They Were Not Human Nor
Angelic, But Passionless, And It Was As If The Whole Visible
World, The Dim Grassy Plain And The Vast Pale Sky Sprinkled
With Paling Stars, Moonlit And Dawnlit, Had Found A Voice To
Express The Mystery And Glory Of The Morning.
It was but eight minutes past two o'clock when this "unbedding
of the lark" began, and the heavenly music lasted about
fourteen minutes, then died down to silence, to recommence
about half an hour later.
At first I wondered why the sound
was at a distance from the road on my right hand and not on my
left hand as well. Then I remembered what I had seen on that
side, how the "boys" at play on Sundays and in fact every day
hunt the birds and pull their nests out, and I could only
conclude that the lark has been pretty well wiped out from all
that part of the plain over which the soldiers range.
At Stonehenge I found a good number of watchers, about a
couple of hundred, already assembled, but more were coming in
continually, and a mile or so of the road to Amesbury visible
from "The Stones" had at times the appearance of a ribbon of
fire from the lamps of this continuous stream of coming
cyclists. Altogether about five to six hundred persons
gathered at "The Stones," mostly young men on bicycles who
came from all the Wiltshire towns within easy distance, from
Salisbury to Bath. I had a few good minutes at the ancient
temple when the sight of the rude upright stones looking black
against the moonlit and star-sprinkled sky produced an
unexpected feeling in me: but the mood could not last; the
crowd was too big and noisy, and the noises they made too
suggestive of a Bank Holiday crowd at the Crystal Palace.
At three o'clock a ribbon of slate-grey cloud appeared above
the eastern horizon, and broadened by degrees, and pretty soon
made it evident that the sun would be hidden at its rising at
a quarter to four. The crowd, however, was not down-hearted;
it sang and shouted; and by and by, just outside the
barbed-wire enclosure a rabbit was unearthed, and about three
hundred young men with shrieks of excitement set about its
capture. It was a lively scene, a general scrimmage, in which
everyone was trying to capture an elusive football with ears
and legs to it, which went darting and spinning about hither
and thither among the multitudinous legs, until earth
compassionately opened and swallowed poor distracted bunny up.
It was but little better inside the enclosure, where the big
fallen stones behind the altar-stone, in the middle, on which
the first rays of sun would fall, were taken possession of by
a crowd of young men who sat and stood packed together like
guillemots on a rock. These too, cheated by that rising cloud
of the spectacle they had come so far to see, wanted to have a
little fun, and began to be very obstreperous.
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