Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
Knock-na-callte-crōin-ōir appears with six different spellings.
Knock-na-callte-ōir
Knockcalltecrore
Knockcalltore
Knockalltecrore
Knockaltecrore
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
THE SNAKE’S PASS.
_Quarto, cloth, gilt edges, price 6s._
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
UNDER THE SUNSET.
Some Opinions of the Press.
“... This particularly is a book which all clever and imaginative
children should read.... The stories all paint a grand moral, are
deeply pathetic, and of absorbing interest.”—_The World._
“....A charming book....”—_Punch._
“....This collection of delicate and forcible allegories.”—_Daily
Telegraph._
“....The style of the book is characterized throughout by remarkable
purity and grace.”—_The Daily News._
“....A really beautiful book, which may be enjoyed, not only by
children, but by their elders.”—_Morning Post._
“....The tales are in the best style of imaginative narrative,
with charming little touches of nature and reference to every-day
things.”—_The Spectator._
“....The book is pervaded by a dreamy beauty of style, which cannot
fail to be fascinating.”—_The Echo._
“....A mystical, supernatural tale, told as it should be told,
hovering airily and luminously in a medium half imaginative, half
ethical....”—_Liverpool Daily Post._
“....It ought to be in the book-case of every pastor, Christian,
teacher, and scholar in the kingdom....”—_Elgin Courant._
“....The tales one and all captivate the young intellect by the charm
of innocence and freshness they possess....”—_Dublin Freeman’s Journal._
“....We have rarely met a more delightful or more thoroughly wholesome
book to place in the hands of children....”—_Cork Constitution._
“....The thoughts of the book are high and pure, and the scenery of it
is finely coloured and attractive....”—_New York Tribune._
“A charming book, full of ingenious, refined, and poetical fancy.”—_The
Australasian._
THE SNAKE’S PASS
BY
BRAM STOKER, M.A.
[Colophon]
LONDON:
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD.
St. Dunstan’s House,
FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET.
1891.
_All rights reserved._
CHISWICK PRESS:—C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT,
CHANCERY LANE.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. A SUDDEN STORM 1
II. THE LOST CROWN OF GOLD 15
III. THE GOMBEEN MAN 36
IV. THE SECRETS OF THE BOG 58
V. ON KNOCKNACAR 83
VI. CONFIDENCES 106
VII. VANISHED 126
VIII. A VISIT TO JOYCE 147
IX. MY NEW PROPERTY 160
X. IN THE CLIFF FIELDS 176
XI. UN MAUVAIS QUART D’HEURE 195
XII. BOG-FISHING AND SCHOOLING 213
XIII. MURDOCK’S WOOING 235
XIV. A TRIP TO PARIS 254
XV. A MIDNIGHT TREASURE HUNT 278
XVI. A GRIM WARNING 297
XVII. THE CATASTROPHE 320
XVIII. THE FULFILMENT 344
THE SNAKE’S PASS.
CHAPTER I.
A SUDDEN STORM.
Between two great mountains of grey and green, as the rock cropped
out between the tufts of emerald verdure, the valley, almost as
narrow as a gorge, ran due west towards the sea. There was just room
for the roadway, half cut in the rock, beside the narrow strip of
dark lake of seemingly unfathomable depth that lay far below between
perpendicular walls of frowning rock. As the valley opened, the land
dipped steeply, and the lake became a foam-fringed torrent, widening
out into pools and miniature lakes as it reached the lower ground.
In the wide terrace-like steps of the shelving mountain there were
occasional glimpses of civilization emerging from the almost primal
desolation which immediately surrounded us—clumps of trees, cottages,
and the irregular outlines of stone-walled fields, with black stacks
of turf for winter firing piled here and there. Far beyond was the
sea—the great Atlantic—with a wildly irregular coast-line studded with
a myriad of clustering rocky islands. A sea of deep dark blue, with the
distant horizon tinged with a line of faint white light, and here and
there, where its margin was visible through the breaks in the rocky
coast, fringed with a line of foam as the waves broke on the rocks or
swept in great rollers over the level expanse of sands.
The sky was a revelation to me, and seemed to almost obliterate
memories of beautiful skies, although I had just come from the south
and had felt the intoxication of the Italian night, where in the deep
blue sky the nightingale’s note seems to hang as though its sound and
the colour were but different expressions of one common feeling.
The whole west was a gorgeous mass of violet and sulphur and gold—great
masses of storm-cloud piling up and up till the very heavens seemed
weighted with a burden too great to bear. Clouds of violet, whose
centres were almost black and whose outer edges were tinged with living
gold; great streaks and piled up clouds of palest yellow deepening into
saffron and flame-colour which seemed to catch the coming sunset and to
throw its radiance back to the eastern sky.
The view was the most beautiful that I had ever seen, and, accustomed
as I had been only to the quiet pastoral beauty of a grass country,
with occasional visits to my Great Aunt’s well-wooded estate in the
South of England, it was no wonder that it arrested my attention and
absorbed my imagination. Even my brief half-a-year’s travel in Europe,
now just concluded, had shown me nothing of the same kind.
Earth, sea and air all evidenced the triumph of nature, and told of her
wild majesty and beauty. The air was still—ominously still. So still
was all, that through the silence, that seemed to hedge us in with a
sense of oppression, came the booming of the distant sea, as the great
Atlantic swell broke in surf on the rocks or stormed the hollow caverns
of the shore.
Even Andy, the driver, was for the nonce awed into comparative silence.
Hitherto, for nearly forty miles of a drive, he had been giving me
his experiences—propounding his views—airing his opinions; in fact he
had been making me acquainted with his store of knowledge touching
the whole district and its people—including their names, histories,
romances, hopes and fears—all that goes to make up the life and
interest of a country-side.
No barber—taking this tradesman to illustrate the popular idea of
loquacity _in excelsis_—is more consistently talkative than an Irish
car-driver to whom has been granted the gift of speech. There is
absolutely no limit to his capability, for every change of surrounding
affords a new theme and brings on the tapis a host of matters requiring
to be set forth.
I was rather glad of Andy’s ‘brilliant flash of silence’ just at
present, for not only did I wish to drink in and absorb the grand and
novel beauty of the scene that opened out before me, but I wanted to
understand as fully as I could some deep thought which it awoke within
me. It may have been merely the grandeur and beauty of the scene—or
perhaps it was the thunder which filled the air that July evening—but
I felt exalted in a strange way, and impressed at the same time with a
new sense of the reality of things. It almost seemed as if through that
opening valley, with the mighty Atlantic beyond and the piling up of
the storm-clouds overhead, I passed into a new and more real life.
Somehow I had of late seemed to myself to be waking up. My foreign
tour had been gradually dissipating my old sleepy ideas, or perhaps
overcoming the negative forces that had hitherto dominated my life; and
now this glorious burst of wild natural beauty—the majesty of nature at
its fullest—seemed to have completed my awakening, and I felt as though
I looked for the first time with open eyes on the beauty and reality of
the world.
Hitherto my life had been but an inert one, and I was younger in many
ways and more deficient in knowledge of the world in all ways than
other young men of my own age. I had stepped but lately from boyhood,
with all boyhood’s surroundings, into manhood, and as yet I was hardly
at ease in my new position.
For the first time in my life I had had a holiday—a real holiday, as
one can take it who can choose his own way of amusing himself.
I had been brought up in an exceedingly quiet way with an old clergyman
and his wife in the west of England, and except my fellow pupils,
of whom there was never at any time more than one other, I had had
little companionship. Altogether I knew very few people. I was the
ward of a Great Aunt, who was wealthy and eccentric and of a sternly
uncompromising disposition. When my father and mother were lost at
sea, leaving me, an only child, quite unprovided for, she undertook
to pay for my schooling and to start me in a profession if I should
show sufficient aptitude for any. My father had been pretty well cut
off by his family on account of his marriage with what they considered
his inferior, and times had been, I was always told, pretty hard for
them both. I was only a very small boy when they were lost in a fog
when crossing the Channel; and the blank that their loss caused me
made me, I dare say, seem even a duller boy than I was. As I did not
get into much trouble and did not exhibit any special restlessness
of disposition, my Great Aunt took it, I suppose, for granted that I
was very well off where I was; and when, through growing years, the
fiction of my being a schoolboy could be no longer supported, the old
clergyman was called “guardian” instead of “tutor,” and I passed with
him the years that young men of the better class usually spend in
College life. The nominal change of position made little difference to
me, except that I was taught to ride and shoot, and was generally given
the rudiments of an education which was to fit me for being a country
gentleman. I dare say that my tutor had some secret understanding with
my Great Aunt, but he never gave me any hint whatever of her feelings
towards me. A part of my holidays each year was spent in her place, a
beautiful country seat. Here I was always treated by the old lady with
rigid severity but with the best of good manners, and by the servants
with affection as well as respect. There were a host of cousins, both
male and female, who came to the house; but I can honestly say that by
not one of them was I ever treated with cordiality. It may have been
my fault, or the misfortune of my shyness; but I never met one of them
without being made to feel that I was an “outsider.”
I can understand now the cause of this treatment as arising from their
suspicions when I remember that the old lady, who had been so severe
with me all my life, sent for me when she lay on her deathbed, and,
taking my hand in hers and holding it tight, said, between her gasps:—
“Arthur, I hope I have not done wrong, but I have reared you so that
the world may for you have good as well as bad—happiness as well as
unhappiness; that you may find many pleasures where you thought there
were but few. Your youth, I know, my dear boy, has not been a happy
one; but it was because I, who loved your dear father as if he had been
my own son—and from whom I unhappily allowed myself to be estranged
until it was too late—wanted you to have a good and happy manhood.”
She did not say any more, but closed her eyes and still held my hand.
I feared to take it away lest I should disturb her; but presently the
clasp seemed to relax, and I found that she was dead.
I had never seen a dead person, much less anyone die, and the event
made a great impression on me. But youth is elastic, and the old lady
had never been much in my heart.
When the will was read, it was found that I had been left heir to all
her property, and that I would be called upon to take a place among the
magnates of the county. I could not fall at once into the position and,
as I was of a shy nature, resolved to spend at least a few months in
travel. This I did, and when I had returned, after a six months’ tour,
I accepted the cordial invitation of some friends, made on my travels,
to pay them a visit at their place in the County of Clare.
As my time was my own, and as I had a week or two to spare, I had
determined to improve my knowledge of Irish affairs by making a detour
through some of the counties in the west on my way to Clare.
By this time I was just beginning to realize that life has many
pleasures. Each day a new world of interest seemed to open before me.
The experiment of my Great Aunt might yet be crowned with success.
And now the consciousness of the change in myself had come home to
me—come with the unexpected suddenness of the first streak of the dawn
through the morning mists. The moment was to be to me a notable one;
and as I wished to remember it to the full, I tried to take in all the
scene where such a revelation first dawned upon me. I had fixed in my
mind, as the central point for my memory to rest on, a promontory right
under the direct line of the sun, when I was interrupted by a remark
made, not to me but seemingly to the universe in general:—
“Musha! but it’s comin’ quick.”
“What is coming?” I asked.
“The shtorm! Don’t ye see the way thim clouds is dhriftin’? Faix! but
it’s fine times the ducks’ll be afther havin’ before many minutes is
past.”
I did not heed his words much, for my thoughts were intent on the
scene. We were rapidly descending the valley, and, as we got lower, the
promontory seemed to take bolder shape, and was beginning to stand out
as a round-topped hill of somewhat noble proportions.
“Tell me, Andy,” I said, “what do they call the hill beyond?”
“The hill beyant there is it? Well, now, they call the place
Shleenanaher.”
“Then that is Shleenanaher mountain?”
“Begor it’s not. The mountain is called Knockcalltecrore. It’s Irish.”
“And what does it mean?”
“Faix, I believe it’s a short name for the Hill iv the Lost Goolden
Crown.”
“And what is Shleenanaher, Andy?”
“Throth, it’s a bit iv a gap in the rocks beyant that they call
Shleenanaher.”
“And what does that mean? It is Irish, I suppose?”
“Thrue for ye! Irish it is, an’ it manes ‘The Shnake’s Pass.’”
“Indeed! And can you tell me why it is so called?”
“Begor, there’s a power iv raysons guv for callin’ it that. Wait till
we get Jerry Scanlan or Bat Moynahan, beyant in Carnaclif! Sure they
knows every laygend and shtory in the bar’ny, an’ll tell them all, av
ye like. Whew! Musha! here it comes.”
Surely enough it did come. The storm seemed to sweep through the valley
in a single instant—the stillness changed to a roar, the air became
dark with the clouds of drifting rain. It was like the bursting of a
waterspout in volume, and came so quickly that I was drenched to the
skin before I could throw my mackintosh round me. The mare seemed
frightened at first, but Andy held her in with a steady hand and with
comforting words, and after the first rush of the tempest she went on
as calmly and steadily as hitherto, only shrinking a little at the
lightning and the thunder.
The grandeur of that storm was something to remember. The lightning
came in brilliant sheets that seemed to cleave the sky, and threw weird
lights amongst the hills, now strange with black sweeping shadows. The
thunder broke with startling violence right over our heads, and flapped
and buffeted from hillside to hillside, rolling and reverberating away
into the distance, its farther voices being lost in the crash of each
succeeding peal.
On we went, through the driving storm, faster and faster; but the storm
abated not a jot. Andy was too much occupied with his work to speak,
and as for me it took all my time to keep on the rocking and swaying
car, and to hold my hat and mackintosh so as to shield myself, as
well as I could, from the pelting storm. Andy seemed to be above all
considerations of personal comfort. He turned up his coat collar, that
was all; and soon he was as shiny as my own waterproof rug. Indeed,
altogether, he seemed quite as well off as I was, or even better,
for we were both as wet as we could be, and whilst I was painfully
endeavouring to keep off the rain he was free from all responsibility
and anxiety of endeavour whatever.
At length, as we entered on a long straight stretch of level road, he
turned to me and said:—
“Yer ’an’r it’s no kind iv use dhrivin’ like this all the way to
Carnaclif. This shtorm’ll go on for hours. I know thim well up in these
mountains, wid’ a nor’-aist wind blowin’. Wouldn’t it be betther for us
to get shelther for a bit?”
“Of course it would,” said I. “Try it at once! Where can you go?”
“There’s a place nigh at hand, yer ’an’r, the Widdy Kelligan’s
sheebeen, at the cross-roads of Glennashaughlin. It’s quite contagious.
Gee-up! ye ould corncrake! hurry up to Widdy Kelligan’s.”
It seemed almost as if the mare understood him and shared his wishes,
for she started with increased speed down a laneway that opened out a
little on our left. In a few minutes we reached the cross-roads, and
also the sheebeen of Widow Kelligan, a low whitewashed thatched house,
in a deep hollow between high banks in the south-western corner of the
cross. Andy jumped down and hurried to the door.
“Here’s a sthrange gintleman, Widdy. Take care iv him,” he called out,
as I entered.
Before I had succeeded in closing the door behind me he was
unharnessing the mare, preparatory to placing her in the lean-to
stable, built behind the house against the high bank.
Already the storm seemed to have sent quite an assemblage to Mrs.
Kelligan’s hospitable shelter. A great fire of turf roared up the
chimney, and round it stood, and sat, and lay a steaming mass of nearly
a dozen people, men and women. The room was a large one, and the
inglenook so roomy that nearly all those present found a place in it.
The roof was black, rafters and thatch alike; quite a number of cocks
and hens found shelter in the rafters at the end of the room. Over the
fire was a large pot, suspended on a wire, and there was a savoury and
inexpressibly appetizing smell of marked volume throughout the room of
roasted herrings and whisky punch.
As I came in all rose up, and I found myself placed in a warm seat
close to the fire, whilst various salutations of welcome buzzed all
around me. The warmth was most grateful, and I was trying to convey my
thanks for the shelter and the welcome, and feeling very awkward over
it, when, with a “God save all here!” Andy entered the room through the
back door.
He was evidently a popular favourite, for there was a perfect rain of
hearty expressions to him. He, too, was placed close to the fire, and a
steaming jorum of punch placed in his hands—a similar one to that which
had been already placed in my own. Andy lost no time in sampling that
punch. Neither did I; and I can honestly say that if he enjoyed his
more than I did mine he must have had a very happy few minutes. He lost
no time in making himself and all the rest comfortable.
“Hurroo!” said he. “Musha! but we’re just in time. Mother, is the
herrins done? Up with the creel, and turn out the pitaties; they’re
done, or me senses desaves me. Yer ’an’r, we’re in the hoight iv good
luck! Herrins, it is, and it might have been only pitaties an’ point.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“Oh, that is whin there is only wan herrin’ amongst a crowd—too little
to give aich a taste, and so they put it in the middle and point the
pitaties at it to give them a flaviour.”
All lent a hand with the preparation of supper. A great potato basket,
which would hold some two hundredweight, was turned bottom up—the pot
was taken off the fire, and the contents turned out on it in a great
steaming mass of potatoes. A handful of coarse salt was taken from a
box and put on one side of the basket, and another on the other side.
The herrings were cut in pieces, and a piece given to each.—The dinner
was served.
There were no plates, no knives, forks or spoons—no ceremony—no
precedence—nor was there any heartburning, jealousy or greed. A
happier meal I never took a part in—nor did I ever enjoy food more.
Such as it was it was perfect. The potatoes were fine and cooked to
perfection; we took them in our fingers, peeled them how we could,
dipped them in the salt—and ate till we were satisfied.
During the meal several more strangers dropped in and all reported the
storm as showing no signs of abating. Indeed, little such assurance was
wanting, for the fierce lash of the rain and the howling of the storm
as it beat on the face of the house, told the tale well enough for the
meanest comprehension.
When dinner was over and the basket removed, we drew around the fire
again—pipes were lit—a great steaming jug of punch made its appearance,
and conversation became general. Of course, as a stranger, I came in
for a good share of attention.
Andy helped to make things interesting for me, and his statement, made
by my request, that I hoped to be allowed to provide the punch for the
evening, even increased his popularity, whilst it established mine.
After calling attention to several matters which evoked local stories
and jokes and anecdotes, he remarked:—
“His ’an’r was axin’ me just afore the shtorm kem on as to why the
Shleenanaher was called so. I tould him that none could tell him like
Jerry Scanlan or Bat Moynahan, an’ here is the both of them, sure
enough. Now, boys, won’t ye oblige the sthrange gintleman an tell him
what yez know iv the shtories anent the hill?”
“Wid all the plisure in life,” said Jerry Scanlan, a tall man of middle
age, with a long, thin, clean shaven face, a humorous eye, and a shirt
collar whose points in front came up almost to his eyes, whilst the
back part disappeared into the depths of his frieze coat collar behind.
“Begor yer ’an’r I’ll tell ye all I iver heerd. Sure there’s a laygend,
and there’s a shtory—musha! but there’s a wheen o’ both laygends and
shtories—but there’s wan laygend beyant all—Here! Mother Kelligan,
fill up me glass, fur sorra one o’ me is a good dhry shpaker—Tell me,
now, sor, do they allow punch to the Mimbers iv Parlymint whin they’re
spakin’?” I shook my head.
“Musha! thin, but its meself they’ll niver git as a mimber till they
alther that law. Thank ye, Mrs. Kelligan, this is just my shtyle. But
now for the laygend that they tell of Shleenanaher:—”