“I thravelled a dale when I had th’ influenzy.”
That was how a County Waterford gardener described the delirious
wanderings of fever. It also describes our state when the momentary joy
of receiving our luggage from the station had passed, when the long
process of dressing was over, and we lay, speechless victims of
headache, on our beds. To the feverishness of heat and exhaustion was
added the gliding panorama of mountain and wood and glaring sky, items
of our ignoble twelve miles; they became abhorrent, and yet the brain
toiled to fill in any forgotten feature. Such was the result of the
Indian method of dealing with hot weather.
It was dealt with that afternoon in a more efficient manner. In the
first place, a parasol was bought from the leading draper, a pink silk
one, reduced from three-and-nine to two shillings, on account of the
places where it had faded yellow. It was certainly a bargain, and an
hour afterwards the barometer began to fall, very slightly, but
sufficiently to show intelligence. Next morning the heat was still
supreme, but this was in order that we might spend another two shillings
on puggarees, after which the barometer fell a little more.
The shops of Dolgelly have the great advantage of a street on all four
sides of each house, each standing “a tower of strength, four square, to
every wind that blew,” so that bread, boots, millinery, vegetables, and
patent medicines can command each a window, great or small; and the
shopkeeper stands, Argus-eyed, in the centre, and caters for the
enigmatic needs of tourists, much as a missionary might prepare glass
beads for the Central African. Each shopkeeper knows his customers, to
the last farmer’s wife; they are united to him in a bond inferior only
to matrimony, as the interloper, of however long standing, finds to his
cost.
“If you could get it anywhere else you wouldn’t come ’ere for it,” said
a shopkeeper in our hearing, apostrophising the departing figure of a
casual purchaser. “I’m ’ere twenty-five years,” he went on, wiping the
flies off a perspiring piece of bacon with his pocket-handkerchief, “and
they ’ave as little likin’ for me as the first day I took down my
shutters, because I’m English. Ah, the Welsh stand together, they do,
and they ’ate the English. They’re near, too--terrible near.”
It was no more than ten o’clock in the morning, and yet when we emerged
from the shop, a “Rehoboth” was sending a stentorian hymn forth through
the town, and the streets were full of people hurrying to it. The tune
was wild and stately, and the minor phrases followed each other
unfaltering. We insensibly drew towards the door, and listened while the
slow melody rose and dropped like a path in the mountains--a path
washed with mountain rain and purified with mountain wind. Within, the
people stood close in the hideous pews, in the naked galleries; three
men in black coats, stationed in three rostrums high up against the
white wall, led the singing, and evidently found the weather too hot. We
observed that their eyes were upon us, and that an elder seemed to be
developing a tendency to offer us a Welsh hymnal, and we retired.
The morning was obviously one to sacrifice to expeditions, and any
tourist worthy of the name would no doubt have been by noon on the top
of Cader Idris or the Torrent Walk. The landlady of the “Angel,” looking
more than ever like Miss O’Flannigan’s aunt, urged us to these and other
courses with veiled reproach, as she would have reminded the impenitent
of evening service, but the hills in whose lap Dolgelly lies remain
unexplored by us. Others have been more conscientious; to them be the
glories of accomplishment and the fell privileges of description. The
one and only thing that Miss O’Flannigan desired to see was a Welsh
woman in a Welsh hat; but this, the landlady was forced to admit, was
the one and only thing not procurable in Dolgelly. There was the
sextoness of the church, an octogenarian, who had preserved her mother’s
hat--perhaps she would do. In half an hour Miss O’Flannigan was driving
the octogenarian before her, carrying a band-box as old and yellow as
herself; and the rest of the morning was spent in the seclusion of the
hotel garden, where, seated on an upturned bucket, the octogenarian
balanced the heirloom upon her spotted cap, while Miss O’Flannigan
produced studies of her that were more forcible than polite.
I, no less enjoyably to myself, sat on a wheelbarrow in the stable, and
laid down the law to the landlord, the ostler, and the saddler about
“chambering” the stuffing of one of the saddles so as to fit certain
swellings which had appeared on Tom’s back, which might be the result of
warbles, or of an ill-fitting saddle, or of the sudden
[Illustration: _The sextoness of Dolgelly._]
rise to the dignity of oats, but were certainly capable of unpleasant
developments. Tommy’s hard, yellow hide remained unaltered by saddle,
oats, curry-comb, or any other of its new conditions. Looks were not his
strong point, but we already relied on him--and there was something
attractive in the conscientious way in which he shied at gate-posts,
cows in the field, and other startling and irregular objects.
It was already far in the afternoon when we rode out over the bridge at
Dolgelly, where a single trickle of water crept through the central
arch. The sky had mackerel backs in it, the trees stirred delicately to
a newly awakened breeze, and the barometer was still falling. The
puggarees were packed up, and the pink parasol was furled, but they were
doing their appointed work, and the change came slowly nearer. In the
meantime we went on and up through wooded glens, past the ideally placed
little fishing hotel of Thynn-y-Groes, in clear, genial sunshine,
without a horse-fly; and gradually the vague headache, _réchauffé_ from
the well-cooked one of yesterday, melted away in that perfect ride. The
road was lonely, more lonely than a by-road in West Galway, and, as in
Galway, low hazels grew thickly behind the stone walls; the wide
lowlands down on our left lay sweet and placid, and silent except for
the corncrake; the mountains ran like a blue wall along the west, a wall
hacked and gashed as if by a siege, but still indomitable. Cader Idris
blocked the end of the valley, overlooking all things; but of what avail
are names, to what purpose the narrow English language? They will not
give one breath of the transcendent air, or the greenness of the leaves
that the goats were tearing from the hazel twigs, or one moment out of
the heavenly silence.
Descending leisurely from the heights and their crisp, ragged woods, we
discovered a line of railway, and farther on a desolate hillside
village, called by its inhabitants “Trowsefunneth.” How they spell it is
a different affair; probably they do not try. We had tea there. The
proprietor of the inn wished us to have a leg of mutton--“quite tender,
yess indeed! been in the ’ouse a week”--but we thought this would be
high tea with a vengeance, and accepted the inevitable in its usual form
of “’am-an’-ecks.” We can no longer refrain from mentioning that there
are two things in Wales, yea, three, which the traveller would do well
to avoid, and yet can hardly hope to escape from--butter, bacon,
coffee,--all are bad, even odious; the bacon salt, tough, stringy; the
butter yellow, coarse, and, if possible, more salt than the bacon; the
coffee a shade worse than the ordinary drug supplied by the British
hotel-keeper--and what has already been referred to as the narrow
English language holds no epithet that will fitly stigmatise British
hotel coffee.
It was past seven o’clock when the reckoning was paid, and we could have
wished we were going to stay on in the little parlour with the German
coloured prints, and the clatter of Welsh outside in the kitchen, but it
could not be. Already the ascent of Snowdon was coming into the near
future, a matter of the day after to-morrow, and the mackerel backs
were in the sky. The reluctant Tommies were drawn from their lair, where
the village sat in conclave on them and the hold-alls, and we pushed
onwards by what the proprietor described as “Mr Oakley’s privvat road
through the glen.” Those who know the Dargle, in the county of Wicklow,
know what a glen can be at its best, and it is hard to admit that it has
a rival; but in the evening light, with the deep places of that bosky
cleft showing a writhing twist of white water a hundred feet below, Mr
Oakley’s glen was very hard to beat. It was as nearly dark as the summer
night knew how to be when the loafers of Mahntooroch--this is again the
phonetic gasp of despair--took their pipes from their mouths to point
out to us the way to the Grapes Hotel. We could make out that it was a
sophisticated village, hemmed in between a wooded hill and a river, and
lying silent in the velvet gloom, except for the noise of running water
and the irregular patter of the Tommies’ hoofs.
A scarlet face loomed in the entry of the hotel as we slid stiffly from
our saddles, and afterwards, in the sitting-room, we found it burning
like a red lamp at the central table. We fell into converse with its
owner, while from a dark corner of the room a sickly jingle apprised us
that some one was playing “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”
“My friend’s playin’ there,” explained the tourist with the roast face;
“’e’s rather a shoy cha-ap.”
He further informed us that he came from Manchester and ’ad just bin up
Snowdon. Perhaps he did not mean to be discouraging: his intentions were
obviously of the best, and possibly his complexion had something to say
to the lurid light in which he regarded our project of riding the
Tommies up Snowdon. Nevertheless, as we heard how, not three years
before, a pony had slipped and fallen down a precipice, how he himself
had felt “that sick and giddy” at one place that on the downward path
two guides had enveloped his head in a sack and carried him past the
dreaded spot, and of how insuperably beset with clouds the topmost peak
had been, our hearts fell into our boots, and the tune of “The Man that
broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” has, ever since that night, held a horror
for us that is not entirely its own.
[Illustration: _The tourist at the Grapes Inn, Maentywrog._]
[Illustration: _Between Trawsfynydd and Maentywrog._] CHAPTER VI.
It was the longest day of the year,--so said the penny almanac in the
Mahntooroch Hotel. So, with richer certainty, did we ourselves
asseverate before nightfall. Before 9 A.M. the Tommies and their
lop-sided burdens had been launched on their twelve miles’ journey to
Beddgelert; and we, something depressed in spirit by the farewell
warnings of our friend the roasted tourist, were hardening our hearts to
the ascent of Snowdon.
We rode up through the Plas Oakley Woods, along the ramparts of the
glens, and reaching higher levels, came on a vision of a mountain lake
dreaming in the early sun. Three or four coots beat a silver path across
it with their black wings, in alarm that testified to the rarity of the
June tourist, and the pine-woods round it still held the purple shadows
of morning. Out on the bare hills beyond it the heather was in bloom,
and the wind’s freshness was softened by the scent of it. The Tommies
crawled along with well-considered sluggishness. They had by this time a
complete mastery of our characters. In the mornings they found that we
were too light-hearted to resent their laziness, and in the evenings too
humane. This, and the fact that Miss O’Flannigan made from Tom’s back a
sketch of nothing in particular, may account for our having taken five
hours over the twelve miles. However, it may be conceded that they were
hilly miles, and were withal as circuitous in their approach of a given
point as an Irishman in getting to the focal point of a bargain. Indeed,
one turn of the road looked as if it might have
[Illustration: _Miss O’Flannigan made a sketch from Tom’s back._]
supplied the Irishman himself, when it led us past a dreary cabin whose
ambition to be rectangularly frightful yielded to the prior necessity of
being crooked in a manner that we thought to be achievable only by the
Irish cottage architect. With squalid, squinting eyes it leered aside
upon its cabbage-garden and the pigs that rooted therein, and outwards
to the sea down a bare valley. We were sensible then, for the first
time, of a greyness that was blunting the sunshine, and the cabin with
its malign, dirty face seemed responsible for it.
The extremes of landscape met where tumbled heaps of grey rock slanted
down from the sky to the flat boggy plain that runs out to Port Madoc.
That the road should be protected from these suspended avalanches by a
single strand of wire-fencing is a fact that no doubt admits of
explanation, but at a cursory view of things its object was not
apparent. The loneliness was absolute, whether we looked inland to crags
and oak-woods, or seaward along the marshes, but by this time we did not
expect anything except loneliness. Coventry on a memorable occasion was
not more straitly penned behind its shutters than was Wales as we rode
through it. The wayside villages seemed asleep, the farmhouse doors were
shut, and the silence of the roads was comparable only to that supremest
of earth’s silences when one is thrown out of a run, and hounds, riders,
and runners have seemingly passed away into eternity.
Turning inland again among the low oak-woods, the country was rich and
flowery, and always silent, and we ourselves were hot and speechless
under the hot, grey sky. A discovery that one of the girths was rubbing
off the skin behind Tom’s foreleg occasioned a delay fraught with gloom,
difficulty, and the tongues of buckles. Miss O’Flannigan mounted a rock,
and fell to sketching the unsketchable--a habit with her in moments of
inglorious crisis, her sole contribution to the difficulty being a stout
square of chamois leather which she wore on her chest in memory of a
departed cold. With this interesting relic I padded the girth, and we
proceeded in despondency. It was one of the junctures when the Tommies,
and riding-tours generally, became intolerable, and we were on the
dangerous verge of admitting as much, when our attention became
concentrated on six black objects advancing towards us in single file
along the barren perspective of road. They were a walking party,
evidently engaged in record-breaking, and as with purple, streaming
faces they swung past us, we accepted the object-lesson, and thanked
heaven for the Tommies.
Following on this was a mile of solitude and sinuous advance through
craggy places; then, suddenly, the Pass of Aberglaslyn, and the tourist
by companies--especially the clerical tourist. There were four long
black coats, and as many soft black felt hats, on or about Aberglaslyn
bridge, each with a remarkable proportion of female adherents, to whom,
guide-book in hand, or with the unaided gush of inspiration, they
defined the beauties of the Pass. We are naturally modest, but we cannot
refrain from mentioning that from the moment we came in sight we usurped
the position of the beauties of the Pass. The adherents of the clergy
turned with ecstasy from the contemplation of nature to feast their
eyes upon us, our sun-burned straw hats, our equally sun-burned noses,
and our bulging wallets.
We are disposed to deal leniently with an unsuccessful rival, and inured
though Aberglaslyn must now be to picturesque description, we will spare
it further adjectives. There was a poor woman once in the county of Cork
who was shown a dazzling array of wedding-presents. Speech first failed
her, and then she said: “Mother of God! it’s like a circus.” Thus, and
with such a humble reverence, do we say of Aberglaslyn Pass, that it is
like a circus.
There is something at once gallant and touching about the way in which
the English tourist places his hand in that of convention, and is led by
her, uncomplaining, through very arid places. This elderly
generalisation does not, by so much as a backward glance, include
Aberglaslyn, with its cliffs and fir-trees, and mountain-sides flushed
with blossoming heather; it is for the moment concentrated upon the
grave of Gelert, its railings and
[Illustration]
little stone pillars, erected possibly by the Town Commissioners to
supply a want long felt by tourists of an object for a short walk. The
selectors of the site have been carried away by a sense of fitness
probably adhering since the days when they buried their pet rabbits in
the back-garden, and, with guileless convention, they have erected the
tomb of Gelert under a tree, a healthy one in the prime of life,
standing discreetly and yet conveniently in a roadside field. The
sentiment of the back-garden has been added at a touch by the railing,
and the result suffices to the tourist. Forth to it, in duteous
pilgrimage, go the brides and bridegrooms, seeking in the long vague
forenoons of holiday for some occupation that shall savour of the
compulsory, and at all events make them glad to get home again for
luncheon. The mile of road between Gelert’s grave and his village was
punctuated with the newly married; and, even at the risk of supporting
another conventionality, it must be recorded that the distance that
separated each bride from her groom was noticeable, and seemed to
indicate a desire to economise conversation.
Do the brides and bridegrooms support the venerable fraud who sits
outside the Goat Hotel in full Welsh costume, selling rag-doll replicas
of herself? It would seem so, for she apparently prospers, and we cannot
believe that the hotel-keepers, who form the balance of the population,
can buy many rag dolls.
The sky had grown grey, the air chilly, the weather was turning nasty,
the saddles had perceptibly turned and were extremely nasty. These
things may perhaps extenuate our bad taste in finding Beddgelert a
trifle disappointing. It seemed to lack a central point; even the
guide-books have to admit that its lions are not on the spot, although
it seductively adds that they are within an “easy walk.” Snowdon was
also included among the objects of interest within an easy walk, but a
brief colloquy with the manageress of the Prince Llewellyn Hotel stamped
the statement as a vicious flight of fancy.
“It’s a good four miles,” said that intelligent woman, regarding us
compassionately; “but there _is_ ladies that think nothing of that.”
We hastened to assure her that we were not of such, and a few moments
of confidential discussion at the bar sufficed for a programme superior
to any that the guide-books had to suggest. It is in such affairs as
these that the landlady and the coffee-room-maid show qualities not to
be found in the landlord, or even the ostler. They can rise above
convention; they have an instinctive perception of what the tourist, in
his bewildered heart, prefers, but fears to acknowledge; and they are
capable of giving advice with a sound disregard for the logic of
precedent. Therefore it befell that our bones are not now bleaching on
the “Beddgelert ascent” of Snowdon, and that, after a large cold lunch,
which included a delicious but embarrassingly stony cherry-pie, we found
ourselves riding slowly towards the village of Rhyddu.
This was the scheme of the manageress. We were to ride on to Rhyddu,
leave the ponies at the Quellyn Arms, get a guide, and having ascended
Snowdon by the shortest route, sleep on top, see the sun rise, and be
back at Rhyddu for breakfast. It was almost alarming in its simplicity,
and in the way in which it degraded the ascent of the highest mountain
in England and Wales into a mere episode of the late afternoon. But,
with a barometrical future so uncertain that, as Miss O’Flannigan’s cook
is in the habit of saying, “you couldn’t tell a day from an hour,” its
merit was too obvious to be disregarded.
Low as we had sunk in the social scale, we yet retained just enough
self-respect to preserve us from asking the rare passer-by which of the
misty bulks that confronted us was Snowdon; but none the less, we should
have liked to know. Snowdon had been to our minds a lonely autocrat,
unmistakable as Vesuvius or Fuji-yama; but here were four or five
round-shouldered monsters, all of about the same height, and none quite
as monstrous as we had expected. We settled on several, and tried
successively to make the best of them, and to experience the sensations
of awe which the guide-book assured us were inevitable under the
circumstances; but the telegraph wire that had been given as our clue
still led us onwards, and the village of Rhyddu seemed, like all our
destinations, to have pitched its moving tent a mile beyond our
estimate.
At length a line of unlovely grey houses stood by the roadside on a
broad green ridge, the telegraph wire sent a feeler down into one of
these, and a modest signboard presently introduced to us the Quellyn
Arms. It was a very small hotel indeed, but it contained a smell of
fried bacon that would have filled St Paul’s, and an ignorance of the
English language that was almost equally stupendous. We were at this
moment on a flank of Snowdon, as we stretched our stiff legs along the
horse-hair chairs; the terminus of the Snowdon Railway was above us,
within a stone’s-throw, and a toy train was curling incredibly round
corners and down into a green valley that was dovetailed in among the
great roots of the mountain. Outside the parlour window a thick-set
figure with a long stick waited immovably--as immovably as Snowdon, or
as the misty
[Illustration: _The Snowdon guide outside the parlour window._]
cloud in which its horns were plunged. As we momently grew stiffer, the
probability that the sun would rise next morning seemed slighter than
usual, and we tried to persuade the thick-set man to regard the position
from our point of view. But a Snowdon guide has an optimism about
sunrises, and a conviction in the matter of a bird in the hand being
worth two in the bush.
This, we were assured, was the longest day in the year. It would be
light all night. There was a very good hotel on the top to which he,
Griffith Roberts, had guided forty people the night before, all of whom
had seen Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man at sunrise.
Miss Jones, the landlady’s daughter, interpreted these things to us, and
we recognised compassion in her eye as she did so. Our craven hearts
sank low; but we realised that, as Mark Twain has sufficingly expressed,
we must “crowd through or bust.”