Chapter 3

First, then, will come a great gorge through which one marches up from the plain, and then at the head of it very often a waterfall of some kind, along the side of which one forces one's way up painfully through a narrow chasm of rock and finds above one The great green level of the first jasse with the mountains standing solemnly around it. And then when one has marched all along this level one will come to another gorge and another chasm, and when one has climbed over the barrier of rock and risen up another 2000 feet or so, one comes to a second jasse, smaller as a rule than the lower one; but so high are the mountains that all this climbing into the heart of them does not seem to have reduced their height at all. And then one marches along this second jasse and one comes to yet another gorge and climbs up just as one did the two others, through a chasm where there will be a little waterfall or a large one, and one finds at the top the smallest and most lonely of the jasses. This often has a lake in it. The mountains round it will usually be cliffs, forming sometimes a perfect ring, and so called cirques, or, by the Spaniards, cooking-pots; and as one stands on the level floor of one such last highest jasse and looks up at the summit of the cliffs, one knows that one is looking at the ridge of the main chain. Then it is one's business, if one desires to conquer the high Pyrenees, to find a sloping place up the cliffs to reach their summits and to go down into the further Spanish valleys. This is the order of the Pyrenean dale, and this was the order of that of the Aston.

Up the gorge then we went, my companion and I; the day fell as we marched, and there was a great moon out, filling the still air, when we came to the first chasm, and climbing through it saw before us, spread with a light mist over its pastures, the first jasse under the moonlight. And up we went, and up again, to the end of the second jasse, having before us the vast wall of the main range, and in our hearts a fear that there was something unblessed in the sight of it. For though neither I told it to my companion nor he to me, we had both begun to feel a fear which the shepherds of these mountains know very well. It was perhaps midnight or a little more when we made our camp, after looking in vain for a hut which may once have stood there, but now stood no longer. We lit a fire, but did not overcome the cold, which tormented us throughout the night, for the wind blew off the summits; and at last we woke from our half-sleep and spent the miserable hours in watching the Great Bear creeping round the pole, and in trying to feed the dying embers with damp fuel. And there it was that I discovered what I now make known to the world, namely, that gorse and holly will burn of themselves, even while they are yet rooted in the ground. So we sat sleepless and exhausted, and not without misgiving, for we had meant that night before camping to be right under the foot of the last cliffs, and we were yet many miles away. We were glad to see the river at last in the meadows show plainly under the growing light, the rocks turning red upon the sky-line, and the extinction of the stars. As we so looked north and eastward the great rock of Guie stood up all its thousands of feet enormous against the rising of the sun.

We were very weary, and invigorated by nothing but the light, but, having that at least to strengthen us, we made at once for the main range, knowing very well that, once we were over it, it would be downhill all the way, and seeing upon our maps that there were houses and living men high in the further Andorran valley, which was not deserted like this vale of the Aston, but inhabited: full, that is, of Catalans, who would soon make us forget the inhuman loneliness of the heights, for by this time we were both convinced, though still neither of us said it to the other, that there was an evil brooding over all this place.

It was noon when, after many hours of broken marching and stumbling, which betrayed our weakness, we stood at last beside the tarn in which the last cliffs of the ridge are reflected, and here was a steep slope up which a man could scramble. We drank at the foot of it the last of our wine and ate the last of our bread, promising ourselves refreshment, light, and peace immediately upon the further side, and thus lightened of our provisions, and with more heart in us, we assaulted the final hill; but just at the summit, where there should have greeted us a great view over Spain, there lowered upon us the angry folds of a black cloud, and the first of the accidents that were set in order by some enemy to ruin us fell upon my companion and me.

For a storm broke, and that with such violence that we thought it would have shattered the bare hills, for an infernal thunder crashed from one precipice to another, and there flashed, now close to us, now vividly but far off, in the thickness of the cloud, great useless and blinding glares of lightning, and hailstones of great size fell about us also, leaping from the bare rocks like marbles. And when the rain fell it was just as though it had been from a hose, forced at one by a pressure instead of falling, and we two on that height were the sole objects of so much fury, until at last my companion cried out from the rock beneath which he was cowering, "This is intolerable!" And I answered him, from the rock which barely covered me, "It is not to be borne!" So in the midst of the storm we groped our way down into the valley beneath, and got below the cloud; and when we were there we thought we had saved the day, for surely we were upon the southern side of the hills, and in a very little while we should see the first roofs of the Andorrans.

For two doubtful hours we trudged down that higher valley, but there were no men, nor any trace of men except this, that here and there the semblance of a path appeared, especially where the valley fell rapidly from one stage to another over smooth rocks, which, in their least dangerous descent, showed by smooth scratches the passage of some lost animal. For the rest, nothing human nor the memory of it was there to comfort us, though in one place we found a group of cattle browsing alone without a master. There we sat down in our exhaustion and confessed at last what every hour had inwardly convinced us of with greater strength, that we were not our own masters, that there was trouble and fate all round us, that we did not know what valley this might be, and that the storm had been but the beginning of an unholy adventure. We had been snared into Fairyland.

We did not speak much together, for fear of lowering our hearts yet more by the confession one to the other of the things we knew to be true. We did not tell each other what reserve of courage remained to us, or of strength. We sat and looked at the peaks immeasurably above us, and at the veils of rain between them, and at the black background of the sky. Nor was there anything in the landscape which did not seem to us unearthly and forlorn.

It was, in a manner, more lonely than had been the very silence of the further slope: there was less to comfort and support the soul of a man; but with every step downward we were penetrated more and more with the presence of things not mortal and of influences to which any desolation is preferable. At one moment voices called to us from the water, at another we heard our names, but pronounced in a whisper so slight and so exact that the more certain we were of hearing them the less did we dare to admit the reality of what we had heard. In a third place we saw twice in succession, though we were still going forward, the same tree standing by the same stone: for neither tree nor stone were natural to the good world, but each had been put there by whatever was mocking us and drawing us on.

Already had we stumbled twice and thrice the distance that should have separated us from the first Andorran village, but we had seen nothing, not a wall, nor smoke from a fire, let alone the tower of a Christian church, or the houses of men. Nor did any length of the way now make us wonder more than we had already wondered, nor did we hope, however far we might proceed, that we should be saved unless some other influence could be found to save us from the unseen masters of this place. For by this time we had need of mutual comfort, and openly said it to one another--but in low tones--that the valley was Faëry. The river went on calling to us all the while. In places it was full of distant cheering, in others crowded with the laughter of a present multitude of tiny things, and always mocking us with innumerable tenuous voices. It grew to be evening. It was nearly two days since we had seen a man.

There stood in the broader and lower part of the valley to which we had now come, numerous rocks and boulders; for our deception some one of them or another would seem to be a man. I heard my companion call suddenly, as though to a stranger, and as he called I thought that he had indeed perceived the face of a human being, and I felt a sort of sudden health in me when I heard the tone of his voice; and when I looked up I also saw a man. We came towards him and he did not move. Close up beside his form we put out our hands: but what we touched was a rough and silent stone.

After that we spoke no more. We went on through the gathering twilight, determined to march downwards to the end, but knowing pretty well what the end would be. Once only did we again fall into the traps that were laid about us, when we went and knocked at the hillside where we thought we had seen a cottage and its oaken door, and after the mockery of that disappointment we would not be deceived again, nor make ourselves again the victims of the laughter that perpetually proceeded from the torrent. The path led us onwards in a manner that was all one with the plot now woven round our feet. We could but follow the path, though we knew with what an evil purpose it was made: that it was as phantom as the rest. At one place it invited us to cross, upon two shaking pine trunks, the abyss of a cataract; in another it invited us to climb, in spite of our final weariness, a great barrier of rock that lay between an upper and a lower jasse. We continued upon it determinedly, with heads bent, barely hoping that perhaps at last we should emerge from this haunted ground, but the illusions which had first mocked us we resolutely refused. So much so, that where at one place there stood plainly before us in the gathering darkness a farm-house with its trees and its close, its orchard and its garden gate, I said to my companion, "All this place is cursed, and I will not go near." And he applauded me, for he knew as well as I that if we had gone a few steps towards that orchard and that garden close, they would have turned into the bracken of the hillside, bare granite and unfruitful scree.

The main range, where it appeared in revelations behind us through the clouds, was far higher than mountains ever seem to waking men, and it stood quite sheer as might a precipice in a dream. The forests upon either side ran up until they were lost miles and miles above us in the storm.

Night fell and we still went onward, the one never daring to fall far behind the other, and once or twice in an hour calling to each other to make sure that another man was near; but this we did not continue, because as we went on each of us became aware under the midnight of the presence of a Third.

There was a place where the path, now broad and plain, approached a sort of little sandy bay going down towards the stream, and there I saw, by a sudden glimpse of the moon through the clouds, a large cave standing wide. We went down to it in silence, we gathered brushwood, we lit a fire, and we lay down in the cave. But before we lay down I said to my companion: "I have seen the moon--she is in the _north_. Into what place have we come?" He said to me in answer, "Nothing here is earthly," and after he had said this we both fell into a profound sleep in which we forgot not only cold, great hunger, and fatigue, but our own names and our very souls, and passed, as it were, into a deep bath of forgetfulness.

When we woke at the same moment, it was dawn.

We stood up in the clear and happy light and found that everything was changed. We poured water upon our faces and our hands, strode out a hundred yards and saw again the features of a man. He had a kind face of some age, and eyes such as are the eyes of mountaineers, which seem to have constantly contemplated the distant horizons and wide plains beneath their homes. We heard as he came up the sound of a bell in a Christian church below, and we exchanged with him the salutations of living men. Then I said to him: "What day is this?" He said "Sunday," and a sort of memory of our fear came on us, for we had lost a day.

Then I said to him: "What river are we upon, and what valley is this?"

He answered: "The river and the valley of the Aston." And what he said was true, for as we rounded a corner we perceived right before us a barrier, that rock of Guie from which we had set out. We had come down again into France, and into the very dale by which we had begun our ascent.

But what that valley was which had led us from the summits round backward to our starting-place, forcing upon us the refusal of whatever powers protect this passage of the chain, I have never been able to tell. It is not upon the maps; by our description the peasants knew nothing of it. No book tells of it. No men except ourselves have seen it, and I am willing to believe that it is not of this world.

ON ELY

There are two ways by which a man may acquire any kind of learning or profit, and this is especially true of travel.

Everybody knows that one can increase what one has of knowledge or of any other possession by going outwards and outwards; but what is also true, and what people know less, is that one can increase it by going inwards and inwards. There is no goal to either of these directions, nor any term to your advantage as you travel in them.

If you will be extensive, take it easy; the infinite is always well ahead of you, and its symbol is the sky.

If you will be intensive, hurry as much as you like you will never exhaust the complexity of things; and the truth of this is very evident in a garden, or even more in the nature of insects; of which beasts I have heard it said that the most stolid man in the longest of lives would acquire only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, for instance, of the horned beetle, which sings so angrily at evening.

You may travel for the sake of great horizons, and travel all your life, and fill your memory with nothing but views from mountain-tops, and yet not have seen a tenth of the world. Or you may spend your life upon the religious history of East Rutland, and plan the most enormous book upon it, and yet find that you have continually to excise and select from the growing mass of your material.

* * * * *

A wise man having told me this some days before (and I having believed it), it seemed to me as though a new entertainment had been invented for me, or rather as though I had found a bottomless purse; since by this doctrine there was manifestly no end to the number of my pleasures, and to each of this infinite number no possibility of exhaustion; but I thought I would put it to the test in this way: putting aside but three days, I determined in that space to explore a little corner of this country.

Now, although I saw not one-hundredth of the buildings or the people in this very small space, and though I knew nothing of the birds or the beasts or the method of tillage, or of anything of all that makes up a land, yet I saw enough to fill a book. And the pleasure of my thoughts was so great that I determined to pick out a bit here and a bit there, and to put down the notes almost without arrangement, in order that those who cannot do these things (whether from lack of leisure or for some other reason) may get some part of my pleasure without loss to me (on the contrary, with profit); and in order that every one may be convinced of what this little journey finally taught me, and which I repeat--that there is an inexhaustible treasure everywhere, not only outwards, but inwards.

I had known the Ouse--(how many years ago!)--had looked up at those towers of Ely from my boat; but a town from a river and a town from the street are two different things. Moreover, in that time I speak of, the day years ago, it was blowing very hard from the south, and I was anxious to be away before it, and away I went down to Lynn at one stretch; for in those days the wind and the water seemed of more moment than old stones. Now (after how many years!) it was my business to go up by land, and as I went, the weight of the Cathedral filled the sky before me.

Impressions of this sort are explained by every man in his own way--for my part I felt the Norman.

I know not by what accident it was, but never had I come so nearly into the presence of the men who founded England. The isolation of the hill, the absence of clamour and false noise and everything modern, the smallness of the village, the solidity and amplitude of the homes and their security, all recalled an origin.

I went into the door of the Cathedral under the high tower. I noted the ponderous simplicity of the great squat pillars, the rough capitals--plain bulges of stone without so much as a pattern cut upon them--the round arch and the low aisles; but in one corner remaining near the door--a baptistery, I suppose--was a crowd of ornament which (like everything of that age) bore the mark of simplicity, for it was an endless heap of the arch and the column and the zigzag ornament--the broken line. Its richness was due to nothing but the repetition of similar forms, and everywhere the low stature, the muscles, the broad shoulders of the thing, proved and reawoke the memory of the Norman soldiers.

They have been written of enough to-day, but who has seen them from close by or understood that brilliant interlude of power?

The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and splendidly brave, we know that they awoke all Europe, that the first provided settled financial systems and settled governments of land, and that everywhere, from the Grampians to Mesopotamia, they were like steel when all other Christians were like wood or like lead.

We know that they were a flash. They were not formed or definable at all before the year 1000; by the year 1200 they were gone. Some odd transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very lucky freak in the history of the European family, produced the only body of men who all were lords and who in their collective action showed continually nothing but genius.

We know that they were the spear-head, as it were, of the Gallic spirit: the vanguard of that one of the Gallic expansions which we associate with the opening of the Middle Ages and with the crusades. ... We know all this and write about it; nevertheless, we do not make enough of the Normans in England.

Here and there a man who really knows his subject and who disdains the market of the school books, puts as it should be put their conquest of this island and their bringing into our blood whatever is still strongest in it. Many (descended from their leaders) have remarked their magical ride through South Italy, their ordering of Sicily, their hand in Palestine. As for the Normans in Normandy, of their exchequer there, of what Rouen was--all that has never been properly written down at all. Their great adventure here in England has been most written of by far; but I say again no one has made enough of them; no one has brought them back out of their graves. The character of what they did has been lost in these silly little modern quarrels about races, which are but the unscholarly expression of a deeper hypocritical quarrel about religion.

Yet it is in England that the Norman can be studied as he can be studied nowhere else. He did not write here (as in Sicily) upon a palimpsest. He was not merged here (as in the Orient) with the rest of the French. He was segregated here; he can be studied in isolation; for though so many that crossed the sea on that September night with William, the big leader of them, held no Norman tenure, yet the spirit of the whole thing was Norman: the regularity the suddenness, the achievement, and, when the short fighting was over the creation of a new society. It was the Norman who began everything over again--the first fresh influence since Rome.

The riot of building has not been seized. The island was conquered in 1070. It was a place of heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes, and a slow manner; their houses were of wood: sometimes they built (but how painfully, and how childishly!) with stone. There was no height, there was no dignity, there was no sense of permanence. The Norman Government was established. At once rapidity, energy, the clear object of a united and organised power followed. And see what followed in architecture alone, and in what a little space of the earth, and in what a little stretch of time--less than the time that separates us to-day from the year of Disraeli's death or the occupation of Egypt.

The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that same year they pulled down the wooden shed at Bury St Edmunds, "unworthy," they said, "of a great saint," and began the great shrine of stone. Next year it was the castle at Oxford, in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St Albans; in 1079 Winchester. Ely, Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by 1089 they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne, Christchurch, tall Durham.... And this is but a short and random list of some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood. Hundreds of castles, houses, village churches are unrecorded.

Were they not indeed a people?... And all that effort realised itself before Pope Urban had made the speech which launched the armies against the Holy Land. The Norman had created and founded all this before the Mass of Europe was urged against the flame of the Arab, to grow fruitful and to be transformed.

One may say of the Norman preceding the Gothic what Dante said of Virgil preceding the Faith: Would that they had been born in a time when they could have known it! But the East was not yet open. The mind of Europe had not yet received the great experience of the Crusades; the Normans had no medium wherein to express their mighty soul, save the round arch and the straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the sullen round shaft of the pillar--more like a drum than like a column. They could build, as it-were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They were given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark Ages had repeated for six hundred years. They were capable, even in the north, of impressing even these forms with a superhuman majesty.

* * * * *

Was I not right in saying that everywhere in the world one can look in and in and never find an end to one's delight? I began to explore but a tiny corner of England, and here in one corner of that corner, and in but one thought arising from this corner of a corner, I have found these things.

* * * * *

But England is especially a garden of this sort, or a storehouse; and in nothing more than in this matter of the old architecture which perpetuates the barbaric grandeur of the eleventh century--the time before it was full day.