On Revisiting Stonehenge After An Interval Of Some Years I
Looked For My Sparrows And Failed To Find Them.
It was at the
breeding-season, when they would have been there had they
still existed.
No doubt the little colony had been extirpated
by a sparrow-hawk or by the human guardians of "The Stones,"
as the temple is called by the natives.
It remains to tell of my latest visit to "The Stones." I had
resolved to go once in my life with the current or crowd to
see the sun rise on the morning of the longest day at that
place. This custom or fashion is a declining one: ten or
twelve years ago, as many as one or two thousand persons would
assemble during the night to wait the great event, but the
watchers have now diminished to a few hundreds, and on some
years to a few scores. The fashion, no doubt, had its origin
when Sir Norman Lockyer's theories, about Stonehenge as a Sun
Temple placed so that the first rays of sun on the longest day
of the year should fall on the centre of the so-called altar
or sacrificial stone placed in the middle of the circle, began
to be noised about the country, and accepted by every one as
the true reading of an ancient riddle. But I gather from
natives in the district that it is an old custom for people to
go and watch for sunrise on the morning of June 21. A dozen
or a score of natives, mostly old shepherds and labourers who
lived near, would go and sit there for a few hours and after
sunrise would trudge home, but whether or not there is any
tradition or belief associated with the custom I have not
ascertained. "How long has the custom existed?" I asked a
field labourer. "From the time of the old people - the
Druids," he answered, and I gave it up.
To be near the spot I went to stay at Shrewton, a downland
village four miles from "The Stones"; or rather a group of
five pretty little villages, almost touching but distinct,
like five flowers or five berries on a single stem, each with
its own old church and individual or parish life. It is a
pretty tree-shaded place, full of the crooning sound of
turtle-doves, hidden among the wide silent open downs and
watered by a clear swift stream, or winter bourne, which dries
up during the heats of late summer, and flows again after the
autumn rains, "when the springs rise" in the chalk hills.
While here, I rambled on the downs and haunted "The Stones."
The road from Shrewton to Amesbury, a straight white band
lying across a green country, passes within a few yards of
Stonehenge: on the right side of this narrow line the land is
all private property, but on the left side and as far as one
can see it mostly belongs to the War Office and is dotted over
with camps. I roamed about freely enough on both sides,
sometimes spending hours at a stretch, not only on Government
land but "within bounds," for the pleasure of spying on the
military from a hiding-place in some pine grove or furze
patch. I was seldom challenged, and the sentinels I came
across were very mild-mannered men; they never ordered me
away; they only said, or hinted, that the place I was in was
not supposed to be free to the public.
I come across many persons who lament the recent great change
on Salisbury Plain. It is hateful to them; the sight of the
camp and troops marching and drilling, of men in khaki
scattered about everywhere over a hundred square leagues of
plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting booming of guns.
It is a desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land has
been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them.
I was pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings.
It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the
fox - a semi-sacred animal with them - is that, if you chance
to see one crossing your path in the morning, all that comes
before your vision on that day will be illusion. As an
illustration of this belief it is related that a Japanese who
witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were
covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes
and the earth shaken by the detonations, and when all others,
thinking the end of the world had come, were swooning with
extreme fear, veiwed it without a tremor as a very sublime but
illusory spectacle. For on that very morning he had seen a
fox cross his path.
A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have
what may be called a sense of historical time - a consciousness
of the transitoriness of most things human - if we see
institutions and works as the branches on a pine or larch,
which fail and die and fall away successively while the tree
itself lives for ever, and if we measure their duration not by
our own few swift years, but by the life of nations and races
of men. It is, I imagine, a sense capable of cultivation, and
enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would
otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the
pleasure of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we
were Japanese and had seen a fox in the morning, but at all
events in what we call a philosophic spirit.
What troubled me most was the consideration of the effect of
the new conditions on the wild life of the plain - or of a very
large portion of it. I knew of this before, but it was
nevertheless exceedingly unpleasant when I came to witness it
myself when I took to spying on the military as an amusement
during my idle time.
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