CHAPTER IX.

The people of Rhyddu were unanimous on one point. They united with enthusiasm to assure us that there was a short cut to Llanberis, that the same was easy, and also that it was advantageous. At this stage of our investigations, however, a piano-organ with a monkey absorbed the attention which, till then, had been lavished upon us and the Tommies--and we left Rhyddu with nothing better to guide us than an impression of hands waving vaguely towards a spur of Snowdon, and some sense of the vital importance of a certain lane by a farmhouse.

In the course of two miles we attempted three lanes, and found they all ended alike at a barking dog and a closed door; finally, we addressed ourselves to a pair of shears, which, moved by unseen hands at the inner side of a hedge, was clapping its jaws malevolently among the topmost privet sprouts. There was a small hotel at the other side of the road, and neither lane nor farmhouse was in sight; but a voice from behind the hedge informed us in unusually fluent English that the short cut to Llanberis started precisely from the yard of the hotel. The yard was deserted, but some semblance of a track wandered from it, and we surrendered ourselves to it. It met with an early death at the gateway of a large, steep field, unpleasantly filled with cattle and young horses, and we were on the point of turning back to insult the man with the shears, when a cow in our vicinity lay down to ruminate, and disclosed a fat, yellow-haired boy who had been standing behind her. To him the stimulating copper was at once administered, and under his guidance we pursued an imperceptible path through the cattle up to the hill, with a confidence not shared by the Tommies, who were, indeed, but moderate mountaineers.

At the next field the boy paused, seeming to consider that we had had our pennyworth; further moneys at intervals impelled him upwards to the highest limits of the pasture-land; but there, unmoved even by the sight of sixpence, he left us, with the information that when we had gone as high as we could, we should--if we did not lose our way--find a gate, and from that gate a good road would take us to Llanberis. The instructions had a pleasing simplicity, and, if applied to a tree or a pyramid, would have been easily followed. The Snowdon range, however, offers a large selection of highest points, and of these we naturally chose the lowest and nearest. The Tommies crept like beetles athwart the slant of the hill, and we, our feelings of humanity somewhat blunted by the exertions of the morning, sat upon their backs, and saw momently a little more of their persons in front of us, as the saddles receded towards their tails.

The hill was above us in heather on our left, below us in steep pasture on the right, and the Tommies were digging their hoofs into a slanting ledge between the two. We ascended slowly, clinging to the ponies’ manes, I in advance of Miss O’Flannigan, who was in one of her most conversational moods, and demanded my frequent appreciation of the landscape with an enthusiasm that seemed to me ill-timed. Each time I so much as turned my head, the saddle and the hold-all turned sympathetically with me, and I was in the act of ignoring an appeal to my æsthetic feelings when Miss O’Flannigan’s voice ceased abruptly. This was so unusual an occurrence that I took a fresh handful of the mane and looked round. Miss O’Flannigan was standing on her head on the off-side of her pony, on whose back nothing was now visible except the girths, while beneath his body hung the hold-all. What it was that formed the link between him and Miss O’Flannigan was not apparent, but as he was eating grass with unshaken calm it was not a matter of vital importance.

Before I had dismounted and reached the scene of the disaster Miss O’Flannigan was free: she had, in fact, rolled over the edge of the ledge into a clump of heather, and was emerging from it, hatless, and in a state of the highest indignation. There is an unconscious, undesired picturesqueness about a person whose hair has come down, and I did not altogether refrain from mentioning this to Miss O’Flannigan, but she had lost her interest in the picturesque. The Tommies, fortunately, viewed the affair from one aspect only--that of a heaven-bestowed interval for food; and during the arduous processes of re-saddling and of binding the hold-alls, like burnt-offerings, to the horns of the saddles (for we had determined upon walking till we reached the top of the hill), they did not give us a moment’s anxiety.

No eyes but those of the aghast, black-faced sheep and the coldly interested carrion-crows witnessed the occurrence, or the subsequent procession upwards, over slippery grass and through the boundless quagmires caused by a stream that seemed newly spilled on the face of the hill, and was still wandering in search of a bed. The hut on the top of Snowdon was visible--an angular atom, retaining even, as a silhouette of the eighth of an inch square, its air of _gamin_ self-sufficiency and adequacy for its position of overseer to England and Wales. With the aid of field-glasses, it and its inmates might have come to the conclusion that two aproned and gaitered Deans of the Church of England were leading a pair of heavy-laden sumpter-palfreys over the pass to Llanberis, or might eventually have made the discovery that the most simple manner of adapting a riding-habit to mountain walks is not necessarily the most graceful.

From our private point of view it seemed many times that we had gone as high as was possible before we found the gate that was to compose all difficulties. It linked two long strips of grey wall that had striven towards each other from afar, down mountain flanks and up from boggy valleys, like two lives fated to meet and overcoming circumstance. Their juncture was, as the boy had truly said, on the highest point of the hill; and leaning breathless on the gate, while the

Tommies tore at the wiry little rushes which grew all about, we looked down a deep, empty valley to open country with the glint of water and the smoke of villages. A track of two feet wide sprang from the farther side of the gate and drew

a steady line along the naked, green face of the valley, outlining the buxom curves like a string course with an encouraging downward tendency in it. Gingerly we trod it, each with an excessively awkward and all-dubious Tommy in tow--while the slope below, on the right hand, became a great deal steeper than was pleasant to look at, and that above, on the left, so pronounced as to preclude the possibility of walking on it. Emerging from a shallow scoop in the face of the hill, and paying more heed to my steps than to my surroundings, I felt the steady drag of the elder Thomas upon the reins become a violent full-stop, and was suddenly aware of two or three startled, audacious pony faces peering round a pile of boulders at the turn of the path. They were gone with a whisk of forelocks and a rattle of loosened stones; and having in some measure reassured the deeply scandalised Tommies, we proceeded, not without some inward speculation as to what would happen to them, and to us, if these sylvan cousins of theirs were to come avalanching round the corner upon us in an unfortunate burst of family feeling. A few steps took us round the sharp bend of the hill, and we came face to face with the foe--a dozen tiny ponies, standing in dramatic attitudes of expectancy, with heads high in the air, and wide nostrils spread to the scent of danger. For an instant their wild eyes devoured us and their brethren of the captivity, and then Miss O’Flannigan obeyed her Keltic instincts, and stooped to pick up a stone. At that world-comprehended and world-respected signal they turned all at once, as if blown by a wind, and floated down the green valley-side, whose steepness we had scarcely cared to look at, with heads up, manes and tails streaming, and shoeless hoofs flicking the turf in bounds that seemed headlong, yet never went beyond control. In the bottom of the valley they swung to the right with the incredible oneness of a flock of birds, and halting, looked up to us and neighed defiance. The Tommies hurried on without comment.

Shortly afterwards the rain began,--diffidently, as if it had forgotten how, but the low bosom of the grey sky was laid against the hills, and the undisciplined drops did not long want for reinforcement. The salmon-coloured Dolgelly parasol made but a dismal _début_ under these auspices, and glowed with a more and more sullen flush as the rain soaked through it and dropped in dirty pink tears from its spikes. Between the tears I saw little except the endless downward progress of the path and unprepossessing glimpses of landscape blind with rain. We mounted the Tommies and scrambled by many stony descents and wet fields to lower levels; a thin cascade glanced over the black lip of a ravine and dropped delicately with slanting leaps down a hundred feet or more; wet roofs appeared below us, then a public road, public-houses, public conveyances, and an intelligent public interest in us and the Dolgelly parasol. The conclusion that we were a circus, or some part of one, was immediately and loudly announced by the infant population; and a vivid representation on a poster of a young lady hovering in pink tights above the foaming manes of six white horses, explained that the infant mind had lately been educated in such matters.

That we should have fortuitously selected the Snowdon Valley Hotel from among the many others of the long street was, in this connection, a singular instance of hypnotic suggestion. As we turned towards the coffee-room, the landlady, after a moment obviously spent in comparing us with the poster, made up her mind to give us the benefit of the doubt.

“Perhaps you would rather step to the drawing-room,” she said, hesitatingly; and while she spoke the chorus of “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” broke forth from the hilarious conversation in the coffee-room, “we have the--a--the circus ladies and gentlemen in there.”