CASTLES BY THE SEA
_The rocky forelands--Delightful days--Colour of the sea--Wild-bird
life--Montgomery's Pelican Island--Gulls and daws--We envy birds
their wings--The sense of sublimity--Cormorants--Ravens and
superstition--Gurnard's Head--A first visit--A siesta in a dangerous
place--The hunter's vision._
|IF "dark Bolerium" seemed best on tempestuous midwinter evenings
because of the spirit of the place, the sentiment, it was not so with
the numerous other forelands along this rude coast. I haunted them by
day, and the finer the weather the better I liked them. It is true that
they too have dark associations from which one cannot wholly escape.
The huge masses of rock rising high above the cliff on many of these
promontories have the appearance of gigantic castles by the sea, and
that they served as castles to the ancient inhabitants of the land we
know, as in many instances the primitive earthworks, the trench and
embankment raised to cut them off from the land, remain to this day. Rut
the thought of the "dreadful past" is not so insistent in these castles,
which were my houses by the sea, as at the Land's End promontory, and
would almost vanish in the brilliant sunshine and in view of the wide
expanse of ocean flecked with dazzling foam.
I could hardly imagine a higher pleasure than was mine on many a bright
day in winter and spring, when I had the whole coast pretty well to
myself and spent long hours in rambling from point to point and in
gazing out on the sea from my seat on some rocky pile that crowned one
of the bolder headlands.
I had heard a good deal about the beautiful colour of the sea in these
parts, yet was often surprised at the sight of it. I had seen no such
blues and greens on any other part of the British coast; and no such
purples in the shallower waters within the caves and near the cliffs
where the rocks beneath were overgrown with seaweed. Where these great
purple patches appeared on the pure brilliant green it was veritably a
"wine-purple sea" and looked as if hundreds of hogsheads of claret or
Burgundy had been emptied into it.
But the sea and its colour and the joy of a vast expanse would not have
drawn me so often to the castled forelands nor held me so long but for
the birds that haunted them, seeing that this visible world is to me
but a sad and empty place without wonderful life and the varied forms of
life, which are in harmony with it, and give it a meaning, and a grace
and beauty and splendour not its own. If there be no visible wild life,
then I am like that wandering being or spirit in Montgomery's _Pelican
Island,_ who was alone on the earth before life was, and had no
knowledge or intimation of any intelligence but its own; who roamed over
the seas that tumbled round the globe for thousands and thousands of
years, flying ever from its own loneliness and vainly seeking comfort
and happiness in loving and being the companion of wind and cloud and
wave, and day and night, and sun and moon and stars, and all inanimate
things.
Sitting on a rock on the edge of one of these headlands I could watch
those glorious fishers in the sea, the gannets, by the hour; but this
bird is so great, being now the greatest left to us in Cornwall, or
rather in the seas that wash its shores, and its habits so interesting,
that I must by and by devote an entire chapter to it. Gulls and daws
were the common species, always to be seen floating and wheeling about
the promontory, a black and white company, with sharp yelping voices and
hoarse and laughter-like cries; never wholly free from anxiety when I
was by, never fully convinced of my peaceful intentions. Their habits
are well known: I was not expecting any new discovery about them, it
was simply the delight of seeing them which kept me to the crags. Sturge
Moore says in a poem on "Wings":
That man who wishes not for wings,
Must be the slave of care;
For birds that have them move so well
And softly through the air:
They venture far into the sky,
If not so far as thoughts and angels fly.
Feather from under feather springs;
All open like a fan;
Our eyes upon their beauty dwell
And marvel at the plan
By which things made for use so rare
Are powerful and delicate and fair.
In Calderon's celebrated drama, _Life's a Dream_, when Sigismund laments
his miserable destiny, comparing it with that of the wild creatures
which inhabited the forest where he is kept a prisoner, the contrast
between his lot and theirs seems greatest when he considers the birds,
perfect in form, lovely in colouring, graceful in their motions, and so
wonderful in their faculty of flight; while he, a being with a higher
nature, a greater, more aspiring soul, had no such liberty! We need not
be so unhappy as the Polish prince to envy the birds their freedom. I
watch and am never tired of watching their play. They rise and fall and
circle, and swerve to this side and to that, and are like sportive
flies in a room which has the wind-roughened ocean for a floor, and the
granite cliffs for walls, and the vast void sky for ceiling. The air is
their element: they float on it and are borne by it, abandoned to it,
effortless, even as a ball of thistledown is borne; and then, merely by
willing it, without any putting forth of strength, without a pulsation,
to rise vertically a thousand feet, to dwell again and float upon an
upper current, to survey the world from a greater altitude and rejoice
in a vaster horizon. To fly like that! To do it all unconsciously,
merely by bringing this or that set of ten thousand flight muscles into
play, as we will to rise, to float, to fall, to go this way or that--to
let the wind do it all for us, as it were, while the sight is occupied
in seeing and the mind is wholly free! The balloons and other wretched
machines to which men tie themselves to mount above the earth serve only
to make the birds' lot more enviable. I would fly and live like them in
the air, not merely for the pleasure of the aerial exercise, but also to
experience in larger measure the sense of sublimity.
But this is a delusion, seeing that we possess such a sense only because
we are bound to earth, because vast cliffs overhanging the sea and other
altitudes are in some degree dangerous. At all events Nature says they
are, and we are compelled to bow to her whether we know better or not.
We cannot get over the instinct of the heavy mammalian that goes on the
ground, whose inherited knowledge is that it is death or terrible injury
to fall from a considerable height. Only so long as we are quite safe
is this instinct a pleasurable one; but when we look over the edge of a
sheer precipice, how often, in spite of reason, does the pleasure, the
fearful joy, lose itself in apprehension! Could we know that it would
not hurt us to drop off, purposely or by accident, that the air itself
and a mysterious faculty in us would sustain us, that it would no more
hurt us to be flung from the summit of a cliff than it would hurt a
jackdaw, we should be as the bird is, without a sense of sublimity.
Daw and herring gull, the most abundant species, were but two of several
kinds I was accustomed to see from the headlands, and some of the others
were greater birds--the great black-backed gull, as big a gull as there
is in the world, who had a rock to himself near the Land's End, where
four or five couples could be seen congregated; and the shag, the
cormorant which abounds most on this coast. They are heavy, ungainly
flyers, and have an ugly reptilian look when fishing in the sea, but
seen standing erect and motionless, airing their spread wings, they have
a noble decorative appearance, like carved bird-figures on the wet black
jagged rocks amid the green and white tumultuous sea. There, too, was
the ancient raven, and he was the most irreconcilable of all. At
one spot on the cliff close to where I was staying a solitary raven
invariably turned up to shadow me. He would fly up and down, then
alight on a rock a hundred yards away or more and watch me, occasionally
emitting his deep hoarse human-like croak; but it failed to frighten me
away or put me in a passion, as I was not a native. The Cornishman of
the coast, when he hears that ominous sound, mocks the bird: "Corpse!
corpse! you devil! If I had a gun I'd give you corpse!" It is not
strange the raven views the human form divine with suspicion in these
parts: he is much persecuted by the religious people hereabouts, and
when they cannot climb up or down to his nest on a ledge of the cliff,
they are sometimes able to destroy it by setting fire to a furze bush
and dropping it upon the nest from above.
[Illustration: 0089]
The rocky forelands I haunted were many, but the favourite one was
Gurnard's Head, situated about midway between St. Ives and Land's End.
It is the grandest and one of the most marked features of that bold
coast. Seen from a distance, from one point of view, the promontory
suggests the figure of a Sphinx, the entire body lying out from the
cliff, the waves washing over its huge black outstretched paws and
beating on its breast, its stupendous deformed face composed of piled
masses of granite looking out on the Atlantic. I was often there
afterwards, spending long hours sitting on the rocks of the great head
and shoulders, watching the sea and the birds that live in it; and
later, when April set the tiny bell of the rock pipit tinkling, and the
wheatear, hovering over the crags, dropped his brief delicious warble,
and when the early delicate flowers touched the rocks and turf with
tender, brilliant colour, I was more enamoured than ever of my lonely
castle by the sea. Forced to leave it I could but chew samphire and fill
my pockets with its clustered green finger-like leaves, so as to have
the wild flavour of that enchanting place as long as possible in my
mouth and its perfume about me.
Now I wish only to relate an adventure which befell me on that midwinter
day on the occasion of my first visit, when nothing happened and I saw
nothing particular except with the mind's eye, for this was an adventure
of the spirit.
It was one of those perfect days when the sun shines from an unclouded
sky and the wind that raves without ceasing at last falls asleep and the
whole world sleeps in the warm, brilliant light, albeit with eyes wide
open like a basking snake. I was abroad early, and after wandering over
a good many miles of moor and climbing several hills I arrived at my
destination, tired and very hungry, and the first thing I did was to
lunch heartily on bread and cheese and beer at the inn which you find
at a short distance from the promontory. Naturally after my meal and an
hour's scramble over the rough rocks of the headland I felt disposed
to take a good rest before setting out on my return, and I soon found a
suitable spot--a slab of stone lying with a slope to the sea on the
edge of the crag. It was like a table-top with a rich cloth of grey and
orange-coloured lichen covering it, and was very warm in the sun, and to
make it more comfortable I rolled up my waterproof and put it under my
head, so that lying there at full length I could still look at the sea
and the gulls and gannets passing and repassing before me.
[Illustration: 0091]
In a very few minutes I began to grow drowsy. So much the better, I
thought; for never is sleep more sweet and refreshing to a tired
man than when it comes to him under the wide sky on a warm day. The
sensation of being overcome is itself very delightful, so I did not
resist but welcomed it, albeit quite conscious that it was there in
me and would soon have me in its power. In a vague way I even felt
interested and amused at the process: I could imagine that the spirit
of sleep was there in person, kneeling on the rock behind my head and
making her passes, until the wide sea and wide sky began to seem all of
one colour and the figures of the gulls and gannets to grow vaguer
as they passed before me. Presently I was in that state when the mind
ceases to think, when the place of thought is taken by pictures from
memory, which come, as it were, floating before us to pass away and be
succeeded by others and still others without any connection. They are
not "suggestions of contiguity" nor even of "analogy": they are not
suggestions at all, and come we know not how or why.
Now among these visions or pictures of things seen or heard or read of
there was one described in a poem called "The Hunter's Vision," which
had been lying for years unknown or forgotten in some dusty lumber-room
of the brain. I read it first in my early years, and though it was poor
poetry it powerfully affected me, partly because I was a hunter myself
in those days, although only a boy hunter, and often wandered far into
lonely places, and sometimes when faint with heat and fatigue I rested
and even fell asleep in the shadow of a bush or of my own horse. The
poem relates how the tired hunter at noon sat down to rest on a jutting
crag on the steep mountain side where he had been climbing, and how when
gazing before him the burning heavens and vast plains of earth, scorched
brown by the summer sun, grew misty and dim to his sight, then gradually
changed to a vision of his early home. He knew it well--the old familiar
scene--and those who were assembled there to welcome him; how could he
but know them--his long dead and long lost; they were there gazing at
him and some were coming with outstretched arms towards him, their faces
shining with joy. The very words of the poem came back to me with the
picture:
Forward with fixed and eager eyes
The hunter leaned in act to rise.
But he leaned too far in his eagerness and slipped from the crag and
woke, if he ever woke at all, to know for one brief, bitter moment that
he was lost for ever.
It is a story to be told, whether in verse or prose, in the simplest,
directest manner; for is there a more poignant grief than that of the
lonely, weary man, especially in some solitary place, who remembers his
loneliness, that he is divided by death and change and absence from
his own kin who were dearer than all the world to him? And just as his
thought is the saddest, so the dream of a return to and reunion with the
lost ones is assuredly the most blissful he can know.
Now, on the verge of sleep, seeing that picture pass before me--the
ineffable sadness of the lonely hunter in the wilderness, the vision,
the unutterable joy, and the fearful end, I thought (for thought now
came to me) of my own case--my loneliness, for I, too, was lonely, not
because I was there by myself on that promontory, but because a whole
ocean and the impassable ocean of death separated me from my own people.
Then it came into my mind that I, too, fast falling into oblivion, would
experience that blissful vision; that the hoarse sound of the sea far
below on the rocks would sink and change to the sound of the summer wind
in the old poplars, that I would see the old roof and all those I first
knew and loved on the earth--see them as in the old days "returned in
beauty from the dust," and seeing them should start forward "in act to
rise," and so end my wanderings by falling from that sloping, perilous
rock!
In a moment I became wide awake, for I did not wish to perish by
accident just yet, and, jumping up, I stretched out my arms, stamped
with my feet, and rubbed my eyes vigorously to get rid of my drowsiness;
then sat down quietly and resumed my watch of gulls and gannets.
[Illustration: 0096]