a line of unlovely grey houses stood by the roadside on a broad green ridge, the telegraph wire sent a feeler down into one of these, and a modest signboard presently introduced to us the Quellyn Arms. It was a very small hotel indeed, but it contained a smell of fried bacon that would have filled St Paul’s, and an ignorance of the English language that was almost equally stupendous. We were at this moment on a flank of Snowdon, as we stretched our stiff legs along the horse-hair chairs; the terminus of the Snowdon Railway was above us, within a stone’s-throw, and a toy train was curling incredibly round corners and down into a green valley that was dovetailed in among the great roots of the mountain. Outside the parlour window a thick-set figure with a long stick waited immovably--as immovably as Snowdon, or as the misty

cloud in which its horns were plunged. As we momently grew stiffer, the probability that the sun would rise next morning seemed slighter than usual, and we tried to persuade the thick-set man to regard the position from our point of view. But a Snowdon guide has an optimism about sunrises, and a conviction in the matter of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.

This, we were assured, was the longest day in the year. It would be light all night. There was a very good hotel on the top to which he, Griffith Roberts, had guided forty people the night before, all of whom had seen Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man at sunrise.

Miss Jones, the landlady’s daughter, interpreted these things to us, and we recognised compassion in her eye as she did so. Our craven hearts sank low; but we realised that, as Mark Twain has sufficingly expressed, we must “crowd through or bust.”