The ascent of Snowdon began as seductively, as gently, as the first step
towards a great crime. A grassy cart-track curved idly through pastures
that had just a perceptible heavenward tendency, enough to stimulate the
traveller and flatter his vigour and prowess. The air was bland and
sweet, and the clouds that had been solemnly seated on the mountain
began to move away in vagrant wisps and shreds, baring the ponderous
side and shoulder and the white track that climbed them at what we
considered an absurdly easy gradient.
Griffith Roberts had allotted us but brief time for rest or refreshment
at the Quellyn Arms. As the clock struck seven he had tapped fatefully
at the parlour window, and we had followed him as unresistingly as the
rats followed the Pied Piper. There are, however, rare occasions when it
is agreeable to be coerced into doing what is right. As, at a steady
three and a half miles an hour, we strode after Griffith Roberts, we
began to be conscious of restored enthusiasm and intelligence, and,
impartially, it seemed to us that we should be delightful charges for
him--so affable, so active, so anxious for information. Griffith
Roberts’s back had, however, not quite so social an aspect as might have
been expected, and he maintained his lead of five yards with
uncommunicative firmness. Miss O’Flannigan and I called on each other
for a spurt, and for two or three minutes walked at the rate of four
miles an hour without any appreciable result. It became clear that
Griffith Roberts moved, planet-like, in a certain fixed relation to his
satellites, and that his lead of five yards was an institution not
easily to be set aside. All that we had effected was the raising of the
pace from three and a half miles to four, and the discovery that the
grasshopper, or its equivalent, the hand-satchel, had become a burden.
Griffith Roberts might scorn us as companions, but he should not ignore
his duties as a hireling. We hailed him, and having bestowed the satchel
upon him, Miss O’Flannigan made a determined plunge into conversation.
“I suppose you have often been up Snowdon?” she began, in the strong,
loud voice which is believed to force comprehension on the foreigner.
She had to say it thrice, and Griffith Roberts finally replied, “Oh
yess, one time.”
This was a confession of startling frankness; and Miss O’Flannigan and
I, recalling in a lightning-flash the Mahntooroch tourist’s tales of
incompetent guides, and of a clergyman whose bones had been picked clean
by Snowdon wild cats, regretted that our five-shilling fee had been
squandered upon an amateur.
“And yesterday,” continued Griffith Roberts, after a pause, during which
I suppose he was mustering his English vocabulary, “it wass two times
also I wass on taap.”
“He means he’s been up once already to-day!” expounded Miss O’Flannigan
in a whisper, whose breathlessness was doubtless caused by her surprise.
Griffith Roberts must himself be kin to the wild cats if he could go up
Snowdon twice in the day at a speed of four miles an hour, and I began
to admit to myself that a guide of this description might perhaps be
thrown away upon us. Something infirm, with asthma, we would gladly have
put up with; we should even have overlooked a club-foot. At about this
period the cart-track began to show symptoms of having had enough, and
of wanting to turn back. Fadingly it led us to a wall and a wicket-gate,
such as occurs in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and it and its grassy ruts
were seen no more.
That which replaced it was a simple adaptation of the bed of a stream to
the uses of a road. Dry it certainly was, but whether the bed of a
stream be wet or dry, it is not easy to walk upon. We followed the
example of Griffith Roberts, whose regard for his boots seemed his one
human weakness, and climbed after him through the heather tussocks along
the bank. Single file and silence prevailed severely, and my heart began
to beat in unusual places, such as my throat and ears. What Miss
O’Flannigan’s heart did I could not tell, but each time that I caught
from behind a glimpse of her cheek, it seemed to glow in more royal
contrast to the dull background of the mountain-side. Another wall and
wicket-gate were arrived at; our guide looked round at us with an eye of
cynical expectancy, and hesitated. It was an intimation that we might
rest,--a compassionless concession to the inadequacy whose extent he
knew by experience, and not by sympathy. But sympathy was not what we
craved for. I sat down on a rock, and Miss O’Flannigan extended herself
at full length on some contiguous boulders, and the ‘Arabian Nights’
could not have provided us with any more satiating form of enjoyment.
[Illustration: _Half-way Miss O’Flannigan extended herself at full
length on some contiguous boulders._]
We were already far above Rhyddu; its slate roofs were but grey specks
on the green slant of the valley, the mountains behind it had dwindled
to hills, and other green valleys with dark lakes in their bosoms had
appeared, crowding round the feet of Snowdon. It was a fine view, and
there was plenty of it, and it had for the first minute or two the
peculiarity of moving in earthquake leaps that kept time to the thumping
pulses of my head. It quieted down gradually, and Miss O’Flannigan,
faint yet pursuing, addressed herself again to conversation and Griffith
Roberts.
“Are there many eagles on Snowdon?” she began in a slow shout.
Griffith Roberts was examining the scenery with a still eye of cold
recognition, and said, “Oh yess, indeed,” which by this time we
understood to be the Welsh manner of expressing want of comprehension.
“Eagles! Big birds, you know!” screamed Miss O’Flannigan.
The guide shook his head, and again said, “Oh yess.”
Miss O’Flannigan got up from her boulders.
“Big birds!” she repeated, “with beaks like this”--she put her
forefinger to her forehead, and described thence a brilliant outward
curve--“with big wings”--she flapped her arms violently--“big birds who
steal lambs!”
“Ah,” said Griffith Roberts, “ze _fahxes_! Oh yess, many fahxes.”
Miss O’Flannigan sat down again, and I laughed a great deal.
Having identified the winged and beaked Snowdon foxes, Griffith Roberts
displayed no further intelligence, nor, indeed, did Miss O’Flannigan;
and after another minute’s grace we were crawling again up the dark,
heathery slope that at each step grew steadily steeper. I was full of
determination, but I did not enjoy myself, and I began to have grave
doubts on the subject of getting the “second wind” fabled by the
athletic. Lightly had we persuaded ourselves that days spent during
previous winters in following hounds on foot over the mountain-sides of
West Cork would have been ample preparation for Mont Blanc. The West
Cork fox is a gentleman, and has a consideration for his followers that
was undreamed of by Griffith Roberts. Heather tussock, slippery grass,
loose stones, shelving rock, came in steep succession as unending as the
rungs of Jacob’s ladder, all of them achievements in their turn, each
one rather more so than the last. In fact, Jacob’s ladder, or any other
frankly precipitous thing, where one could have been helped by one’s
hands, would have been preferable to the short cut by means of which
Griffith Roberts abbreviated, and at the same time imparted, the
bitterness of death to the ascent.
The air became perceptibly sharp as we went up, and scraps of cloud
floated near us across the delusive stretches of desolation. Everything
was harmoniously huge: the Eiffel Tower, perched on one of the crags,
might have restored to the eye some sense of the human scale of
measurement; but to think of feet--even of the guide’s, of which it
might truly be said that “a deal of his leg had been turned up when
they were made”--was an idle effort of memory. It was half an hour
before our guide paused again; the short cut, and we with it, had
climbed a moraine of boulders, and rejoined the orthodox path, and a
rest came as an unlooked-for mercy.
“Ferry deep,” said Griffith Roberts, leaving the path and moving
cautiously towards a low grassy rampart, behind which the mist steamed
billowing up.
We knelt with our elbows on the rampart, and saw chaos heaped in grey
vapour below--chaos stirred as if with a ladle, and weltering slow and
mysterious in the perfect quiet of the air. As we watched, some unseen
force from below tore an upward opening through the mist, and our nerves
dived tingling down it to where, at the bottom of all things, a little
leaden lake lay dead and sombre. The cliff on which we were kneeling ran
with a tremendous horse-shoe curve right up to the highest peak of
Snowdon, a point darkly visible in the greyness, and depressingly
remote. Could
[Illustration: _The ascent of Snowdon._]
that infinitesimal dot be the hotel that had held forty people the night
before?
It was Miss O’Flannigan who made the contemptible suggestion that we
should return to Rhyddu and get particulars of the sunrise and the view
from the landlady’s daughter. I repelled the suggestion with appropriate
spirit; but half an hour later, when, with acute neuralgia in the
muscles above my knees, I was reduced to lifting each leg in succession
with my hands, I hardly dared to think of the horse-hair sofa in the
parlour of the Quellyn Arms. As we dragged ourselves up at the pace
relentlessly demanded by Griffith Roberts, all sense of connection with
the world below went from us. It was weeks since we had supped at
Rhyddu, years since the tourist shouted his final warnings after us at
Mahntooroch. We were in another planet, toiling up through some dim,
endless purgatory to ever higher levels in the manner so trimly arranged
by the newer Spiritualism--only that instead of the corresponding moral
elevation, the one emotion in which we were conscious of any progress
was detestation of Griffith Roberts. A sodden twilight, not born of
sunset or moonrise, came down about us, and the tormented vapours
writhed up to meet it from the voids on either hand as we went
delicately along the ridge that leads, like a horse’s crest, from
shoulder to summit of the mountain. The ridge grew more and more
slender, and we picked our aching steps more and more carefully. One of
the Tommies’ saddles would have been almost wide enough to have spanned
it comfortably at one place--the happy Tommies, now doubtless sleeping
like infants in their little beds at Rhyddu; and Miss O’Flannigan has
since admitted her almost uncontrollable desire to traverse it after the
manner of a serpent.
It was half-past nine o’clock when Griffith Roberts led his now
speechless prey up to the tiny plateau whereon were a large cairn of
stones, two men, and two squalid wooden shanties.
“Ze taap,” observed Griffith Roberts, coldly.