On This Account Any Large Object Appearing On
It, Such As A Horse Or Tree Or A Big Animal, Looks Very Much
Bigger Than It Would On Land With A Broken Surface.
Oddly enough, my impossible Stonehenge was derived from a
sober description and an accompanying plate in a sober work
- a gigantic folio in two volumes entitled "A New System of
Geography", dated some time in the eighteenth century.
How
this ponderous work ever came to be out on the pampas, over
six thousand miles from the land of its origin, is a thing to
wonder at. I remember that the Stonehenge plate greatly
impressed me and that I sacrilegiously cut it out of the book
so as to have it!
Now we know, our reason tells us continually, that the mental
pictures formed in childhood are false because the child and
man have different standards, and furthermore the child mind
exaggerates everything; nevertheless, such pictures persist
until the scene or object so visualized is actually looked
upon and the old image shattered. This refers to scenes
visualized with the inner eye, but the disillusion is almost
as great when we return to a home left in childhood or boyhood
and look on it once more with the man's eyes. How small it
is! How diminished the hills, and the trees that grew to such
a vast height, whose tops once seemed "so close against the
sky" - what poor little trees they now are! And the house
itself, how low it is; and the rooms that seemed so wide and
lofty, where our footfalls and childish voices sounded as in
some vast hall, how little and how mean they look!
Children, they are very little,
the poet says, and they measure things by their size; but it
seems odd that unless we grow up amid the scenes where our
first impressions were received they should remain unaltered
in the adult mind. The most amusing instance of a false
picture of something seen in childhood and continuing through
life I have met was that of an Italian peasant I knew in South
America. He liked to talk to me about the cranes, those great
and wonderful birds he had become acquainted with in childhood
in his home on the plains of Lombardy. The birds, of course,
only appeared in autumn and spring when migrating, and passed
over at a vast height above the earth. These birds, he said,
were so big and had such great wings that if they came down on
the flat earth they would be incapable of rising, hence they
only alighted on the tops of high mountains, and as there was
nothing for them to eat in such places, it being naked rock
and ice, they were compelled to subsist on each other's
droppings. Now it came to pass that one year during his
childhood a crane, owing to some accident, came down to the
ground near his home. The whole population of the village
turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and were amazed at its
size; it was, he said, the strangest sight he had ever looked
on. How big was it? I asked him; was it as big as an
ostrich? An ostrich, he said, was nothing to it; I might as
well ask him how it compared with a lapwing. He could give me
no measurements: it happened when he was a child; he had
forgotten the exact size, but he had seen it with his own eyes
and he could see it now in his mind - the biggest bird in the
world. Very well, I said, if he could see it plainly in his
mind he could give some rough idea of the wing-spread - how
much would it measure from tip to tip? He said it was perhaps
fifty yards - perhaps a good deal more!
A similar trick was played by my mind about Stonehenge. As
a child I had stood in imagination before it, gazing up
awestruck on those stupendous stones or climbing and crawling
like a small beetle on them. And what at last did I see with
my physical eyes? Walking over the downs, miscalled a plain,
anticipating something tremendous, I finally got away from the
woods at Amesbury and spied the thing I sought before me far
away on the slope of a green down, and stood still and then
sat down in pure astonishment. Was this Stonehenge - this
cluster of poor little grey stones, looking in the distance
like a small flock of sheep or goats grazing on that immense
down! How incredibly insignificant it appeared to me, dwarfed
by its surroundings - woods and groves and farmhouses, and by
the vast extent of rolling down country visible at that point.
It was only when I had recovered from the first shock, when I
had got to the very place and stood among the stones, that I
began to experience something of the feeling appropriate to
the occasion.
The feeling, however, must have been very slight, since it
permitted me to become interested in the appearance and
actions of a few sparrows inhabiting the temple. The common
sparrow is parasitical on man, consequently but rarely found
at any distance from human habitations, and it seemed a little
strange to find them at home at Stonehenge on the open plain.
They were very active carrying up straws and feathers to the
crevices on the trioliths where the massive imposts rest on
the upright stones. I noticed the birds because of their
bright appearance: they were lighter coloured than any
sparrows I have ever seen, and one cock bird when flying to
and fro in the sunlight looked almost white. I formed the
idea that this small colony of about a dozen birds had been
long established at that place, and that the change in their
colouring was a direct result of the unusual conditions in
which they existed, where there was no shade and shelter of
trees and bushes, and they were perpetually exposed for
generations to the full light of the wide open sky.
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