Part 11

But whatever hold upon the imagination the winter dusk may have, however subtle a spell there may be in the gloamings of autumn, surely the coming of dusk has at no other time the enchantment of the long midsummer eves. It is then that one feels to the utmost the magic influences of the dimsea or dimsee, to use the beautiful old English west-country word. The further north one is the longer the suspense, the more magical the slow gradual recession of the day-glow from vast luminous skies, the slow swimming into the earthward gloaming of incalculable shadow. What a difference between the lands of the south and the light-lingering countries of the north! The sudden night comes to the shores of Mediterranean while the rose of the west yet flames against the Cornish headlands, and the Sicilian wave is dark while the long green billow washing over Lyonesse is still a wandering fire under cloudy banks of amethyst. And, in turn, shadow has come out of the sea upon Wales and fallen upon the upland watercourses from the norland fells, while in the Gaelic isles purple and gold cloths are still piled deep upon the fiery threshold of the sunset: and when the last isles themselves are like velvet-dark barques afloat in a universe of opal and pale yellow and faint crimson, a radiant sun still blooms like a flower of fire among the white pinnacles of wandering berg and the everlasting walls of ice.

In June the coming of dusk is the audible movement of summer. The day is so full of myriad beauty, so full of sound and fragrance, that it is not till the hour of the dew that one may hear the breathing of the miraculous presence. The birds, who still sing early in the month, and many even of those whose songs follow the feet of May begin a new love-life at the coming of June, are silent: though sometimes, in the south, the nightingale will still suddenly put the pulse of song into the gloaming, though brieflier now; and elsewhere the night-loving thrush will awake, and call his long liquid notes above the wild-growth of honeysuckle and brier. At the rising of the moon I have heard the cuckoos calling well after the date when they are supposed to be silent, and near midnight have known the blackcap fill a woodland hollow in Argyll with a music as solitary, as intoxicating, as that of a nightingale in a Surrey dell. The thrush, the blackbird, the blackcap, the willow-warbler and other birds may often be heard singing in the dusk, or on moonlit nights, in a warm May: and doubtless it is for this reason that many people declare they have heard the nightingale even in regions where that bird never penetrates. Often, too, the nightingale’s song is attributed to the blackcap, and even to the thrush or merle, simply because heard by day, for there seems to be a common idea that this bird will not sing save at dusk or in darkness or in the morning twilight. I doubt if the nightingale ever sings in actual darkness, though the bird is most eager just before and at dawn, at moonlit or starlit dusk, or at full moon, it may be heard at any hour of the day. I have heard the song and watched the singer at full noon, and that not in deep woods but in a copse by the wayside. Strange that both name and legend survive in lands where the nightingale is now unseen. There is no question but that it was once plentiful, or at any rate often seen, in the Western Highlands; though now, it is said, not a bird of its tribe has crossed the Solway since the Union! It is still spoken of in Argyll and elsewhere, and not confusedly with any other woodlander. In no country has it a lovelier name than the Gaelic _Ros-an-Ceol_, the Rose of Music. I have heard it spoken of as the _smiol_ or _smiolach_, the _eosag_, and the _spideag_, though this latter name, perhaps the commonest, is misleading, as it is applied to one or two other songsters. In Iona, Colonsay, Tiree, and other isles, I have heard the robin alluded to as the _spideag_. I remember the drift, but cannot recall the text of a Gaelic poem where the nightingale (for neither in literary nor legendary language is any other bird indicated by ‘Ros-an-Ceol’) is called the Sister of Sorrow, with an allusion to a singular legend, which in some variant or another I believe is also found in the Austrian highlands, parts of Germany, and elsewhere, to the effect that if a nightingale come ‘with Song upon it’ into the room of a sleeping person, that person will go mad, or that if the eyes of a nightingale found dead or slain be dissolved in any liquid, the drinker will become blind. I have heard, too, a tale (though the bird was there alluded to as the _smeorach-oidhche_ or ‘night-thrush’) where the nightingale, the owl, and the bat are called moon-children, the Moon-Clan; three birds, it is said, with three animals of the land and three of the water, three fish, three insects, three trees, three plants, three flowers, and three stones were thrown to the earth as a farewell gift the day the Moon died. Among the three birds the teller included the bat, and I daresay there are many who still regard the bat as a bird. The three animals of land and water were the weasel, the badger, and the fox, the seal, the otter, and the kelpie (_sic_). The three fish were the fluke, the eel, and the moon-glistered herring. The three insects were the white moth, the grey gnat, and the cockchafer. The three trees were the ash, the thorn, and the elder. The three plants were the ivy, the moon-fern or bracken, and the mistletoe. The three flowers were the meadowsweet, the white water-lily, and the ‘lusavone’ (? _Lus-Mhonaidh_...? Bog-cotton). The three stones were, I think, granite, basalt, and trap, though I am uncertain about the second and still more so about the third, which was called _clach-liath_, ‘the grey stone.’

But though in the north the nightingale is no longer a haunter of the dusk, the other clans of the night are to be met with everywhere, ‘from the Rhinns of Islay to the Ord of Sutherland’ as the Highland saying goes in place of the wider ‘from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.’ First and foremost is the owl. But of the owl and the nightjar and the midsummer night I wish to speak in a succeeding paper. The corncrake will next occur to mind.

The cry of the landrail is so like its popular name that one cannot mistake it. Some naturalists say the resemblance to the croaking of the frog may mislead the unwary, but there is an altogether different musical beat or emphasis in the call of the rail, a different quality of sound, a different energy; and it is difficult to understand how any ear familiar with nocturnal sounds could err in detecting the monotonously uniform _krex-krex_ of the bull-frog from the large, air-swimming, harshly musical _crek-crāke_, with the singular suspense so often to be noted after the first syllable. For all its harshness there are few sounds of the summer-dusk so welcome. It speaks of heat: of long shadow-weaving afternoons: of labour ceased, of love begun, of dreams within dreams. The very memory of it fills the mind as with silent garths of hay, with pastures ruddy with sorrel, lit by the last flusht glow or by the yellow gold of the moon, paling as it rises. The white moth is out; the dew is on the grass, the orchis, the ghostly clover; the flittermouse is here, is yonder, is here again; a late mallard flies like a whirring bolt overhead, or a homing cushat cleaves the air-waves as with rapid oars. As a phantom, a white owl drifts past and greys into the dusk, like flying foam into gathering mist. In the dew-moist air an innumerable rumour becomes a monotone: the breath of life, suppressed, husht, or palpitant. A wilderness of wild-roses has been crushed, and their fragrance diffused among the dove-grey and harebell-blue and pansy-purple veils of twilight: or is it a wilderness of honeysuckle; or of meadowsweet; or of the dew-wet hay; or lime-blossom and brier, galingale and the tufted reed and the multitude of the fern? It is fragrance, ineffable, indescribable: odour born under the pale fire of the moon, under the lance-thrusting whiteness of the Evening Star.

But before rain the persistent cry of the corncrake becomes loud, raucous, with a rasping intensity. The bird is commonly said to be a ventriloquist, but this I greatly doubt. I have watched the rail in many places, often within a few yards, more than once from the flat summit of a huge boulder set in the heart of a hillmeadow of grass and sorrel. Not once have I heard ‘the King of the quails’ unmistakably throw his voice a few score of yards away. Often a _crek-crāke_ has resounded, and at some distance away, just as I have seen the stooping body of the _dreaun_ (or _traon_ or _treun-ri-treun_) slide through the grassy tangle almost at my feet: but the cry was not identical with that which a moment before I had heard, and surely it was not only distance but the difference of sex and the pulse of love which softened it to a musical call. Once, however, watching unseen from the boulder I have spoken of, I saw and heard a landrail utter its _crake_ in three ways, first and for over a minute with its head to one side while it moved jerkingly this way and that, then for a few seconds (perhaps four or five times) with its head apparently thrown back, and then after a minute or two’s silence and after a brief rapid run forward with out-thrust neck and lowered head, as though calling along the ground. In no instance was the call thrown as though from a distance, but unmistakably from where the bird moved or crouched. There had been no response to the first, a single echo-like _crek-crāke_ followed the second, but to the third there came almost simultaneously calls from at least three separate regions.

Nor is the rail so invariably shy, so heedful of cover, as commonly averred. With silence and patience it may often be discerned before the seeding grass is too dense or the corn high. In a lonely place on the east shore of West Loch Tarbert in Cantire I have seen several corncrakes leave cover as fearlessly as those two other ‘sacred’ or ‘blessed’ birds, the lark and the red grouse, will leave the shelter of heather-clutch or grassy tussock: and one morning I was awaked at dawn by so near and insistent an iterance of the singular call that I rose and looked out, to discover three corncrakes awkwardly perched on a low rabbit-fence, while I counted four others running to and fro in the rough dew-glistered grass just beyond. Here, by the way, a crofter spoke of the landrail as the _cearrsach_, a name I have not elsewhere heard and am not sure of the meaning, unless it is ‘the lumpy’ or ‘awkward one’; while an English factor knew it as the grass-drake or meadow-drake, and again as the night-crow--the latter obviously a survival from the Anglo-Saxon ‘myghte-crake’ or a name re-given from like association of ideas. The same shrewd farmer quite believed that a corncrake is governor and leader of each flock of quails, at any rate in the season of migration--an idea held by the Greeks of old and retained by the Greek and Sicilian quail-shooters of to-day, and obviously widespread, as the Germans call the landrail the quail-king (_Wachtelkonig_), the French ‘_le roi des cailles_,’ the Italians ‘_il re di quaglie_,’ and the Spaniards ‘_el rey de las cordonices_.’ However, if he had been a Gael he could have spoken of the quail only by hearsay most likely, for it is very rare in the Highlands, and for myself I have never seen one there. Its name (_garra-gart_ or _gartan_) is not unique; and the common term _muir-eun_ is solely biblical, ‘sea-bird’ or ‘bird-from-oversea,’ because of the allusion in Numbers xii. 31.

But the dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.

AT THE RISING OF THE MOON

‘The dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.’

With these words I ended my preceding article, ‘The Coming of Dusk.’ There was not space there to speak of other, of so many of those nocturnal things which add so much to the mystery and spell of the short nights of summer: the arrowy throw of the bat, a shadowy javelin flung by a shadowy hand against a shadowy foe; the nightjar, the dusky clans of the owl, moonrise at sea or among pinewoods, the dance of the moths round certain trees, the faint woven cadence of the wheeling gnat-columns, the sudden scream of the heron or the wailing of seafowl, or the mournful noise of the moon-restless lapwing, wind in the grass, wind in the hollows of woods, wind among the high corries of the hills. These and a hundred other sounds and sights fill the summer-darkness: the hill-fox barking at the moonshine, the heather-cock in defiance of alarm, deer panting among the bracken, the splash of herring or mackerel on the moonlit breast of the bay, dogs baying a long way off and from farmstead to farmstead. One could not speak of all these things, or of the hundred more. In the meadows, in woods, on upland pastures, from beech-thicket to pine-forest, on the moors, on the hills, in the long valleys and the narrow glens, among the dunes and sea-banks and along wave-loud or wave-whispering shores, everywhere the midsummer-night is filled with sound, with fragrance, with a myriad motion. It is an exquisite unrest: a prolonged suspense, to the dayworn as silence is, yet is not silence, though the illusion is wrought out of the multitudinous silences which incalculably intersperse the continuous chant of death, the ceaseless hymn of life.

Everywhere, but far north in particular, the summer night has a loveliness to which the least sensitive must in some degree yield, creates a spell which must trouble even a dulled imagination, as moonlight and the faintest rippling breath will trouble unquickened pools into a sudden beauty. It is a matter of temperament, of mood and circumstance rather, where one would find oneself, at the rising of the moon, in the prolonged twilights of summer. To be in a pinewood shelving to a calm sea breaking in continuous foam: or among mountain solitudes, where all is a velvety twilight deepening to a green darkness, till the sudden moon rests athwart one hill-shoulder like a bronze shield, and then slowly is lifted and dissolves into an amber glow along all the heights: or on great moors, where one can see for leagues upon leagues, and hear nothing but the restless crying of the curlew, the screech of a heron, the abrupt unknown cries and fugitive sounds and momentary stealthy rustlings of nocturnal solitudes. Or, again, on a white roadway passing through beech-woods: or on a gorse-set common, with the churring of a nightjar filling the dusk with the unknown surge and beat in one’s own heart: or on the skirts of thatched hamlets, where a few lights linger, with perhaps the loud breathing and trampling of cattle: or in a cottage-garden, with mignonette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or dew-fragrant with musk and southernwood: or in an old manor-garden, with white array of lilies that seem to have drunk moonlight, and damask and tea-rose in odorous profusion, with the honey-loving moths circling from moss-rose to moss-rose, and the night-air delaying among tall thickets of sweet-pea. Or, it may be, on quiet sea-waters, along phantom cliffs, or under mossed and brackened rocky wastes: or on a river, under sweeping boughs of alder and willow, the great ash, the shadowy beech. But each can dream for himself. Memory and the imagination will create dream-pictures without end.

Of all these midsummer-night creatures alluded to here or in the preceding article there may be none more allied to poetic association than the nightjar, but surely there is none more interesting than the owl itself, that true bird of the darkness. That phantom-flight, that silent passage as from the unseen to the unseen, that singular cry, whether a boding scream or a long melancholy hoot or a prolonged too-whoo, how blent they are with one’s associations of the warm husht nights of summer. But is not the nightjar also of the same tribe? Fern-owl is a common name; also jar-owl, heather-owl. I have heard it called the heather-bleat, though probably that name commonly indicates the snipe. How well I remember from childhood that puzzling riddle

“_The bat, the bee, the butterflee, the cuckoo and the gowk, The heather-bleat, the mire-snipe; how many birds is that?_”

I was never ‘taken-in’ by the first three, but as I had been told or had somehow discovered that the cuckoo was often companioned by the meadow-pipit I thought the latter must be the ‘gowk.’ So I guessed ‘four,’ taking the heather-bleat to be the nightjar: and it was long before I discovered that the answer was two, for only the cuckoo and the snipe were really named.

I wonder how many names the Owl has! Those alone which, like the archetypal name, derive from the old root-word _ul_ (to howl or hoot or screech), must run to some thirty to forty at least, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘hule’ and later ‘ullet’ to the familiar ‘hoolet’ or ‘hoolit’ or ‘howlet,’ or, again, the still current south English ‘ullud,’ ‘ullot,’ or ‘ullyet.’ We have many Gaelic names also, as (for the snowy or barn owl) ‘cailleach-bhan,’ the white auld wife, or ‘cailleach-oidhche,’ the night-witch; or (for the tawny owl) ‘bodach-oidhche,’ the night-bogle; or (for the screech-owl) the onomatopœic ‘corra-sgriachaig,’ or several terms meaning ‘long-eared’ or ‘horned’; and three or four designations, either onomatopœic, as perhaps ‘ulacan’ (though both in sound and meaning it is the same as the southland ‘hooligan’), or adaptations of the Teutonic root-word, as ‘Olcadan’ or ‘ullaid.’ The name ‘yogle’ may be heard along the Lothian, Yorkshire, and East Anglian coast-lands, and is doubtless a ‘lift’ from the Danish ‘Katyugle’ or ‘Katogle’: indeed ‘catyogle,’ ‘catogle,’ and ‘catyool’ (with the quaint by-throw ‘cherubim’) occur in several parts of England. In Clydesdale I have often heard the horned owl called the ‘luggie’ (long-ears). Some names with probably only local meaning I do not understand, as for example, the ‘Wite’ (not the adjective, but possibly the old word for churchyard and even church); the ‘padge’ or ‘pudge’ of Leicestershire; the Jack-baker, billy-wix, and the eastland ‘will-a-wix.’ (Is this the cry of the young owl awaiting food?) The ‘jilly,’ which I heard once at or near Windermere, is probably a corruption of the Gaelic ‘gheal’ (white), as many north-Celtic names survive in that region. Our commonest name in the Highlands is ‘comhachag’ (co-achak) probably as onomatopœic a term as ‘cuach’ or ‘cuthag’ (coo-ak) for the cuckoo, or ‘fitheach’ (_fee-ak_) for the raven. It is said that the longest poem on the Owl in any language is in Gaelic. The _Oran na Comhachaig_ or Song of the Owl was composed by an aged Highland bard named Donald Finlay somewhere about three hundred years ago--about 1590 says one local account, though I do not know on what authority: _a rinn Domhnull Mac Fhionnlaidh nan Dan, sealgair ’us bard ainmeil Abrach, mu thiomchioll 1590_ (done by Donald Finlay of the Songs, the celebrated Lochaber huntsman and poet, in or about 1590). I have again and again heard the second of its sixty-seven--in another version seventy--quatrains quoted in support of the theory that an owl lives at least a hundred years; some are credited with far greater age:

“_’S co-aoise mise do’n daraig, Bha na fhaillain ann sa choinnich, ’S ioma linn a chuir mi romham, ’S gur mi comhachag bhochd na sroine._”

(I am old as the oak ... lit. ‘the ancientness upon me is that of the oak’ ... whose mossy roots spread wide: many a race have I seen come and go: and still I am the lonely owl of Srona.)

In every country the owl is a bird of mourning. It is also the bird of night pre-eminently (what a pity the old-English owl-light as a variant for twilight has become obsolete); the bird of moonlight or the Moon; the bird of Silence, of Ruin, of the Grave, of Death. In some places a dead owl is still transfixed to the outside of a door, to avert lightning. Perhaps it is for the same reason that a caged owl is held to be a dangerous co-inmate of a house during a thunderstorm. A thousand legends have woven this sombre raiment of associations, though the owl’s only distinction from other birds of prey is that it can see in the dark and is nocturnal in habit. It loves solitary places, because there undisturbed, but is not all darkness solitary? In Syria the peasant calls the owl ‘the mother of ruins,’ which is poetically apt, as is the German ‘the sorrowing mother,’ but our northern ‘night-witch’ and the grim Breton ‘soul-harrier’ (surely a survival of the Greek idea of the owl as a soul-guide) are unjust to an inoffensive bird whose concern is not with souls and graves and ruins but with rats and mice. A German naturalist has even, I remember, written to prove that the owl is pre-eminently a bird of love, of single-hearted devotion, ‘the dove of the night’: and there is a Danish poem about ‘the Silver-Spinner’ weaving a thin invisible web in the dusk wherein to entangle and bring close the hearts of lovers. Old Donald Finlay of the Songs must have had some such idea in his mind when in his Song of the Owl he makes the bird say in effect, ‘I may be old and forlorn, but am not to be blamed for that: neither of rapine nor of lies have I ever been guilty: is there a grave anywhere that I have ever violated? and to the mate of my choice have I ever been faithless?’

This name of the Silver-Spinner, however, though often in Germany, Scandinavia, and our own country associated with the poetic legend alluded to, is really a romantic derivative from the ancient connection of the small owl with the Maiden Maid goddess who presided over spinning as one of her foremost womanly attributes. ‘The Woman’s Bird,’ as the small owl is sometimes called, deserves the name, for in almost every language ancient and modern, except English and Finnish, its name is feminine. The sacred bird of Athens or the Lesbian Nyctimenê is still ‘the woman’s bird’ among the Australian aborigines: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Icelandic, Vendish, German, French, Hungarian, all afford the same sex-indication. The great white owl, however, is the bird of heroes, wanderers, the night-foray, war, lightning, desolation, solitude, and death. It is said, I know not how demonstrated or traced, that the name Ulysses is but the variant of the Etruscan _Ulixé_ or Sikulian _Oulixes_, words supposed to indicate the ululation of the owl’s cry (in Italy I have heard the name of the sweet and plaintive little _aziola_ or _aziolo_ derived from the same source): and that it was given to the Homeric hero because he was the first to adventure sea-voyaging on moonlit nights, because he too was a night-wanderer. But unless Ulixé or Oulixes be older than the Greek name, what of Odysseus? In like fashion some speculative philologists derive ‘Pallas’ from the Turanian owl-name _Pöllö_.