IV

I have learned at Burra that we townsfolk know nothing of the heavens.

There are only wet days in the city, and fine. The clouds merely pass

over London. They cross the street, and are gone. They cast shadows

on us, they make the place dark, they suggest, with a chill, that

there are powers beyond our borders over which even the elders of the

city have no jurisdiction. The day is fine again and we forget our

premonition; it was only the weather.

The motor-buses are all numbered and their routes are known, but the

clouds are visitations, unannounced and inexplicable; warnings, which

we disregard, that in truth we do not know where our city is. We

cannot distinguish one cloud from another, because the narrow measure

of heaven for each street allows us but an arc of a celestial coast,

or one summit of a white range; before that high continent has more

than suggested its magnitude we see the bus we want, or go down a

side-turning.

Doubtless the meagre outlook of this imprisonment from the heavens

must have its effect upon us. Our eyes go no more to the sky than

they do to the hills. We have acquired, if we have not inherited, the

characteristic of downcast eyes. Where there is no horizon there may be

work, but no hope, and so we begin to see the way to account for the

cynical humour of the Cockney. We say, in friendly derision, that they

who look upwards more than can be justified by the rules of our busy

community are star-gazers. When we look up, it is not to the hills, but

to a post-office clock or the name of a street. The city has length and

breadth, but no height, for the greater the elevation of its buildings,

the lower its inhabitants sink.

But in this Estuary I have changed that view of the world for one

that is flooded with light. The earth, I can see, is a planet, a vast

reflector. We look up and out from Burra, in the morning, to learn what

is stored in the sky; and if there is a moon we look to the heavens

at night to judge how the men at sea will fare, while we sleep. For

the clouds here plainly rule our affairs; or they are the heralds of

the powers which rule us. The clouds take the light of the sun, and

translate it into the character of our luck. On a bright morning over

this bay, when the happy and careless imagine that all is well, the

wind will begin to back. We are not at once aware of the reason for

it, but the colours fade from the earth and from one’s spirit. The

light dims. The uplands, which had been of umber and purple, become

that shadow of desolation from which men seek refuge. Scud like gusts

of livid smoke blows in swiftly from the southwest over the hills. The

clouds which follow it are dark and heavy, and so low that they take

the ground, roll over and burst. The uplands vanish. The sea grows

bleak and forbidding, and the cliffs, with their crags and screes, turn

into a prospect of downfall and ruin.

Yet when the wind is easterly, then the polish of the bay is hardly

tarnished, the clouds are high and diaphanous veils, and there is no

horizon, for sea and sky are merged as one concavity of turquoise. When

the morning is of easterly weather and still, the sea floor about the

boat is distinct in several fathoms, and the mind floats so buoyantly

and confidently midway in space that it feels there is no human problem

which could not be solved by a happy thought.

One afternoon the wind had been cool, for it came from the north of

north-west; then, long before its hour, the sun vanished behind a

veil. The wind fell with the sun. The world was without a movement,

except for the languid and distant glinting of the breakers on the bar.

The sea had the burnish of dull metal. The distant headlands were but

faint outlines, and they might have been poised aloft, for there was

as much light under them as above them. A steamer was passing from one

headland to another, but whether it was sailing the heavens to another

planet, or was going to America, it was hard to say. There were no

clouds. There was only a vague light which was both sea and sky. In

this indeterminate west, where the sun would then have been setting,

was a group of small islands of pearl, not marked on the chart, where

no islands ought to have been seen. They were too lofty and softly

luminous to be of this earth; they floated in a threatening cobalt

darkness. The day was a discernible presence, but it was ghostly; and

I wish I could guess its origin, and why it stood over us, pale and

silent, while we waited fearfully for a word that did not come.

V

On the shore of the dunes, which are across the Estuary from Burra,

few boats ever ground. There are shoals, and a conflict of tides and

currents, and then the surf. And why should a boat put over? Nothing

is there but the lighthouse and the sand. Nor is it easy to approach

it from the habitable land to the east, for after a long and devious

journey by ferry and road to avoid the arm of the sea, you come first

to a difficulty of marsh and dyke, and then to the region of the dunes.

That journey takes all the best of the daylight, for you could not

hurry if you knew every yard of the way, which nobody does; and then,

once caught in the brightness and silence of the desert of sandhills,

the need to hurry is forgotten.

It is one of the days with a better light when your boat grounds on

that shore. You may begin to walk the beach along the firm wet sand by

the breakers, but you cannot keep to it. Something which calls, some

strange lump among the flotsam stranded on the upper beach, draws you

towards the sandhills. It looked, you imagined, like a man asleep, with

a dark blanket over him; but it proved to be only a short length of a

ship’s spar covered with bladder-wrack. There is no returning then.

Once you reach that line of rubbish it is the track you follow, the

message you try to read. A baffling story, though, made of words from

many stories, separated, partly erased, muddled by the interruption

of storms, and woven irrelevantly into one long serpentining sentence

which extends to the point where the shore goes round a corner; and

from there, when you reach that point, continues to the next. It is

made of shells, derelict trees, bushes which have drifted from shores

only a botanist could guess, boards and fragments of wrecks, yarn and

rope, bottles, feathers, carapaces of crabs and sea-urchins, and corks,

all tangled with pulse into an interminable cable. Sometimes it runs

through the black ribs of an old wreck.

Perhaps, after the seaweed, there are more corks in its composition

than anything else. The abundance of corks on this desert shore, for

they are to be found at the head of every miniature combe of the

sandhills, most of them old and bleached, but some so fresh that it

is easy to read the impress of the vintners on their seals, suggests

that man’s most marked characteristic is thirst. If one went by the

evidence on this beach, then thirst is the chief human attribute.

In this life we might be occupied most of the time in drinking from

bottles. Examples of the bottles are here, too. The archæologists of

the future will find our enduring bottles and corks in association,

and they will discover, by experiment, that the corks often fit the

bottles, and they will deduce that both were used, in all probability,

in conjunction. But for what reason? Nothing will have been left in

the bottles for the archæologists but dirt. We occasionally look on

to-day while a learned man, from fragmentary evidence, creates a

surprising picture of the past. I feel I should enjoy coming back,

several thousand years hence, to hear another learned creature, a table

before him covered with the shards and corks of our years--one almost

perfect example has the mysterious word BOLS cast on it--explain to his

fascinated audience what he feels sure, from the relics before him, on

which he has spent the best years of his life, the mysterious folk of

our own age were like.

We can be fairly sure not much evidence of our own age will remain by

then. What will survive us will be the oddest assortment of rubbish;

but the pertinacious corks will be there. The British Museum will

have gone. It will be impossible to refer to the London Directory. No

Burke will exist. All the files of our newspapers, with their lists of

honours, will have perished. What will our age be called? Not the Age

of Invention, of the Great War, of Reconstruction, or anything else

that is noble and inspiriting; for not a vestige of a democratic press,

an aeroplane, a motor-car, or a wireless set will remain. There will

be only corks and bottles.

“For the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy....”

Yet it does seem unfair that of all the proud memories of these

resounding days, nothing may persist but our corks and bottles. Another

interruption of ice may creep down from the Pole, as has happened

before; as indeed happened once to the undoing of a previous race of

men. Its rigours increase, but so gradually that men are hardly aware

that anything is happening. They say to each other at last, “The

summers seem very short.” The cheerful Press of that day, true to

its function of maintaining the spirit of the people, never mentions

Winter, never speaks of the cold, but always turns its pages to the

south, where most of the sun is.

Nevertheless that does not thaw the ice. It still creeps south. The

habit of a week-end at a cottage is presently forgotten. Unalienable

rights and privileges become buried under inexorable glaciers that know

nothing of our sounder economic arguments. And, in the end, maybe the

ball of St. Paul’s is dropped as an erratic block from the bottom of an

iceberg to form a fossil in the ooze of a southern sea, to puzzle we

may not guess what earnest investigator living in an ameliorated clime

and time.

That ice retreats again, and the haunts and works of our age are

exposed, as were those of Magdalenian man. And what have we been

able to guess about him? Very little; but he did, we are sure, use

implements having enduring parts of flint and bone. It is fairly

certain that if he were aware that we judged him by his flints, he

would be a little grieved. And it would be too bad if the trifles,

which our butlers discarded with a flourish during our dinners were all

that survived for the future to see of us. Why, that archaeologist of a

time to come may not even deduce that we employed butlers.