CHAPTER VIII.

A solitary candle struggled with the obscurity as we stumbled through a narrow door into the shanty indicated to us. It illuminated principally the features of a young gentleman in a check ulster and a Tam o’ Shanter cap, who sat behind it with a note-book and pencil and an indefinite air of being connected with the Press, and his eye-glasses flashed upon us with almost awful inquiry as the light caught them beneath the dashing tilt of his cap. The next most immediate impression was of the cabin of a fifth-rate coasting steamer: dingy wooden walls, a bare seat running round them, two tables, three cramped doorways, and a pigmy stove. That was the sum-total of the surroundings; but the fact that there was a fire in the stove crowded out all deficiencies for the first ten minutes.

The cold was clinging, inescapable, unbelieveable, at least for people who had come sweltering up in light attire from a world where it was midsummer and behaved as such. The opening of the stove was about as large as the lens of a Kodak, and might have heated us through if moved up and down our persons, as a painter burns old paint off with a brazier. Failing this, we had to reverse the process, and rotate endlessly before that single, sullen glow, while from the corner the twin malignity of the double eye-glasses blazed upon us.

“I thought I was goin’ to be all alone up here to-night,” said a voice from behind the eye-glasses--a voice of that class which, like Scott’s poetry, “scorns to be obscure,” and proclaims its natal Brixton in clarion tones. “I’ve bin kicking my ’eels up ’ere since five o’clock, and I cawn’t say it’s bin lively!” The speaker permitted to himself a dramatic yawn, followed by a giggle of

incipient boon-companionship, but the conversation was not given time to expand with the luxuriance of which it was doubtless capable. The door of the cabin was opened, and Griffith Roberts stood without, waiting for his lawful five shillings, and, subsequently, the price of a drink (which, in deference to our possible scruples, was entitled “ginger-beer”). We bade him good-bye without a pang. He is a good man, and would be invaluable as hare for a paper-chase; but if we ever ascend Snowdon again--which Heaven forfend--it will not be under his guidance.

We stood at the door and watched him go down and down through the lifeless twilight, till the cold bit through and through our summer coats and linen shirts, and a precept of early youth rose menacingly in our minds:--

“Whatever brawls disturb the street, Wear flannel next your skin.”

What if we both developed influenza on the top of Snowdon! Some preservative was instantly necessary: we hurriedly appealed to the proprietor of the cabin for hot water, and were supplied with a boiling jugful on the spot. The Summit Hotel does not go in for style, but it understands the mystery of boiling water, which is a thing too deep for many of its betters.

I have often had cause to curse the day on which it was revealed to Miss O’Flannigan, by a palmist, that she was subject to medical inspirations; but even the power of speech was denied to me for some minutes after I had tasted the mixture of Bovril, whisky, and hot water, compounded by my companion under the influence of her latest inspiration. Our fellow-tourist, after a period of aghast observation, attacked his note-book with an ardour that convinces us that the recipe will be made glorious by his pen in the columns of the ‘Brixton Chanticleer.’ Then he drew forth a pipe and tobacco-pouch, and looked first at the mists which were pressing against the little port-hole of a window behind his head, and then at us. We accepted the hint, and retired to the cabin allotted to us.

It was about seven feet square, and contained a bedstead that covered all the room save a strip of two feet, on which stood a doll’s chest of drawers with a small jug and basin on it. In the face of the fact that there was but one other bedroom, it was idle to speculate as to how the forty visitors of the night before had disposed themselves; but a very cursory investigation of the sheets forced us to the conclusion that many of them had gone to bed in their boots. Possibly they were right. Top-boots and an entire suit of oil-skins would alone have brought those sheets within the sphere of practical politics. We wrapped ourselves in the blankets, and lay down, fully clad, to wait for the dawn.

Never before that night had I known how much more miserable one may be made by sleep than by the want of it. The thin doses forced on us by fatigue had the property of magnifying-glasses, and turned a vague insufficiency of pillow into a broken neck, the cold and stiffness into centuries of Arctic hardship. A monotonous wind sighed round the shanty, and the small uncurtained window held a changeless square of ghostly light, that, in the intervals of the fevered dreams of this midsummer’s night, became a giant luminous matchbox hanging on the wall beside us. Once or twice Miss O’Flannigan broached in gloomy monologue reflections proper to the occasion, their _leit motif_ being that we, the newspaper-man, and the two shanty proprietors, were the five highest people in England. I cannot remember that I contributed to the conversation anything more appropriate than the remark of a slighted Dublin aristocrat, in vindication of her rights of precedence, “and me the rankest lady in the room,”--which, indeed, had only a remote and dreamlike connection with the subject.

The luminous paint in the window-frame was just perceptibly brighter when the door of the opposite shanty opened, and we heard a heavy step outside. By this time we had become reconciled to the blankets, and we held our breaths with the dread that there might be a sunrise, and that we should have to go out into the piercing air to look at it. There was a battering upon the Brixtonian door, and then a voice: “It’s a quarter past three, sir, and it’s a _very_ thick morning,” and then our heroic fellow-traveller: “Never mind, I’m comin’ out.”

We lay, silent as stones, listening intently. The footstep paused at our door, but relenting, passed on without knocking. Presently we heard the newspaper-man go forth like the dove from the ark, and, after a similarly brief absence, return, and settle himself down in the saloon, where, faithful to the interests of the ‘Brixton Chanticleer,’ he no doubt occupied himself in recording his impressions of the mist. For the sake of our self-respect we rose and looked out of the window--a shuddering glance which scarcely revealed to us the foggy outlines of the other shanty and the cairn of stones.

Beyond these, a thick curtain of mist without a fold in it. In the bitter cold and the hideous daylight we shawled ourselves again in our blankets and slept miserably till seven o’clock, when, after such gruesome toilet as circumstances and a small jug of ice-cold water permitted, we emerged from our cabin, objects that our nearest relations would have been justified in cutting. The gentleman from Brixton had gone, and the sun had arrived too late to arrange a sunrise, but still anxious to oblige. There was also a kettle of boiling water, a loaf of bread, and a clear fire in the stove. All these things disposed us to realise with a new benevolence what an achievement of labour and perseverance was embodied in the Summit Hotel. The ponies on whose backs each plank and each lump of coal has been carried up are alone able to estimate that achievement perfectly, but they are not likely to expatiate on it, and the fleshless mountain-track repudiates the hoof-prints that could tell of scramble and struggle.

Outside the shanty, when we stepped into the open air, we found most of Wales, clad in the chilly, opaline tints of morning, waiting in complacent silence for the inevitable burst of admiration. On three sides of it was a hazy shimmer, a misty sparkle, betraying the environing sea, from the river Dee to the Bay of Cardigan, and close about us were the grey spines and huge slants of the Snowdon range. George Herbert, with a fine discrimination, has said--

“Praise the sea, but stay on shore.”

And in respectful adaption of this counsel, we would say to those who ascend heights for the sake of the view, that a mountain, in shape, in colour, in sentiment, in every possible aspect, is more praiseworthy from its base than from its summit. Moreover, as to the view itself, it seems to us that a beautiful view is not a mere matter of miles seen from a great height. The world was obviously made to be regarded _en profile_, and not to be stared at, flat-faced, from above; and the view from the top of Snowdon impresses the imagination rather than the sense of beauty. To look across the tiny hedgerow and homestead anatomy of the nearer counties, away to England in the distant haze, was to taste suddenly the core of many trite sayings about human effort and insignificance, and in spite of triteness the great expanse, sown with silent life, was wonderful beyond the symmetry of mountain-peaks.

Many things were revealed to us on the way down that had been withheld by the mist and twilight of the ascent. Ravines into whose purple shadows the sun had not yet looked--green valleys, with little lakes lurking in them--white paths straggling away to every point of the compass--and pre-eminent and ubiquitous, the soda-water bottle, the sandwich-paper, and the orange-peel. It was still October when we started, but now as we scrambled, slid, and ran with brief, unintentional abandonment down the path, we were travelling back along the gamut of the months. By the time we had arrived at the first halting-place of the night before, our own temperatures had touched a point that made us independent of climate; but though we were hardly in a condition to appreciate the balm of mid-June that was coming up from the pastures, we could not wish it to be chilled.

Striding up the lower fields, with an ardour that we recognised compassionately as having once been ours, were two tourists, a middle-aged gentleman and his daughter. They paused as they met us, to unburden themselves of a kindly platitude or two about the weather; and it is still on Miss O’Flannigan’s conscience that she gave these harmless wayfarers careful particulars as to Griffith Roberts’s short cut, and received their gratitude without compunction.

Shortly after this incident it was that we met the postmaster of Rhyddu communing alone with nature--a very noble-looking person, in a costume modelled upon that of the most sumptuous tourist. Considering how far we were from the ideal female of the species, he treated us with unexpected affability, even giving himself the trouble of accompanying us back to the village, favouring us meanwhile with his political opinions, his low opinion of the Irish race--legitimately founded on a large experience of intoxicated hay-makers--and other details. He afterwards sold us letter-cards at a fancy price suggested by ourselves: the problem of the price of seven, if nine cost tenpence halfpenny, or some similar sum, being beyond the grasp of the human intellect.

It was 10.30 when we reached the Quellyn Arms, and while the sympathetic Miss Jones prepared cans of hot water and breakfast, we visited the orphaned Tommies. The Quellyn Arms does not profess to stable horses, therefore it cannot be regarded as an unkindness if we mention that the Tommies were housed in what seemed to be a lumber-room. Broken things that might have been beds, washing-mangles, or turnip-cutters, choked the entrance. One saddle was perched on a bedpost, like a bonnet on a stand in a shop-window, the other lay on the ground, and behind the heap glowered the indignant faces of the Tommies. Both had pulled their heads out of their halters, and, in default of other food, were tearing the stuffing out of an ancient palliasse. In the boxes that served as mangers were a few nettles and stalks of mint, sole remnants of some strange repast which must have borne about the same relation to hay that curry does to boiled mutton. The hotel cook strolled into the stable while we were there; it seemed she had been hay-making during a pause in the duties of the cuisine--a fact that recurred to us when subsequently the flavour of the hay-fields was perceptible in that of the tea.

She kindly permitted us to fill the mangers of the Tommies from her private hoard of poultry corn, and it was on this occasion that we realised their relation to us was that of rather alarmed nephews towards severe but conscientious aunts. There was good feeling on both sides, there was even a little affection, but the auntly element was ineradicable.