Hills and the Sea Part 4

Each of the four Causses is a waste; but the Causse of Mende is utterly bereft of men. Each is a high plateau; but this, I believe, the highest in feet, and certainly in impression. You stand there as it were upon the summit of a lonely pedestal, with nothing but a rocky edge around you. Each is dried up; but the Catisse of Mende is without so much as a dew-pan or a well; it is wrinkled, h.o.r.n.y, and cauterised under the alternate frost and flame of its fierce open sky, as are the deserts of the moon. Each of the Causses is silent; but the silence of the Causse of Mende is scorched and frozen into its stones, and is as old as they: all around, the torrents which have sawn their black canons upon every side of the block frame this silence with their rumble. Each of the Causses casts up above its plain fantastic heaps of rock consonant to the wild spirit of its isolation; but the Causse of Mende holds a kind of fortress--a medley so like the ghost of a dead town that, even in full daylight, you expect the footsteps of men; and by night, as you go gently, in fear of waking the sleepers, you tread quite certainly among built houses and spires. This place the peasants of the canons have called "The Old City"; and no one living will go near it who knows it well.

The Causses have also this peculiar to them: that the ravines by which each is cut off are steep and sudden. But the cliffs of the Causse of Mende are walls. That the chief of these walls may seem the more terrible, it is turned northwards, so that by day and night it is in shadow, and falls sheer.

It was when I had abandoned this desolate wonder (but with its influence strong upon me) that I left the town of Mende, down on the noise of its river, and began to climb the opposing mountain of the Margeride.

It was already evening, though as yet there were no stars. The air was fresh, because the year was at that season when it is summer in the vineyard plains, but winter in the hills. A twilight so coloured and translucent as to suggest cold spanned like an Aurora the western mouth of the gully. Upon my eastward and upward way the full moon, not yet risen, began to throw an uncertain glory over the sky.

This road was made by the French kings when their influence had crept so far south as to control these mountains. They became despots, and their despotism, which was everywhere magnificent, engraved itself upon these untenanted bare rocks. They strengthened and fortified the road. Its grandeur in so empty and impoverished a land was a boast or a threat of their power. The Republic succeeded the kings, the Armies succeeded the Republic, and every experiment succeeded the victories and the breakdown of the Armies. The road grew stronger all the while, bridging this desert, and giving pledge that the brain of Paris was able, and more able, to order the whole of the soil. So then, as I followed it, it seemed to me to bear in itself, and in its contrast with untamed surroundings, the history and the character of this one nation out of the many which live by the tradition of Europe. As I followed it and saw its exact gradient, its hard and even surface, its square border stones, and, every hundred yards, its carved mark of the distance done, these elaborations, standing quite new among the tumbled rocks of a vague upland, made one certain that Paris had been at work. Very far back (how far was marked on the milestone) the road had left the swarming gate of Toulouse. Very far on (how far was marked on the milestone) it was to cross the Saone by its own bridge, and feed the life of Lyons. In between it met and surmounted (still civilised, easy, complete) this barbaric watershed of the Margeride.

As I followed it, law--good law and evil--seemed to go with me up the mountain side.

There was more sound than on the arid wastes of the Causse. There were trees, and birds in the trees, moving faintly. The great moon, which had now risen, shone also upon scanty gra.s.s and (from time to time) upon the trickle of water pa.s.sing in runnels beneath the road.

The torrent in the depth below roared openly and strong, and, beyond it, the black wall of the Causse, immense and battlemented above me under the moon, made what poor life this mountain supported seem for a moment gracious by comparison. I remembered that sheep and goats and men could live on the Margeride.

But the Margeride has rightly compelled its 'very few historians to melancholy or fear.

It is a district, or a mountain range, or a single summit, which cuts off the east from the west, the Loire from the Gironde: a long, even barrow of dark stone. Its people are one, suspicious of the plains. Its line against the sky is also one: no critical height in Europe is so strict and unbroken. You may see it from a long way east--from the Velay, or even from the last of the Forez, and wonder whether it is a land or a sullen bar of black cloud.

All the world knows how snow, even in mere gullies and streaks, uplifts a mountain. Well, I have seen the dull roof-tile of the Margeride from above Puy in spring, when patches of snow still clung to it, and the snow did no more than it would have done to a plain. It neither raised nor distinguished this brooding thing.

But it is indeed a barrier. Its rounded top is more formidable than if it were a ridge of rock; its saddle, broad and indeterminate, deceives the traveller, with new slight slopes following one upon the other when the sharp first of the ascent is done.

Already the last edge of the Causse beyond the valley had disappeared, and already had the great road taken me higher than the b.u.t.tress which holds up that table-land, when, thinking I had gained the summit, I turned a corner in the way and found a vague roll of rising land before me. Upon this also, under the strong moonlight, I saw the ruin of a mill. Water, therefore, must have risen behind it. I expected and found yet another uncertain height, and beyond it a third, and, a mile beyond, another. This summit was like those random marshy steps which rise continually and wearily between the sluggish rivers of the prairies.

I pa.s.sed the fields that gave his t.i.tle to La Peyrouse. The cold, which with every hundred feet had increased unnoticed, now first disturbed me.

The wind had risen (for I had come to that last stretch of the glacis, over which, from beyond the final height, an eastern wind can blow), and this wind carried I know not what dust of ice, that did not make a perceptible fall, yet in an hour covered my clothes with tiny spangles, and stung upon the face like Highland snow in a gale. With that wind and that fine, powdery frost went no apparent clouds. The sky was still clear above me. Such rare stars as can conquer the full moon shone palely; but round the moon herself bent an evanescent halo, like those one sees over the Channel upon clear nights before a stormy morning. The spindrift of fine ice had, I think, defined this halo.

How long I climbed through the night I do not know. The summit was but a slight accident upon a tumbled plain. The ponds stood thick with ice, the sound of running water had ceased, when the slight downward of the road through a barren moor and past broad undrained films of frozen bog, told me that I was on the further northern slope. The wind also was now roaring over the platform of the watershed, and great patches of whirling snow lay to the right and left like sand upon the gra.s.sy dunes of a coast.

Through all this loneliness and cold I went down, with the great road for a companion. Majesty and power were imposed by it upon these savage wilds. The hours uncalculated, and the long arrears of the night, had confused my attention; the wind, the little arrows of the ice, the absence of ploughlands and of men. Those standards of measure which (I have said) the Causses so easily disturb would not return to me. I took mile after mile almost unheeding, numbed with cold, demanding sleep, but ignorant of where might be found the next habitation.

It was in this mood that I noticed on a distant swirl of rocks before me what might have been roofs and walls; but in that haunted country the rocks play such tricks as I have told. The moonlight also, which seems so much too bright upon a lonely heath, fails one altogether when distinction must be made between distant things, and when men are near.

I did not know that these rocks (or houses) were the high group of Chateauneuf till I came suddenly upon the long and low house which stands below it on the road, and is the highway inn for the mountain town beyond.

I halted for a moment, because no light came from the windows. Just opposite the house a great tomb marked the fall of some hero. The wind seemed less violent. The waters of the marshy plain had gathered. They were no longer frozen, and a little brook ran by. As I waited there, hesitating, my fatigue came upon me, and I knocked at their great door.

They opened, and light poured upon the road, and the noise of peasants talking loudly, and the roaring welcome of a fire. In this way I ended my crossing of these sombre and unrecorded hills.

I that had lost count of hours and of heights in the glamour of the midnight and of the huge abandoned places of my climb, stepped now into a hall where the centuries also mingled and lost their order. The dancing fire filled one of those great pent-house chimneys that witness to the communal life of the Middle Ages. Around and above it, ironwork of a hundred years branched from the ingle-nooks to support the drying meats of the winter provision. A wide board, rude, over-ma.s.sive, and shining with long usage, reflected the stone ware and the wine. Chairs, carved grotesquely, and as old almost as the walls about me, stood round the comfort of the fire. I saw that the windows were deeper than a man's arms could reach, and wedge-shaped--made for fighting. I saw that the beams of the high roof, which the firelight hardly caught, were black oak and squared enormously, like the ribs of a master-galley, and in the leaves and garden things that hung from them, in the mighty stones of the wall, and the beaten earth of the floor, the strong simplicity of our past, and the promise of our endurance, came upon me.

The peasants sitting about the board and fire had risen, looking at the door; for strangers were rare, and it was very late as I came out of the empty cold into that human room. Their dress was ancestral; the master, as he spoke to me, mixed new words with old. He had phrases that the Black Prince used when he went riding at arms across the Margeride. He spoke also of modern things, of the news in the valley from which I had come, and the railway and Puy below us. They put before me bread and wine, which I most needed. I sat right up against the blaze. We all talked high together of the things we knew. For when I had told them what news there was in the valley, they also answered my questions, into which I wove as best I could those still living ancient words I had caught from their mouths. I asked them whose was that great tomb under the moonlight, at which I had shuddered as I entered their doors. They told me it was Duguesclin's tomb; for he got his death-wound here under the walls of the town above them five hundred years ago, and in this house he had died. Then I asked what stream that was which trickled from the half-frozen moss, and led down the valley of my next day's journey.

They told me it was called the River Red-cap, and they said that it was Faery. I asked them also what was the name of the height over which I had come; they answered, that the shepherds called it "The King's House," and that hence, in clear weather, under an eastern wind, one could see far off, beyond the Velay, that lonely height which is called "The Chair of G.o.d."

So we talked together, drinking wine and telling each other of many things, I of the world to which I was compelled to return, and they of the pastures and the streams, and all the story of Lozere. And, all the while, not the antiquity alone, but the endurance of Christendom poured into me from every influence around.

They rose to go to the homes which were their own, without a lord. We exchanged the last salutations. The wooden soles of their shoes clattered upon the stone threshold of the door.

The master also rose and left me. I sat there for perhaps an hour, alone, with the falling fire before me and a vision in my heart.

Though I was here on the very roof and centre of the western land, I heard the surge of the inner and the roll of the outer sea; the foam broke against the Hebrides, and made a white margin to the cliffs of Holy Ireland. The tide poured up beyond our islands to the darkness in the north. I saw the German towns, and Lombardy, and the light on Rome.

And the great landscape I saw from the summit to which I was exalted was not of to-day only, but also of yesterday, and perhaps of to-morrow.

Our Europe cannot perish. Her religion--which is also mine--has in it those victorious energies of defence which neither merchants nor philosophers can understand, and which are yet the prime condition of establishment. Europe, though she must always repel attacks from within and from without, is always secure; the soul of her is a certain spirit, at once reasonable and chivalric. And the gates of h.e.l.l shall not prevail against it.

She will not dissolve by expansion, nor be broken by internal strains.

She will not suffer that loss of unity which would be for all her members death, and for her history and meaning and self an utter oblivion. She will certainly remain.

Her component peoples have merged and have remerged. Her particular, famous cities have fallen down. Her soldiers have believed the world to have lost all, because a battle turned against them, Hittin or Leipsic.

Her best has at times grown poor, and her worst rich. Her colonies have seemed dangerous for a moment from the insolence of their power, and then again (for a moment) from the contamination of their decline. She has suffered invasion of every sort; the East has wounded her in arms and has corrupted her with ideas; her vigorous blood has healed the wounds at once, and her permanent sanity has turned such corruptions into innocuous follies. She will certainly remain.

So that old room, by its very age, reminded me, not of decay, but of unchangeable things.

All this came to me out of the fire; and upon such a scene pa.s.sed the pageantry of our astounding history. The armies marching perpetually, the guns and ring of bronze; I heard the chant of our prayers; and, though so great a host went by from the Baltic to the pa.s.ses of the Pyrenees, the myriads were contained in one figure common to them all.

I was refreshed, as though by the resurrection of something loved and thought dead. I was no longer afraid of Time.

That night I slept ten hours. Next day, as I swung out into the air, I knew that whatever Power comforts men had thrown wide open the gates of morning; and a gale sang strong and clean across that pale blue sky which mountains have for a neighbour.

I could see the further valley broadening among woods, to the warmer places; and I went down beside the River Red-cap onwards, whither it pleased me to go.

A FAMILY OF THE FENS

Upon the very limit of the Fens, not a hundred feet in height, but very sharp against the level, there is a lonely little hill. From the edge of that hill the land seems very vague; the flat line of the horizon is the only boundary, and that horizon mixes into watery clouds. No countryside is so formless until one has seen the plan of it set down in a map, but on studying such a map one understands the scheme of the Fens.

The Wash is in the shape of a keystone with the narrow side towards the sea and the broad side towards the land. Imagine the Wash prolonged for twenty or thirty miles inland and broadened considerably as it proceeded as would a curving fan, or better still, a horseshoe, and you have the Fens: a horseshoe whose points, as Dugdale says, are the corners of Lincolnshire and Norfolk.

All around them is land of some little height, and quite dry. It is oolitic on the east, chalky on the south, and the old towns and the old roads look from all round this amphitheatre of dry land down upon the alluvial flats beneath. Peterboro', Cambridge, Lynn, are all just off the Fens, and the Ermine street runs on the bank which forms their eastern frontier.

This plain has suffered very various fortunes. How good the land was and how well inhabited before the ruin of the monasteries is not yet completely grasped, even by these who love these marshes and who have written their history. Yet there is physical evidence of what was once here: ma.s.ses of trees but just buried, gra.s.s lying mown in swathes beneath the moss-land, the implements of men where now no men can live, the great buried causeway running right across from east to west.

Beyond such proofs there are the writers who, rare as are the descriptions of medieval scenery, manage to speak of this. For Henry of Huntingdon it was a kind of garden. There were many meres in it, but there were also islands and woods and orchards. William of Malmesbury writes of it with delight, and mentions even its vines. The meres were not impa.s.sable marshes; for instance, in _Domesday_ you find the Abbot of Ramsay owning a vessel upon Whittlesea Mere. The whole impression one gets from the earlier time is that of something like the upper waters of the rivers in the Broads: much draining and a good many ponds, but most of the land firm with good deep pastures and a great diversity of woods.

Great catastrophes have certainly overcome this countryside. The greatest was the anarchy of the sixteenth century; but it is probable that, coincidently with every grave lesion in the continuity of our civilisation, the Fens suffered, for they always needed the perpetual attention of man to keep them (as they so long were, and may be again if ever our people get back their land and restore a communal life) fully inhabited, afforested, and cultured.

It is probable that the break-up of the ninth century saw the Fens partly drowned, and that after the Black Death something of the same sort happened again, for it is in the latter fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that you begin to hear of a necessity for reclaiming them.

John of Gaunt had a scheme, and Morton dug a ditch which is still called "Morton's Leam." I say, every defeat of our civilisation was inflicted here in the Fens, but it is certain that the princ.i.p.al disaster followed the suppression of the monasteries.

These great foundations--nourishing hundreds and governing thousands, based upon the populace, drawn from the populace, and living by the common life--were scattered throughout the Fens. They were founded on the "islands" nearest the good land: Thorney, Ramsay, Croyland, Ely--the nuns of Chatteris.