There are certain customs in man the permanence of which gives infinite
pleasure. When the mood of the schools is against them these customs
lie in wait beneath the floors of society, but they never die, and when
a decay in pedantry or in despotism or in any other evil and inhuman
influence permits them to reappear they reappear.
One of these customs is the religious attachment of man to isolated
high places, peaks, and single striking hills. On these he must build
shrines, and though he is a little furtive about it nowadays, yet the
instinct is there, strong as ever. I have not often come to the top of
a high hill with another man but I have seen him put a few stones
together when he got there, or, if he had not the moral courage so to
satisfy his soul, he would never fail on such an occasion to say
something ritual and quasi-religious, even if it were only about the
view; and another instinct of the same sort is the worship of the
sources of rivers.
The Iconoclast and the people whose pride it is that their senses are
dead will see in a river nothing more than so much moisture gathered in
a narrow place and falling as the mystery of gravitation inclines it.
Their mood is the mood of that gentleman who despaired and wrote:
A cloud’s a lot of vapour,
The sky’s a lot of air,
And the sea’s a lot of water
That happens to be there.
You cannot get further down than that. When you have got as far down as
that all is over. Luckily God still keeps his mysteries going for you,
and you can’t get rid, even in that mood, of the certitude that you
yourself exist and that things outside of you are outside of you. But
when you get into that modern mood you do lose the personality of
everything else, and you forget the sanctity of river heads.
You have lost a great deal when you have forgotten that, and it behoves
you to recover what you have lost as quickly as possible, which is to
be done in this way: Visit the source of some famous stream and think
about it. There was a Scotchman once who discovered the sources of the
Nile, to the lasting advantage of mankind and the permanent glory of
his native land. He thought the source of the Nile looked rather like
the sources of the Till or the Tweed or some such river of Thule. He
has been ridiculed for saying this, but he was mystically very right.
The source of the greatest of rivers, since it was sacred to him,
reminded him of the sacred things of his home.
When I consider the sources of rivers which I have seen, there is not
one, I think, which I do not remember to have had about it an influence
of awe. Not only because one could in imaginings see the kingdoms of
the cities which it was to visit and the way in which it would bind
them all together in one province and one story, but also simply
because it was an origin.
The sources of the Rhone are famous: the Rhone comes out of a glacier
through a sort of ice cave, and if it were not for an enormous hotel
quite four-square it would be as lonely a place as there is in Europe,
and as remarkable a beginning for a great river as could anywhere be
found. Nor, when you come to think of it, does any European river have
such varied fortunes as the Rhone. It feeds such different religions
and looks on such diverse landscapes. It makes Geneva and it makes
Avignon; it changes in colour and in the nature of its going as it
goes. It sees new products appearing continually on its journey until
it comes to olives, and it flows past the beginning of human cities,
when it reflects the huddle of old Arles.
The sources of the Garonne are well known. The Garonne rises by itself
in a valley from which there is no issue, like the fabled valleys shut
in by hills on every side. And if it were anything but the Garonne it
would not be able to escape: it would lie imprisoned there for ever.
Being the Garonne it tunnels a way for itself right under the High
Pyrenees and comes out again on the French side. There are some that
doubt this, but then there are people who would doubt anything.
The sources of the River Arun are not so famous as these two last, and
it is a good thing, for they are to be found in one of the loneliest
places within an hour of London that any man can imagine, and if you
were put down there upon a windy day you would think yourself upon the
moors. There is nothing whatsoever near you at the beginnings of the
little sacred stream.
Thames had a source once which was very famous. The water came out
plainly at a fountain under a bleak wood just west of the Fosse Way,
under which it ran by a culvert, a culvert at least as old as the
Romans. But when about a hundred years ago people began to improve the
world in those parts, they put up a pumping station and they pumped
Thames dry—since which time its gods have deserted the river.
The sources of the Ribble are in a lonely place up in a corner of the
hills where everything has strange shapes and where the rocks make one
think of trolls. The great frozen Whernside stands up above it, and
Ingleborough Hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the
flat-topped Mesas which you have in America, or (as those who have
visited it tell me) like the flat hills of South Africa; and a little
way off on the other side is Pen-y-ghent, or words to that effect. The
little River Ribble rises under such enormous guardianship. It rises
quite clean and single in the shape of a little spring upon the
hillside, and too few people know it. The other river that flows east
while the Ribble flows west is the River Ayr. It rises in a curious
way, for it imitates the Garonne, and finding itself blocked by
limestone burrows underneath at a place called Malham Tarn, after which
it has no more trouble.
The River Severn, the River Wye, and a third unimportant river, or at
least important only for its beauty (and who would insist on that?)
rise all close together on the skirts of Plinlimmon, and the smallest
of them has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge
of Llygnant, which looks like, and perhaps is, the deepest cleft in
this island, or, at any rate, the most unexpected. And a fourth source
on the mountain, a tarn below its summit, is the source of Rheidol,
which has a short but adventurous life like Achilles.
There is one source in Europe that is properly dealt with, and where
the religion due to the sources of rivers has free play, and this is
the source of the Seine. It comes out upon the northern side of the
hills which the French call the Hills of Gold, in a country of
pasturage and forest, very high up above the world and thinly peopled.
The River Seine appears there in a sort of miraculous manner, pouring
out of a grotto, and over this grotto the Parisians have built a votive
statue; and there is yet another of the hundred thousand things that
nobody knows.