At all seasons the coming of dusk has its spell upon the imagination.
Even in cities it puts something of silence into the turmoil, something
of mystery into the commonplace aspect of the familiar and the
day-worn. The shadow of the great change that accompanies the passage
of day is as furtive and mysterious, as swift and inevitable, amid
the traffic of streets as in aisles of the forest, or in glens and on
hills, on shores, or on the sea. It is everywhere the hour of suspense.
Day has not receded into the confused past, already a shadow in
eternity, and night has not yet come out of the unknown. Instinctively
one feels as though crossing an invisible bridge over a gulf, perchance
with troubled glances at the already dimming shore behind, or with
dreaming eyes or watchful or expectant gaze on the veiled shore upon
which we are almost come. In winter one can see dusk advancing like a
mountain-shadow. In lonely places there is something ominous, menacing
in the swift approach of the early winter-dusk, further gloomed perhaps
by the oncome of snow or rain or of a soughing wind moving out of low
congregated cloud. In thronged streets it is not less swift, not less
sombre, but the falling veils have hardly been secretly unloosened
before they are punctuated by the white or yellow flare of the
street-lamps. Hardly is breathing-space, there, between the stepping
out of day and the stepping into night. The fear of darkness, which
possesses towns like a great dread, has broken the spell with ten
thousand lights: as the mind of man, which likewise dreads the naked
darkness of thought and the white, remote, passionless stars of the
spirit, hastens to hide its shadowy dusks and brooding nights with a
myriad frail paper lanterns that a flying hand of rain will extinguish
or a breath of wind carry in a moment to the outer darkness.
But whatever hold upon the imagination the winter dusk may have,
however subtle a spell there may be in the gloamings of autumn, surely
the coming of dusk has at no other time the enchantment of the long
midsummer eves. It is then that one feels to the utmost the magic
influences of the dimsea or dimsee, to use the beautiful old English
west-country word. The further north one is the longer the suspense,
the more magical the slow gradual recession of the day-glow from vast
luminous skies, the slow swimming into the earthward gloaming of
incalculable shadow. What a difference between the lands of the south
and the light-lingering countries of the north! The sudden night comes
to the shores of Mediterranean while the rose of the west yet flames
against the Cornish headlands, and the Sicilian wave is dark while the
long green billow washing over Lyonesse is still a wandering fire under
cloudy banks of amethyst. And, in turn, shadow has come out of the sea
upon Wales and fallen upon the upland watercourses from the norland
fells, while in the Gaelic isles purple and gold cloths are still piled
deep upon the fiery threshold of the sunset: and when the last isles
themselves are like velvet-dark barques afloat in a universe of opal
and pale yellow and faint crimson, a radiant sun still blooms like a
flower of fire among the white pinnacles of wandering berg and the
everlasting walls of ice.
In June the coming of dusk is the audible movement of summer. The day
is so full of myriad beauty, so full of sound and fragrance, that it
is not till the hour of the dew that one may hear the breathing of
the miraculous presence. The birds, who still sing early in the month,
and many even of those whose songs follow the feet of May begin a
new love-life at the coming of June, are silent: though sometimes,
in the south, the nightingale will still suddenly put the pulse of
song into the gloaming, though brieflier now; and elsewhere the
night-loving thrush will awake, and call his long liquid notes above
the wild-growth of honeysuckle and brier. At the rising of the moon
I have heard the cuckoos calling well after the date when they are
supposed to be silent, and near midnight have known the blackcap fill
a woodland hollow in Argyll with a music as solitary, as intoxicating,
as that of a nightingale in a Surrey dell. The thrush, the blackbird,
the blackcap, the willow-warbler and other birds may often be heard
singing in the dusk, or on moonlit nights, in a warm May: and doubtless
it is for this reason that many people declare they have heard the
nightingale even in regions where that bird never penetrates. Often,
too, the nightingale’s song is attributed to the blackcap, and even
to the thrush or merle, simply because heard by day, for there seems
to be a common idea that this bird will not sing save at dusk or in
darkness or in the morning twilight. I doubt if the nightingale ever
sings in actual darkness, though the bird is most eager just before
and at dawn, at moonlit or starlit dusk, or at full moon, it may be
heard at any hour of the day. I have heard the song and watched the
singer at full noon, and that not in deep woods but in a copse by the
wayside. Strange that both name and legend survive in lands where
the nightingale is now unseen. There is no question but that it was
once plentiful, or at any rate often seen, in the Western Highlands;
though now, it is said, not a bird of its tribe has crossed the Solway
since the Union! It is still spoken of in Argyll and elsewhere, and
not confusedly with any other woodlander. In no country has it a
lovelier name than the Gaelic _Ros-an-Ceol_, the Rose of Music. I
have heard it spoken of as the _smiol_ or _smiolach_, the _eosag_,
and the _spideag_, though this latter name, perhaps the commonest, is
misleading, as it is applied to one or two other songsters. In Iona,
Colonsay, Tiree, and other isles, I have heard the robin alluded to
as the _spideag_. I remember the drift, but cannot recall the text
of a Gaelic poem where the nightingale (for neither in literary nor
legendary language is any other bird indicated by ‘Ros-an-Ceol’) is
called the Sister of Sorrow, with an allusion to a singular legend,
which in some variant or another I believe is also found in the
Austrian highlands, parts of Germany, and elsewhere, to the effect that
if a nightingale come ‘with Song upon it’ into the room of a sleeping
person, that person will go mad, or that if the eyes of a nightingale
found dead or slain be dissolved in any liquid, the drinker will become
blind. I have heard, too, a tale (though the bird was there alluded to
as the _smeorach-oidhche_ or ‘night-thrush’) where the nightingale,
the owl, and the bat are called moon-children, the Moon-Clan; three
birds, it is said, with three animals of the land and three of the
water, three fish, three insects, three trees, three plants, three
flowers, and three stones were thrown to the earth as a farewell gift
the day the Moon died. Among the three birds the teller included the
bat, and I daresay there are many who still regard the bat as a bird.
The three animals of land and water were the weasel, the badger, and
the fox, the seal, the otter, and the kelpie (_sic_). The three fish
were the fluke, the eel, and the moon-glistered herring. The three
insects were the white moth, the grey gnat, and the cockchafer. The
three trees were the ash, the thorn, and the elder. The three plants
were the ivy, the moon-fern or bracken, and the mistletoe. The three
flowers were the meadowsweet, the white water-lily, and the ‘lusavone’
(? _Lus-Mhonaidh_...? Bog-cotton). The three stones were, I think,
granite, basalt, and trap, though I am uncertain about the second and
still more so about the third, which was called _clach-liath_, ‘the
grey stone.’
But though in the north the nightingale is no longer a haunter of the
dusk, the other clans of the night are to be met with everywhere,
‘from the Rhinns of Islay to the Ord of Sutherland’ as the Highland
saying goes in place of the wider ‘from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.’
First and foremost is the owl. But of the owl and the nightjar and the
midsummer night I wish to speak in a succeeding paper. The corncrake
will next occur to mind.
The cry of the landrail is so like its popular name that one cannot
mistake it. Some naturalists say the resemblance to the croaking of
the frog may mislead the unwary, but there is an altogether different
musical beat or emphasis in the call of the rail, a different quality
of sound, a different energy; and it is difficult to understand how
any ear familiar with nocturnal sounds could err in detecting the
monotonously uniform _krex-krex_ of the bull-frog from the large,
air-swimming, harshly musical _crek-crāke_, with the singular suspense
so often to be noted after the first syllable. For all its harshness
there are few sounds of the summer-dusk so welcome. It speaks of heat:
of long shadow-weaving afternoons: of labour ceased, of love begun,
of dreams within dreams. The very memory of it fills the mind as with
silent garths of hay, with pastures ruddy with sorrel, lit by the last
flusht glow or by the yellow gold of the moon, paling as it rises. The
white moth is out; the dew is on the grass, the orchis, the ghostly
clover; the flittermouse is here, is yonder, is here again; a late
mallard flies like a whirring bolt overhead, or a homing cushat cleaves
the air-waves as with rapid oars. As a phantom, a white owl drifts
past and greys into the dusk, like flying foam into gathering mist. In
the dew-moist air an innumerable rumour becomes a monotone: the breath
of life, suppressed, husht, or palpitant. A wilderness of wild-roses
has been crushed, and their fragrance diffused among the dove-grey
and harebell-blue and pansy-purple veils of twilight: or is it a
wilderness of honeysuckle; or of meadowsweet; or of the dew-wet hay; or
lime-blossom and brier, galingale and the tufted reed and the multitude
of the fern? It is fragrance, ineffable, indescribable: odour born
under the pale fire of the moon, under the lance-thrusting whiteness
of the Evening Star.
But before rain the persistent cry of the corncrake becomes loud,
raucous, with a rasping intensity. The bird is commonly said to be a
ventriloquist, but this I greatly doubt. I have watched the rail in
many places, often within a few yards, more than once from the flat
summit of a huge boulder set in the heart of a hillmeadow of grass and
sorrel. Not once have I heard ‘the King of the quails’ unmistakably
throw his voice a few score of yards away. Often a _crek-crāke_ has
resounded, and at some distance away, just as I have seen the stooping
body of the _dreaun_ (or _traon_ or _treun-ri-treun_) slide through the
grassy tangle almost at my feet: but the cry was not identical with
that which a moment before I had heard, and surely it was not only
distance but the difference of sex and the pulse of love which softened
it to a musical call. Once, however, watching unseen from the boulder I
have spoken of, I saw and heard a landrail utter its _crake_ in three
ways, first and for over a minute with its head to one side while it
moved jerkingly this way and that, then for a few seconds (perhaps
four or five times) with its head apparently thrown back, and then
after a minute or two’s silence and after a brief rapid run forward
with out-thrust neck and lowered head, as though calling along the
ground. In no instance was the call thrown as though from a distance,
but unmistakably from where the bird moved or crouched. There had been
no response to the first, a single echo-like _crek-crāke_ followed the
second, but to the third there came almost simultaneously calls from at
least three separate regions.
Nor is the rail so invariably shy, so heedful of cover, as commonly
averred. With silence and patience it may often be discerned before
the seeding grass is too dense or the corn high. In a lonely place on
the east shore of West Loch Tarbert in Cantire I have seen several
corncrakes leave cover as fearlessly as those two other ‘sacred’ or
‘blessed’ birds, the lark and the red grouse, will leave the shelter
of heather-clutch or grassy tussock: and one morning I was awaked at
dawn by so near and insistent an iterance of the singular call that I
rose and looked out, to discover three corncrakes awkwardly perched on
a low rabbit-fence, while I counted four others running to and fro in
the rough dew-glistered grass just beyond. Here, by the way, a crofter
spoke of the landrail as the _cearrsach_, a name I have not elsewhere
heard and am not sure of the meaning, unless it is ‘the lumpy’ or
‘awkward one’; while an English factor knew it as the grass-drake or
meadow-drake, and again as the night-crow--the latter obviously a
survival from the Anglo-Saxon ‘myghte-crake’ or a name re-given from
like association of ideas. The same shrewd farmer quite believed that
a corncrake is governor and leader of each flock of quails, at any
rate in the season of migration--an idea held by the Greeks of old
and retained by the Greek and Sicilian quail-shooters of to-day, and
obviously widespread, as the Germans call the landrail the quail-king
(_Wachtelkonig_), the French ‘_le roi des cailles_,’ the Italians
‘_il re di quaglie_,’ and the Spaniards ‘_el rey de las cordonices_.’
However, if he had been a Gael he could have spoken of the quail only
by hearsay most likely, for it is very rare in the Highlands, and for
myself I have never seen one there. Its name (_garra-gart_ or _gartan_)
is not unique; and the common term _muir-eun_ is solely biblical,
‘sea-bird’ or ‘bird-from-oversea,’ because of the allusion in Numbers
xii. 31.
But the dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy
juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the
tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet
dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the
moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars
pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their
tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.