'The Beech,' I Thought, 'is A Good Tree To Sleep Under, For Nothing
Will Grow There, And There Is
Always dry beech-mast; the yew would be
good if it did not grow so low, but, all in all,
Pine-trees are the
best.' I also considered that the worst tree to sleep under would be
the upas tree. These thoughts so nearly bordered on nothing that,
though I was not sleepy, yet I fell asleep. Long before day, the moon
being still lustrous against a sky that yet contained a few faint
stars, I awoke shivering with cold.
In sleep there is something diminishes us. This every one has noticed;
for who ever suffered a nightmare awake, or felt in full consciousness
those awful impotencies which lie on the other side of slumber? When
we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, yet by the force of nature,
to powers before which we melt and are nothing. And among the strange
frailties of sleep I have noticed cold.
Here was a warm place under the pines where I could rest in great
comfort on pine needles still full of the day; a covering for the
beasts underground that love an even heat - the best of floors for a
tired man. Even the slight wind that blew under the waning moon was
warm, and the stars were languid and not brilliant, as though
everything were full of summer, and I knew that the night would be
short; a midsummer night; and I had lived half of it before attempting
repose. Yet, I say, I woke shivering and also disconsolate, needing
companionship. I pushed down through tall, rank grass, drenched with
dew, and made my way across the road to the bank of the river. By the
time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.
For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of
trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day,
because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.
The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so much to shine through
the air as to be part of it, took all colour out of the woods and
fields and the high slopes above me, leaving them planes of grey and
deeper grey. The woods near me were a silhouette, black and
motionless, emphasizing the east beyond. The river was white and
dead, not even a steam rose from it, but out of the further pastures a
gentle mist had lifted up and lay all even along the flanks of the
hills, so that they rose out of it, indistinct at their bases,
clear-cut above against the brightening sky; and the farther they were
the more their mouldings showed in the early light, and the most
distant edges of all caught the morning.
At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an-hour without moving,
and took in vigour from it as a man takes in food and wine. When I
stirred and looked about me it had become easy to see the separate
grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted chirrups in the
bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the silence,
the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared. In a
solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the
neighbouring sources of the river.
I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I was approaching the
end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had become part of my
adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small stream,
mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow.
There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible
accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers
(however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain
roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their
stone cottages and their lonely paths off the road.
So it was here. The hills had grown much higher and come closer to the
river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and then an aged and
uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring stone: part of
the hills. Then again there were present here and there on the spurs
lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the
mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be
so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but
especially in the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said,
here in the upper parts of valleys in the great hills. In such shrines
Mass is to be said but rarely, sometimes but once a year in a special
commemoration. The rest of the time they stand empty, and some of the
older or simpler, one might take for ruins. They mark everywhere some
strong emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and they anchor
these wild places to their own past, making them up in memories what
they lack in multitudinous life.
I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place where the road crosses
the river, and then I determined I would have hot coffee as well, and
seeing in front of me a village called Rupt, which means 'the cleft'
(for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it and
had my coffee. Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of
the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar
baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have
noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and
have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great
crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock,
glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my
way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown
impatient as he wandered on about 'leaving on your left the stone we
call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you
come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and so forth.
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