GLASHGAR.
Up and up the hill went Gibbie. The path ceased altogether; but when
_up_ is the word in one’s mind--and _up_ had grown almost a fixed idea
with Gibbie--he can seldom be in doubt whether he is going right, even
where there is no track. Indeed in all more arduous ways, men leave no
track behind them, no finger-post--there is always but the steepness.
He climbed and climbed. The mountain grew steeper and barer as he went,
and he became absorbed in his climbing. All at once he discovered that
he had lost the stream, where or when he could not tell. All below and
around him was red granite rock, scattered over with the chips and
splinters detached by air and wind, water and stream, light and heat
and cold. Glashgar was only about three thousand feet in height, but it
was the steepest of its group--a huge rock that, even in the midst of
masses, suggested solidity.
Not once while he ascended had the idea come to him that by and by
he should be able to climb no farther. For aught he knew there were
oat-cakes and milk and sheep and collie dogs ever higher and higher
still. Not until he actually stood upon the peak did he know that
there was the earthly _hitherto_--the final obstacle of unobstancy,
the everywhere which, from excess of perviousness, was to human foot
impervious. The sun was about two hours towards the west, when Gibbie,
his little legs almost as active as ever, surmounted the final slope.
Running up like a child that would scale heaven, he stood on the bare
round, the head of the mountain, and saw, with an invading shock of
amazement, and at first of disappointment, that there was no going
higher: in every direction the slope was downward. He had never been
on the top of anything before. He had always been in the hollows of
things. Now the whole world lay beneath him. It was cold; in some of
the shadows lay snow--weary exile from both the sky and the sea and
the ways of them--captive in the fetters of the cold--prisoner to
the mountain top; but Gibbie felt no cold. In a glow with the climb,
which at the last had been hard, his lungs filled with the heavenly
air, and his soul with the feeling that he was above everything that
was, uplifted on the very crown of the earth, he stood in his rags,
a fluttering scarecrow, the conqueror of height, the discoverer of
immensity, the monarch of space. Nobody knew of such marvel but him!
Gibbie had never even heard the word _poetry_, but none the less was
he the very stuff out of which poems grow, and now all the latent
poetry in him was set a swaying and heaving--an ocean inarticulate
because unobstructed--a might that could make no music, no thunder
of waves, because it had no shore, no rocks of thought against which
to break in speech. He sat down on the topmost point; and slowly,
in the silence and the loneliness, from the unknown fountains of
the eternal consciousness, the heart of the child filled. Above him
towered infinitude, immensity, potent on his mind through shape to his
eye in a soaring dome of blue--the one visible symbol informed and
insouled of the eternal, to reveal itself thereby. In it, centre and
life, lorded the great sun, beginning to cast shadows to the south
and east from the endless heaps of the world that lifted themselves
in all directions. Down their sides ran the streams, down busily,
hasting away through every valley to the Daur, which bore them back
to the ocean-heart--through woods and meadows, park and waste, rocks
and willowy marsh. Behind the valleys rose mountains; and behind the
mountains, other mountains, more and more, each swathed in its own
mystery; and beyond all hung the curtain-depth of the sky-gulf. Gibbie
sat and gazed, and dreamed and gazed. The mighty city that had been
to him the universe, was dropped and lost, like a thing that was now
nobody’s, in far indistinguishable distance; and he who had lost it
had climbed upon the throne of the world. The air was still; when a
breath awoke, it but touched his cheek like the down of a feather, and
the stillness was there again. The stillness grew great, and slowly
descended upon him. It deepened and deepened. Surely it would deepen to
a voice!--it was about to speak! It was as if a great single thought
was the substance of the silence, and was all over and around him, and
closer to him than his clothes, than his body, than his hands. I am
describing the indescribable, and compelled to make it too definite
for belief. In colder speech, an experience had come to the child; a
link in the chain of his development glided over the windlass of his
uplifting; a change passed upon him. In after years, when Gibbie had
the idea of God, when he had learned to think about him, to desire his
presence, to believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the
brooding hen spreads her wings over her eggs--as often as the thought
of God came to him, it came in the shape of the silence on the top of
Glashgar.
As he sat, with his eyes on the peak he had just chosen from the rest
as the loftiest of all within his sight, he saw a cloud begin to grow
upon it. The cloud grew, and gathered, and descended, covering its
sides as it went, until the whole was hidden. Then swiftly, as he
gazed, the cloud opened as it were a round window in the heart of it,
and through that he saw the peak again. The next moment a flash of blue
lightning darted across the opening, and whether Gibbie really saw what
follows, he never could be sure, but always after, as often as the
vision returned, in the flash he saw a rock rolling down the peak. The
clouds swept together, and the window closed. The next thing which in
after years he remembered was, that the earth, mountains, meadows, and
streams, had vanished; everything was gone from his sight, except a
few yards around him of the rock upon which he sat, and the cloud that
hid world and heaven. Then again burst forth the lightning. He saw no
flash, but an intense cloud-illumination, accompanied by the deafening
crack, and followed by the appalling roar and roll of the thunder. Nor
was it noise alone that surrounded him, for, as if he were in the heart
and nest of the storm, the very wind-waves that made the thunder rushed
in driven bellowing over him, and had nearly swept him away. He clung
to the rock with hands and feet. The cloud writhed and wrought and
billowed and eddied, with all the shapes of the wind, and seemed itself
to be the furnace-womb in which the thunder was created. Was this then
the voice into which the silence had been all the time deepening?--had
the Presence thus taken form and declared itself? Gibbie had yet to
learn that there is a deeper voice still into which such a silence may
grow--and the silence not be broken. He was not dismayed. He had no
conscience of wrong, and scarcely knew fear. It was an awful delight
that filled his spirit. Mount Sinai was not to him a terror. To him
there was no wrath in the thunder any more than in the greeting of the
dog that found him in his kennel. To him there was no being in the sky
so righteous as to be more displeased than pitiful over the wrongness
of the children whom he had not yet got taught their childhood.
Gibbie sat calm, awe-ful, but, I imagine, with a clear forehead and
smile-haunted mouth, while the storm roared and beat and flashed and
ran about him. It was the very fountain of tempest. From the bare crest
of the mountain the water poured down its sides, as if its springs were
in the rock itself, and not in the bosom of the cloud above. The tumult
at last seized Gibbie like an intoxication; he jumped to his feet,
and danced and flung his arms about, as if he himself were the storm.
But the uproar did not last long. Almost suddenly it was gone, as if,
like a bird that had been flapping the ground in agony, it had at last
recovered itself, and taken to its great wings and flown. The sun shone
out clear, and in all the blue abyss not a cloud was to be seen, except
far away to leeward, where one was spread like a banner in the lonely
air, fleeting away, the ensign of the charging storm--bearing for its
device a segment of the many-coloured bow.
And now that its fierceness was over, the jubilation in the softer
voices of the storm became audible. As the soul gives thanks for the
sufferings that are overpast, offering the love and faith and hope
which the pain has stung into fresh life, so from the sides of the
mountain ascended the noise of the waters the cloud had left behind.
The sun had kept on his journey; the storm had been no disaster to him;
and now he was a long way down the west, and Twilight, in her grey
cloak, would soon be tracking him from the east, like sorrow dogging
delight. Gibbie, wet and cold, began to think of the cottage where he
had been so kindly received, of the friendly face of its mistress, and
her care of the lamb. It was not that he wanted to eat. He did not
even imagine more eating, for never in his life had he eaten twice
of the same charity in the same day. What he wanted was to find some
dry hole in the mountain, and sleep as near the cottage as he could.
So he rose and set out. But he lost his way; came upon one precipice
after another, down which only a creeping thing could have gone; was
repeatedly turned aside by torrents and swampy places; and when the
twilight came, was still wandering upon the mountain. At length he
found, as he thought, the burn along whose bank he had ascended in
the morning, and followed it towards the valley, looking out for the
friendly cottage. But the first indication of abode he saw, was the
wall of the grounds of the house through whose gate he had looked in
the morning. He was then a long way from the cottage, and not far
from the farm; and the best thing he could do was to find again the
barn where he had slept so well the night before. This was not very
difficult even in the dusky night. He skirted the wall, came to his
first guide, found and crossed the valley-stream, and descended it
until he thought he recognized the slope of clover down which he had
run in the morning. He ran up the brae, and there were the solemn cones
of the corn-ricks between him and the sky! A minute more and he had
crept through the cat-hole, and was feeling about in the dark barn.
Happily the heap of straw was not yet removed. Gibbie shot into it like
a mole, and burrowed to the very centre, there coiled himself up, and
imagined himself lying in the heart of the rock on which he sat during
the storm, and listening to the thunder winds over his head. The fancy
enticed the sleep which before was ready enough to come, and he was
soon far stiller than Ariel in the cloven pine of Sycorax.