Part 18
To be far north of the Highland Line and among the mountains, when winter has not only whitened the hill-moors but dusted the green roofs of every strath and corrie, may not have for many people the charm of the southward flight. But to the hill-born it is a call as potent as any that can put the bittersweet ache into longing hearts. There is peace there: and silence is there: and, withal, a beauty that is not like any other beauty. The air and wind are auxiliary; every cloud or mist-drift lends itself to the ineffable conspiracy; the polar breath itself is a weaver of continual loveliness often more exquisitely delicate than the harebell, often incalculable or immeasurable, or beautiful with strangeness, as moonlight on great waters, or the solitary torch of Jupiter burning his cold flame in the heart of a mountain-tarn. There is no soundlessness like it. And yet the silence is relative; is, in a word, but an imagination laid upon an illusion. If there is no wind on the moor, there may be a wandering air among the lower heights. If so, many hollows of rocks, caverns lost in bracken, caves of hill-fox and badger, sudden ledges haunted by the daw and the hoodie and filled with holes as though the broken flutes of the dead forgotten giants of old tales, will make a low but audible music: a lifting and falling sighing, with singular turnings upon itself of an obscure chant or refrain, that just as one thinks is slipping into this side knowledge and is almost on the edge of memory, slides like rain along that edge and vanishes, vague as an unremembered fragrance. Or if the suspense be so wide that not a breath moves lower than where the corries climb towards the very brows of the mountains, one will surely hear, far up among the time-hollowed scarps and weather-sculptured scaurs, that singular sound which can sink to a whimpering, as of unknown creatures or lost inhuman clans strayed and bewildered, or can be as though unseen nomads were travelling the mountain-way with songs and strange flutes and thin wailing fifes, or can rise to a confused tumult as of embattled hosts, or to a crying and a lamentation more desperate than the cries of men and a lamenting as of that mysterious and dreaded clan, the Grey Children of the Wind. The wind, in truth, is almost always to be heard, near or far. Sometimes the eye may learn, where the ear fails: as when one is in a glen or strath or on a shore or moor, and, looking up, may see smoke rising from the serrated crests or the curving sky-lines, like the surf of vast billows--to realise soon, that this volcanic apparition means no more than that vast volumes of driven snow are being lifted by the north wind and whirled against and over the extreme mountain-bastions. _Trath chaidleas ’s a ghleann an t-àile_, ‘when the air sleeps in the glens,’ goes a Gaelic saying, ‘you may hear the wind blowing in the high corries _mar chaithream chlàr_,’ like the symphony of harps.
Then, too, it is rare that the snowy wilderness is without voice of mountain torrent, for even when frost holds the hill-world in a grip so terrible that the smaller birds cannot fly in the freezing air, there are rushing burns of so fierce a spate that the hands-of-ice are whirled aside like foam, and the brown wave leaps and dashes from rock to rock, from granite ledge to peaty hollow, from brief turbulent channels to chasms and crevasses whence ceaselessly ascends the damp smell of churned surge, above which as ceaselessly rises a phantom spray. Again, there is that strange, continual earth-movement, the alarm of all unfamiliar wayfarers. Who suddenly unloosened that rush of rock and earth yonder? What enemy moved that boulder that leapt and hurtled and crashed downward and beyond, but a score yards away? Of what elfin-artillery are those rattling stones the witness? What hand, in the silence, thrust itself through the snow and crumbled that old serrated ledge, where, a week ago, the red deer stood sniffing the wind, where, yesterday perhaps, the white ptarmigan searched the heather?
Moreover we are in the domain of the eagle, the raven, and the corbie. They are seldom long silent there. And that sudden call on the wind? ... what but the Merry Folk, _Clann Aighean Siubhlach_, the Wandering Deer-Clan, passing like drifting shadows over white heather-pastures lost to view? It is long since the love-belling of the stags made musical the mountain-side: was not ‘the Silence of the Deer’ the first sign of winter come again? But that cry was the cry of hunger--a _guth accaimeach_, a sobbing voice, as once I heard a prosaic roadmender unprosaically and with kindly sympathy allude to the winter-bleat of the snow-famished deer. And that other bleating: of sheep left upon the hills, and overtaken by the White Weather. How goes the sound, the translated echo of their mournful iteration, that is now a long ululation of lament and now a rising and falling bleating as of confused words? The same roadmender I speak of said--after himself lamenting in sympathy _tha’m fuachd a muigh’s a staigh an diugh ..._ ‘the cold is outside and inside to-day’--that it went like this: _Tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr’s gun fhios againn!_... ‘We are astray, we are astray, we are astray and have lost our bearings!’
Up here everything may have a snow-change ‘into something rich and rare.’ It was in a hill-solitude, in white weather such as this, that, for example, I heard from an old shepherd names for the eagle, the corbie, and the ptarmigan that I had not elsewhere heard, nor have seen in print, though for long now I have been collecting all whenever and wherever chance permits the Gaelic and Lowland names of birds and animals. The corbie he called _An t-Eun Acarachd_, the Merciless, literally, ‘the bird without compassion,’ no doubt with thought of its love for young lambs or its savage lust for the eyes of stricken or dying sheep. The ptarmigan he called _An t-Eun_ (_Adhar_ or _Aidhre_), the bird of the snow or frost--though this is but a variant, of course, of the more familiar _Sneacag_ or _Eun-an-Sneachel_. When he spoke of the eagle simply as _An t-Eun Mòr_, the great bird, that seemed less noteworthy, but when he added, _Abù! An t-Eun Mòr Abù_, I was puzzled. I thought he meant _aboo_ to simulate the _Iolair’s_ cry, though it sounded much more like the muffled hoot of the great owl than the eagle’s screech. He said he remembered that was the eagle’s name in an old tale he had often heard his mother tell when he was a child. I never thought of it as _Abù_, however, till one day I came upon this word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered as being an ancient war-cry of the Gael. Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills: to live still among these desolate mountains, around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs, in the scream of the golden eagle. The old man had a special bird-name for most of the birds he spoke of or about which I asked him. Doubtless he was as good a naturalist and with as good a right to make names as any ornithologist who would know what the old man could not know, and would be familiar with common and other names that would be unfamiliar there among the far hills, or, at least, to the old mountaineer, for whom the hill-birds were the best of company. For the curlew, for instance, though he knew the common Scots name, Whaup, he had the good name _An t-Eun Chaismeachd_, ‘the bird of alarm’--how good a name (though perhaps equally applicable to the grey plover, the green whistler, or the lapwing) must be obvious to all who have walked the moorland or travelled the hillside. And where an islesman or a man of the mainland coasts would, for swiftness, use a comparison such as _cho luath ri sgadan_, ‘as swift as a herring,’ he would say, _cho luath ris nafeadag_, ‘as swift as the plover.’
White Weather, he said, was always first ‘called’ by the linnet, the ‘heather lintie’ so loved of Scots song-writers, to which he gave several names (‘out of a good ten that will be known to any one whatever’), one a curious blend of Scots-Gaelic, _Shilfe-monaidh_ (_i.e._, the moor--chaffinch), another a pretty name, _Breacan-Beithe_, ‘little speckled one of the birch.’ But even he, for all his hill-wisdom, could not tell me why it is that when the lapwing come again after the great winter-end storm about mid-March, welcome pioneers of the Spring that is stealing slowly up through the glens and straths of the south, they always, if they nest on the slope of a hillside, choose the east side for their unsheltered homes and where to lay their eggs. Do they so love the bleak wind of the east? Hardly any bird takes so little trouble with the nest: often it is but the frost-hardened delve of a cow’s hoof, a tangle of bent, or the hollow of a misplaced stone. I have heard that this is truer of the mainland than of the isles, but I have not found it so. Last March or April I remember that on the long, low-hilled and mainly ‘upland’ island where I then was, not a single lapwing’s nest but was on the east slope of grassy brae or sloping moor or pasture. But though he could not say a word on so strange, almost so inexplicable a habit, he could be positive as to the age of the eagle, and especially as to one aged _iolair_ that he often saw on Maol-Aitionnach, the great hill that was half the world and more to him: namely, that the king-bird lived to be three hundred years. And he computed it thus: that an eagle lives three times less than an oak, and three times more than a deer. There is a familiar proverb that ‘_Tri aois feidh aois firein; tri aois firein aois crsoibh dharaich_,’ ‘Thrice the age of a deer, the age of an eagle’ (‘ferain,’ ‘fireun,’ and ‘fiolair’ are variants of ‘iolair,’ whose more ancient name is ‘antar’ (_an t-ar_), one of the oldest names in the Gaelic language); ‘thrice the age of an eagle, the age of an oak.’ The stag lives a hundred years, or so it is universally believed: therefore the eagle lives three hundred, and the oak’s age is at least nine hundred years. I recall, in connection with the eagle, a singular saying which I heard many years ago and have not since heard or anywhere encountered, to the effect that between dusk and dawn a bat’s flight will be the equivalent of a thousand miles, that between dawn and dusk a swallow will cover a thousand miles, and that a thousand miles is the measure of an eagle’s flight between sunrise and sunset.
Well, I must leave Maol-Aitionnach, and the snow-held hills. Everywhere, now, the White Weather may have spread. Far south, listeners may hear the _honk-honk_ of the travelling solander, that most musical and thrilling of all nocturnal sounds or of winter-dawns: or, like phantom-voices from the world of dreams, the _kuilliyak-ee, kuilliyak-o_ of the wild swans, the _Clann righ fo gheasan_, the Enchanted sons of Kings, who, as they wheel through the snowy twilight under the dawn-star may remember the dim lands of the north, and a great mountain that rises among white and silent hills and looks down upon a black tarn I know of, so dark in the grip of black-frost, and so strangely spared of the snow, that not a white wing rests there, or floats overhead, but is mirrored as an enchanted sail in an enchanted sea.
ROSA MYSTICA
(AND ROSES OF AUTUMN)
... _Rosa Sempiterna Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole Odor di lode al Sol._...
Sitting here, in an old garden by the sea, it is difficult for me to realise that the swallow has gone on her long flight to the South, that last night I heard countless teal flying overhead, and before dawn this morning the mysterious _honk-honk_ of the wild-geese. A white calm prevails. A sea of faint blue and beaten silver, still molten, still luminous as with yet unsubdued flame, lies motionless beneath an immeasurable dome of a blue as faint, drowned in a universal delicate haze of silver-grey and pearl. But already a change to pale apple-green and mauve is imminent. A single tern flashes a lonely wing along a grey-green line that may be where sky and sea meet, or may be the illusion of the tide refluent from green depths. On the weedy rocks I cannot see even a sleeping seamew: on the havened stretch of yellow-white sand a dotterel runs to and fro in sudden aimless starts, but as suddenly is still, is all but unseen with her breast against a rock covered with the blue-bloom of mussels, and now is like a shadow licked up by twilight.
Along the husht garden-ways beside me and behind me are roses, crimson and yellow, sulphur-white and pale carnation, the blood-red damask, and a trailing-rose, brought from France, that looks as though it were live flame miraculously stilled. It is the hour of the rose. Summer has gone, but the phantom-summer is here still. A yellow butterfly hangs upon a great drooping Marechal Niel: two white butterflies faintly flutter above a corner-group of honey-sweet roses of Provence. A late hermit-bee, a few lingering wasps, and the sweet, reiterated, insistent, late-autumn song of the redbreast. That is all. It is the hour of the rose.
“_C’est l’heure de la rose L’heure d’ambre et flamme, Quand dans mon àme Je sens une Blanche Rose Éclose._”
To-night the sea-wind will go moaning from the west into the dark north: before dawn a steely frost will come over the far crests of the hills. To-morrow the garden will be desolate: a garden of phantom dreams. They have waited long, spell-bound! but the enchantment is fallen; in a few hours all shall be a remembrance. What has so marvellously bloomed thus late, so long escaped devastating wind and far-drifting rains and the blight of the sea, will pass in a night. Already, a long way off, I hear a singular, faint, humming sound, like stifled bees. So ... the foam of storm is on the skerries of the seaward isles. Already from the north, a faint but gathering chill comes on the slanting wings of twilight. I rise with a sigh, thinking of an old forgotten refrain in an old forgotten poem:
“_Ged tha thu ’n diugh ’a d’aibheis fhuar, Bha thu nair ’a d’aros righ_--”
“(_Though thou art to-day a cold ruin Thou wert once the dwelling of a king._)”
In the long history of the Rose, from the time when the Babylonians carried sceptres ornamented now with this flower now with the apple or lotus, to the coming of the Damask Rose into England in the time of Henry VII.: from the straying into English gardens, out of the Orient, of that lovely yellow cabbage-rose which first came into notice shortly after Shakespeare’s death, or from Shakespeare’s own ‘Provençal rose,’ which is no other than the loved and common cabbage-rose of our gardens: from the combes of Devon to the straths of Sutherland, to that little clustering rose which flowered in Surrey meads in the days of Chaucer and has now wandered so far north that the Icelander can gather it in his brief hyperborean summer: from Keats’ musk-rose--
“The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves--”
to that Green Rose which for more than half a century has puzzled the rose-lover and been a theme of many speculations ... a thousand wise and beautiful things have been said of this most loved of flowers and not a few errors been perpetuated.
What has become of the Blue Roses to which in 1800 a French writer, Guillemeau, alludes as growing wild near Turin? They are no less phantoms than some of the rose-allusions which the poet has made sacrosanct, that to the Rhetorician have become an accepted convention. Again, we are told and retold that the cult of the rose is a modern and not an ancient sentiment. Even, it is said, the allusions of the Latin poets are not those of lovers and enthusiasts. It is the Rose of Catullus, we are reminded, that blooms in the old Italic literature, the flower of festival, of Venus and Bacchus, alluded to more for its associations and its decorative value than for love borne to it or enthusiasm lit by it as by a fragrant flame.
All this may be so, and yet I am not persuaded that the people of ancient days did not love this flower of flowers as truly as, if perhaps differently than, we do. It is true that the ancients do not appear to have regarded nature, either in the abstract or in the particular, in the way characteristic of peoples of modern times and above all of our own time. But literary allusiveness does not reveal the extent or the measure of the love of objects and places. It is almost inconceivable, for example, that so beauty-loving a people as the Greeks did not delight in the rose. The fact that only a mere handful of roses may be culled from all the poetry of Hellas, here a spray from Sappho, a wine-flusht cluster from Anacreon, a dew-wet bloom from Theocritus, a few wild-roses from the Anthology, an epithet from Homer, an image from Simonides or Pindar, a metaphor in some golden mouth, this paucity--so singular compared with the Rose of Poetry in our English speech, from Chaucer’s ‘Rose of Rhone’ to Mr. Yeats’s ‘Rose on the Rood of Time,’ loved and sung through a thousand years. Such paucity does not necessarily mean that only a few poets casually alluded to this supreme flower, and that it was unnoticed or unloved of the many. Doubtless rose-chaplets were woven for lovers, and children made coronals, and at mourning ceremonies and marriage festivals these flowers were strewn. The very fact that Sappho called the rose the queen of flowers showed that it was distinguished from and admired among even the violets, pre-eminently the flowers of Athens. That she likened a young maiden to a rose is as indicative as when an Arab poet likens his love to a delicate green palm, or as when a northern poet speaks of her as a pine-tree swaying in the wind or a wave dancing on the sea.
Then, again, the Rose would not have been consecrated to Venus, as an emblem of beauty: to Eros, as an emblem of love: to Aurora, as an emblem of Youth: and to Harpocrates, as an emblem of silence: if this symbolic usage were not such as would seem fit and natural. That roses, too, were in general demand is evident alone from their far-famed culture and the great trade in them at Paestum, the Lucanian town colonised by the Greek Sybarites five hundred years B.C. All mediæval and later literature is full of the beauty and fragrance of the rose, but were it not so, one could infer that the flower was held in high esteem from the fact that it has for ages been the wont of the Popes to have a golden rose exquisitely finished, and, when consecrated, to present it to some Catholic monarch as a token of special regard. Thus it seems to me that were there not a single allusion to the rose by any great poet from Homer to Sappho, from Anacreon to Theocritus, we might yet discern the love of the ancient Greeks for this flower from, let us say, a single surviving phrase such as the anonymous lovely epitaphial prayer-poem in the Anthology:--‘May many flowers grow on this newly-built tomb; not the dried-up Bramble, or the red flower loved by goats; but Violets and Marjoram, and the Narcissus growing in water; and around thee may all Roses grow.’
In Persia and the East, from Hindustân to Palestine, from remotest Asia to Abyssinia and Barbary, the Rose has ever been loved and honoured. Sâdi of the Rose-garden and many another has sung of it with ecstasy. The Hindû god Indra, even Buddha himself, suffered for robbing a paradisaical garden of a rose. How suggestive it is, that the Eve of the Aztec garden of Eden sinned, not for plucking an apple but a rose: it was a fatal rose, too, that the Eve of primitive Mexican legend gathered to her undoing and that of all her descendants.
What innumerable legends centre round this flower. In every country and in either hemisphere, north of the Equator, the poet and the myth-maker and the legend-weaver have occupied their imaginations to enhance its beauty, to deepen its significance.
Long ago Bion told how the rose sprang from the blood of the wounded Adonis, the supreme type of beauty, and of the tears of Venus. An older Hellenic legend declares that the rose was originally white, till Eros, dancing among the gods, upset a goblet of nectar upon Venus’s flower, which thereupon became red. Christian legend, on the other hand, would have it that the red rose sprang from the brands which had been lighted at Bethlehem to burn to death a Christian virgin-martyr. Remote from Syria as from Greece, the Scandinavian legend arose that this flower was white till Baldur, the god of Youth and Love, bled at the coming of Christ--akin to which is a Gaelic legend, that the flower was white till a drop of Christ’s blood fell from the Cross ... a variant of which is that the robin, who plucked at the thorns in Christ’s forehead till they stained its breast red, leaned exhausted against a wild white-rose on Calvary, which ever after was red as blood. I do not know the origin of the legend save that it is Teutonic in its present colour and shape, of how the Crown of Thorns was woven of the Briar-Rose, and how the drops that fell from the thorns became blood-hued blooms. Teutonic also, I think, is the legend that Judas made a ladder of the rose-briar with which to reach the closed doors of heaven: hence why it is that the name Judas-Stairs is given to the Briar in some parts of Germany to this day, and why the scarlet hips are called _Judasbeeren_.
Most beautiful of surviving rose-customs is that akin to what is still done in some remote parts of Europe, the placing of an apple into the hand of a dead child, so that the little one may have something to play with in Paradise. I know of a dead Irish girl into whose right hand was placed a white rose, and of a drowned fisherman in whose hand was placed a red rose, symbols of spiritual rebirth and of deathless youth. Against this must be set the strange and widespread aversion to throwing a rose into a grave, or even letting one fall or be lowered there. (‘It is throwing red life away’ it was explained to me once,--with the grim addition, ‘and Death will at once be hungry for more of the rose-thrower.’)
Again, I recall an old legend of the last rose of summer, long anterior to the familiar song so named: a legend of how at Samhain (Hallowmass) when of old was held the festival of summer ended and of winter begun, a young Druid brought a rose to the sunward Stones and, after consecration and invocation, threw it into the sea.