II.The BullYesterday at one o’clock in the afternoon.About this time I was sitting on a damp sharp stone, looking about me and seeing nothing. I had walked for a long while and gotten nowhere. For there was persistent mist still in the uplands, and I had strayed into the thick of it and was hopelessly befogged, hungry, and a trifle anxious about the probable duration of my helplessness.My thoughts just then were largely retrospect. I had set out from—well, I have forgotten the spelling of the place, but it’s no matter.¹The names in Wales have fascinating orthography and, to one not adept, rather unobvious pronunciations. I had set out from this place which must be anonymous in order to search for something that had not been seen for several centuries, the private oratory or shrine or cell of St. Tarw, a rather unbelievable name, or, in the American idiom, a bully one, whichever way you look at it, for a Welsh saint. It’s one that anybody can say without arduous practice. The saint himself was a rather incredible individual. It happens that I know something of saints, they being a particular hobby of mine, and yet I was uncertain at that moment whether St. Tarw was a man or was a whisper on the faëry breeze of legend. But as it happened, in the course of researches in London, I found hints that, man or whisper, he had left or there had been left for him in what to-day is Radnorshire, a monument of stone in which he did his devotions, or had been believed to do them.It was in the Book of Sylvan Armitage that I ran across the clue. The Book is a chronicle of the diversions of a sixteenth-century gentleman, and mine is a genuine first printing of 1598. It contains an allusion which I am confident refers to a performance of the “Merchant of Venice” at Blackfriars, which allusion would stagger the erudite who prate glibly of the “order of Shakespeare’s plays,” if they gave it a thought. But much more interesting to me is the reference to the devotional seat of St. Tarw.Sylvan Armitage, progressing through Wales in 1594, visited the house of an Englishman residing in that lately war-distraught country. On one of their “long gaddynges and peregrinations afoot,” for riding was not feasible among these broken mountains, they came upon a humble structure of “hewn stones, much dishevelled and marvellously coated by moss,” says Sylvan Armitage. He adds that the “cella” had been built under a bank, and that this very fact was then threatening its existence. Small chance of success then for me.So yesterday while I sat on my ungrateful seat with the mist wreathing about me, I half-abandoned the search before it had properly begun. For the dozenth time I took out the letter I had received the day before from my dear old friends, Jack and Mary Bonnet of Bristol. Their barque, recently returned from Australia, will leave the dry-dock in a day or so and take the sea again from Bristol next Monday. Would I join them in a “terror and pleasure” trip somewhere around Africa or the Scandinavian coast? Of course, I reflected, it would take me fully a week to wind up my affairs in preparation for such an ocean journey. I must drop the saint business. I looked at the fog, felt sick of saints, and almost decided I would go.I had let down my burden, a soldier’s knapsack and a fairly well-loaded one, to the grass beside my feet. I decided to eat my luncheon. I tucked the Bonnet letter away and took out my beef-sandwiches, milk in a thermos-flask, and walnut meats, a substantial meal in small compass. My long morning’s tramp on the uplands had made me very hungry. It was not only the tramp, but the slipping and falling and crawling, for the yellow grass was long and trodden flat by cattle, making the side slopes very toilsome, and, in the mist, risky, for you sometimes did not know whether you might fall ten feet or a thousand.I had been exploring Aidenn Forest, but I had early left the lowland area of trees. The uplands, miles of broad-topped hills in a range of horseshoe shape, were given over largely to cattle-grazing. There were long pastures of rolling and heaving slopes, like the gently-breathing ocean of midsummer. My meal over, I unfolded my contour-map of the Geographical Institute and pondered over it, trying by recollection and inference to determine just where I was. But I had not the remotest clue to slope or distance. I might have been at one extreme of the horseshoe or the other, or any spot betwixt. It was two o’clock.Neither my literary nor my philosophic studies, which are supposed to chasten the mind to resignation, comforted my thoughts in the least, but suddenly I was aware of a change in the atmosphere. The mist seemed suffused with silver, then with gold. Soon the phantoms of fog had retracted far on either side in lofty, shifting, sun-rayed banks, and the air became clear about me. But I remained in doubt about my position.For the mist had cleared only to the shoulders of the hills, and left the rolling heights a-sparkle like early morning; but the valleys and the great outer hills of Wales, girding Aidenn Forest, were blind to me. From the declining sun I could tell which way was west, but knowledge of that direction alone was no use. Was I on the western curve of the horseshoe or the opposite? Nor did it help to recall that my ascent of Aidenn Forest had been the north, where the two curves meet, the open part of the horseshoe being to the south. I was as confused as ever.At least I could walk freely, keep to the smooth uplands without peril of falling down some gap or gully. I strode on in the grandeur of the sun, the mighty halo of mist extending a mile all around, a more gorgeous glory than bully St. Tarw or any other of the blessed men of earth ever wore. The towering wall of mist was warm with the light that occasionally melted through and dazzled the ragged hill-slope underneath; the cloud-caps wreathed and spired like golden smoke, and I went on proudly and merrily in my enormous prison. I felt like a god, exultant. I reached out my hands and lifted my face to the heavens. My loneliness apotheosized me. I laughed. I shouted,ebriatus. Never before have I experienced that sense of space and power, that vigour beyond muscle and sense, that reckless rapture!Nearly an hour passed. Grasshoppers leapt to either side of my path with little soft comings to earth; the sound was like the first drops of rain. Black-game and grouse twice or thrice scampered and scudded from my feet, and suddenly out of the fog which had closed in on my left swept a great bevy of unknown birds with a thunder of wings. I judged then that I was not far from the brink of a steep pitch on the edge of the uplands. The mist which had glorified me was beginning to hem me more straitly and I bore away to the right, being wary of pitfalls.Gradually, while I moved up and down the placid slopes and crossed wide expanses wherein I was an ephemeral topic for cows and shambling tattered ponies, an inexpressible sense told me precisely where I was on the lofty horseshoe of Aidenn Forest. Fragmentary half-submerged memories of my contour-map, of the dip of the slopes where I trod, of instructions proffered me by scraggy, wry-spoken yokels (with obligato of a pig screaming at a gate), of the arc described by the sun, of the bated breath of the breeze—all these united to fix my certainty. My feet just at that moment were ascending on the flattened grass of a small summit; Mynydd Tarw I knew it was, whose highest spot was considerably above two thousand feet. Mynydd Tarw, on the verge of the horseshoe’s eastern bend, was where I had concluded the oratory of St. Tarw was most likely to be found.I explored the hill and all about, but unfortunately it was creased and gorged by channels, tiny valleys. Trees and rank underbrush grew in these troughs, increasing in thickness down the declivity, and the banners of mist were tangled in the trees. The trunks were clammy, the fallen leaves dank, the earth too soft for good footing. My shoes sank over the ankles in leaves and loam. Bereft of my halo, I had little joy. And after an hour of climbing up and down, groping and grasping, of peering for traces of foundered or buried walls, I realized, with a shock that sickened me, that I was out of my reckoning in the lower fog again, and that I could not trace my way back. I could not even tell in which direction Mynydd Tarw lay.I was almost frantic. It was now past mid-afternoon, less than two hours before sunset, and had I known the bee-line to my hostel in the difficultly-pronounced village, I could not have reached it before darkness had long covered Wales.The valleys, immersed in mist below me, were a wilderness, and broad of expanse; once on the uplands again, however, I believed I could find Mynydd Tarw, and thence strike on the true way home. As for exploring the Vale of Aidenn Water itself, I had no reason to believe that man had ever built a habitation there. To regain the uplands was my anxious wish; but not even this was an easy feat. I was weary already, from physical exertion and strain of mind, but it should have been easy to keep my course upward, however slow my progress. Yet the yellow grass and the heather was flat and long, and whether still dry or drenched with fog, slippery and maddening to ascend upon. Moreover, I would find myself in channels torn and scarred by water, now streamless in summer season, but choked with thorny creepers and thick spear-like stalks in malign barriers.But I persevered, although I found the mist had grown thicker above as day declined. Presently I recognized the sweet smell of new-cut hay in fields above me, and soon afterward kneeing myself to the sharp edge of a parapet of rock, I rejoiced to see the smoky round of the sun. There was a line of wild apple-trees along the rim of the uplands at this point. The crooked branches and straggling shoots of them made them all like black hats of witches wreathed with tattered ribbons, save for the one directly before me, through whose limbs half-despoiled of leaves the sun sent a wicked leering shine that made me singularly uneasy.I had come into a region thickly populated with cattle. There were a score on the hillock to my right, and when I had gone thence over a bristling wire fence I found a hundred more filling the twilight plain with their shadows. There was not a sound from the widespread throng, but I had a feeling that each dispassionate bovine head was turned toward me, and I advanced with something of the shyness of a child crossing a drawing-room where he feels every eye cold and critical. A little the uncanny sense gripped me that I had happened upon some land undiscovered by Gulliver, where cows were people, and very superior people. There had been so few of them visible all day, now so many; I could not rid myself of the notion that I was an intruder. (Just then the reasonable explanation did not occur to me that atmospheric conditions had much to do with the migrations of the beasts from place to place on the horseshoe.)Across an unkempt stone wall which I whipped up laggard muscles to leap—I was going rapidly—sweet-fleshed sheep, of orthodox tan, the cross of Welsh mountain breed with black-faced “Shrops,” were nudging one another in an anxious mass. I looked toward the sinking sun and discerned a black rift perhaps a mile distant: the Vale of Aidenn Water, with the prominences of the western arm of the horseshoe, Great Rhos, Esgair Nantau, and Vron Hill, nosing up to the sky even another mile beyond.Then down on me came dark ruin with a rush.I was aware appallingly of some vaster shadow blotting out the gorgeous disc which lay on the western hills, a shadow blatant, militant, perilous. A sting of fear in my breast goaded me to instant flight; I was plunging away all in an instant, every part of me in panic, without realization of what it was from which I fled.Ten seconds of rushing flight, a frantic glance behind me, and my returning faculties told me what that fell form was, horned and pawed, with cavorting death-like head and eyes evilly a-gleam, the shape rampaging, the feet tremendous on the shaken ground. I knew too well those signs of the Hereford breed, the twining horns and the white face so startlingly suggestive of the skull beneath. It was a bull, the hugest bull on earth, insane with murderous passion.Terror winged me in that course for life. Once I stumbled and rolled down a slope littered with small stones, but my speed was scarcely lessened. I must have regained my feet, for I drove myself through a patch of merciless nettles and awful thorns, yet was hardly sensible of being torn and stabbed. Not until long afterward did I feel the heavy bruise, like the mark of an iron palm, which my hard and firmly fastened pack had printed between my shoulder-blades, saving me a worse blow. Now my due training for the mile at the University, not so very long ago, and the desire for strict regimen then instilled in me, and my frequent jaunts on foot through broad countrysides, were in good stead. In the beginning of this breathless chase, I had had a wide margin of advantage, and now I was all but holding my own, when ahead of me I saw deliverance. For I had turned westward in flight across the leveller hilltop, and the brink of the Vale of Aidenn Water, with its slope looking a precipice all around and its hollow now a mammoth bowl of impenetrable fog, was less than a furlong away ahead.Risk had to be taken to make safety sure. I chanced another ugly fall by a quick twist of my neck. I led by twenty yards. Gradually, therefore, I diminished my pace so that at the verge of the cliff only ten feet might separate us—and just before I would have leaped out into the turbid air, I used every remaining particle of strength in a sidewise lunge downward to the grass, letting the bull flash with unconquerable momentum over the edge.But I myself was a vessel of momentum and could not by any frantic clutching and clawing soever keep myself from sliding over the brink and slipping from an abrupt decline to a sharper one, whence with horrified mind I felt myself go over the verge of nothingness! While I fell backward with eyes staring to the lurid sky, I saw the hulk of the bull shoot out from the summit of the cliff. Never have I seen a thing as black as the mass of the beast, with limbs winnowing in the air and head and vast nose outstretched. The black body would have crushed me to pulp had I not flung myself aside a moment before. I know that I must have been still in the air when the bull struck a thrust-out ledge far below the cliff—I had caught just an instant’s glare of one eye, demoniac and hopeless—then the animal went bellowing and thumping down through the fog into unseen depths until one final crash and cry ended sound in ghastly silence.¹ Actually Llanbadarnfynydd, nine miles away, where I had put up before. My landlord had given me a lift half-way down in his Morris. (Author’s note.)↩︎
Yesterday at one o’clock in the afternoon.
About this time I was sitting on a damp sharp stone, looking about me and seeing nothing. I had walked for a long while and gotten nowhere. For there was persistent mist still in the uplands, and I had strayed into the thick of it and was hopelessly befogged, hungry, and a trifle anxious about the probable duration of my helplessness.
My thoughts just then were largely retrospect. I had set out from—well, I have forgotten the spelling of the place, but it’s no matter.¹The names in Wales have fascinating orthography and, to one not adept, rather unobvious pronunciations. I had set out from this place which must be anonymous in order to search for something that had not been seen for several centuries, the private oratory or shrine or cell of St. Tarw, a rather unbelievable name, or, in the American idiom, a bully one, whichever way you look at it, for a Welsh saint. It’s one that anybody can say without arduous practice. The saint himself was a rather incredible individual. It happens that I know something of saints, they being a particular hobby of mine, and yet I was uncertain at that moment whether St. Tarw was a man or was a whisper on the faëry breeze of legend. But as it happened, in the course of researches in London, I found hints that, man or whisper, he had left or there had been left for him in what to-day is Radnorshire, a monument of stone in which he did his devotions, or had been believed to do them.
It was in the Book of Sylvan Armitage that I ran across the clue. The Book is a chronicle of the diversions of a sixteenth-century gentleman, and mine is a genuine first printing of 1598. It contains an allusion which I am confident refers to a performance of the “Merchant of Venice” at Blackfriars, which allusion would stagger the erudite who prate glibly of the “order of Shakespeare’s plays,” if they gave it a thought. But much more interesting to me is the reference to the devotional seat of St. Tarw.
Sylvan Armitage, progressing through Wales in 1594, visited the house of an Englishman residing in that lately war-distraught country. On one of their “long gaddynges and peregrinations afoot,” for riding was not feasible among these broken mountains, they came upon a humble structure of “hewn stones, much dishevelled and marvellously coated by moss,” says Sylvan Armitage. He adds that the “cella” had been built under a bank, and that this very fact was then threatening its existence. Small chance of success then for me.
So yesterday while I sat on my ungrateful seat with the mist wreathing about me, I half-abandoned the search before it had properly begun. For the dozenth time I took out the letter I had received the day before from my dear old friends, Jack and Mary Bonnet of Bristol. Their barque, recently returned from Australia, will leave the dry-dock in a day or so and take the sea again from Bristol next Monday. Would I join them in a “terror and pleasure” trip somewhere around Africa or the Scandinavian coast? Of course, I reflected, it would take me fully a week to wind up my affairs in preparation for such an ocean journey. I must drop the saint business. I looked at the fog, felt sick of saints, and almost decided I would go.
I had let down my burden, a soldier’s knapsack and a fairly well-loaded one, to the grass beside my feet. I decided to eat my luncheon. I tucked the Bonnet letter away and took out my beef-sandwiches, milk in a thermos-flask, and walnut meats, a substantial meal in small compass. My long morning’s tramp on the uplands had made me very hungry. It was not only the tramp, but the slipping and falling and crawling, for the yellow grass was long and trodden flat by cattle, making the side slopes very toilsome, and, in the mist, risky, for you sometimes did not know whether you might fall ten feet or a thousand.
I had been exploring Aidenn Forest, but I had early left the lowland area of trees. The uplands, miles of broad-topped hills in a range of horseshoe shape, were given over largely to cattle-grazing. There were long pastures of rolling and heaving slopes, like the gently-breathing ocean of midsummer. My meal over, I unfolded my contour-map of the Geographical Institute and pondered over it, trying by recollection and inference to determine just where I was. But I had not the remotest clue to slope or distance. I might have been at one extreme of the horseshoe or the other, or any spot betwixt. It was two o’clock.
Neither my literary nor my philosophic studies, which are supposed to chasten the mind to resignation, comforted my thoughts in the least, but suddenly I was aware of a change in the atmosphere. The mist seemed suffused with silver, then with gold. Soon the phantoms of fog had retracted far on either side in lofty, shifting, sun-rayed banks, and the air became clear about me. But I remained in doubt about my position.
For the mist had cleared only to the shoulders of the hills, and left the rolling heights a-sparkle like early morning; but the valleys and the great outer hills of Wales, girding Aidenn Forest, were blind to me. From the declining sun I could tell which way was west, but knowledge of that direction alone was no use. Was I on the western curve of the horseshoe or the opposite? Nor did it help to recall that my ascent of Aidenn Forest had been the north, where the two curves meet, the open part of the horseshoe being to the south. I was as confused as ever.
At least I could walk freely, keep to the smooth uplands without peril of falling down some gap or gully. I strode on in the grandeur of the sun, the mighty halo of mist extending a mile all around, a more gorgeous glory than bully St. Tarw or any other of the blessed men of earth ever wore. The towering wall of mist was warm with the light that occasionally melted through and dazzled the ragged hill-slope underneath; the cloud-caps wreathed and spired like golden smoke, and I went on proudly and merrily in my enormous prison. I felt like a god, exultant. I reached out my hands and lifted my face to the heavens. My loneliness apotheosized me. I laughed. I shouted,ebriatus. Never before have I experienced that sense of space and power, that vigour beyond muscle and sense, that reckless rapture!
Nearly an hour passed. Grasshoppers leapt to either side of my path with little soft comings to earth; the sound was like the first drops of rain. Black-game and grouse twice or thrice scampered and scudded from my feet, and suddenly out of the fog which had closed in on my left swept a great bevy of unknown birds with a thunder of wings. I judged then that I was not far from the brink of a steep pitch on the edge of the uplands. The mist which had glorified me was beginning to hem me more straitly and I bore away to the right, being wary of pitfalls.
Gradually, while I moved up and down the placid slopes and crossed wide expanses wherein I was an ephemeral topic for cows and shambling tattered ponies, an inexpressible sense told me precisely where I was on the lofty horseshoe of Aidenn Forest. Fragmentary half-submerged memories of my contour-map, of the dip of the slopes where I trod, of instructions proffered me by scraggy, wry-spoken yokels (with obligato of a pig screaming at a gate), of the arc described by the sun, of the bated breath of the breeze—all these united to fix my certainty. My feet just at that moment were ascending on the flattened grass of a small summit; Mynydd Tarw I knew it was, whose highest spot was considerably above two thousand feet. Mynydd Tarw, on the verge of the horseshoe’s eastern bend, was where I had concluded the oratory of St. Tarw was most likely to be found.
I explored the hill and all about, but unfortunately it was creased and gorged by channels, tiny valleys. Trees and rank underbrush grew in these troughs, increasing in thickness down the declivity, and the banners of mist were tangled in the trees. The trunks were clammy, the fallen leaves dank, the earth too soft for good footing. My shoes sank over the ankles in leaves and loam. Bereft of my halo, I had little joy. And after an hour of climbing up and down, groping and grasping, of peering for traces of foundered or buried walls, I realized, with a shock that sickened me, that I was out of my reckoning in the lower fog again, and that I could not trace my way back. I could not even tell in which direction Mynydd Tarw lay.
I was almost frantic. It was now past mid-afternoon, less than two hours before sunset, and had I known the bee-line to my hostel in the difficultly-pronounced village, I could not have reached it before darkness had long covered Wales.
The valleys, immersed in mist below me, were a wilderness, and broad of expanse; once on the uplands again, however, I believed I could find Mynydd Tarw, and thence strike on the true way home. As for exploring the Vale of Aidenn Water itself, I had no reason to believe that man had ever built a habitation there. To regain the uplands was my anxious wish; but not even this was an easy feat. I was weary already, from physical exertion and strain of mind, but it should have been easy to keep my course upward, however slow my progress. Yet the yellow grass and the heather was flat and long, and whether still dry or drenched with fog, slippery and maddening to ascend upon. Moreover, I would find myself in channels torn and scarred by water, now streamless in summer season, but choked with thorny creepers and thick spear-like stalks in malign barriers.
But I persevered, although I found the mist had grown thicker above as day declined. Presently I recognized the sweet smell of new-cut hay in fields above me, and soon afterward kneeing myself to the sharp edge of a parapet of rock, I rejoiced to see the smoky round of the sun. There was a line of wild apple-trees along the rim of the uplands at this point. The crooked branches and straggling shoots of them made them all like black hats of witches wreathed with tattered ribbons, save for the one directly before me, through whose limbs half-despoiled of leaves the sun sent a wicked leering shine that made me singularly uneasy.
I had come into a region thickly populated with cattle. There were a score on the hillock to my right, and when I had gone thence over a bristling wire fence I found a hundred more filling the twilight plain with their shadows. There was not a sound from the widespread throng, but I had a feeling that each dispassionate bovine head was turned toward me, and I advanced with something of the shyness of a child crossing a drawing-room where he feels every eye cold and critical. A little the uncanny sense gripped me that I had happened upon some land undiscovered by Gulliver, where cows were people, and very superior people. There had been so few of them visible all day, now so many; I could not rid myself of the notion that I was an intruder. (Just then the reasonable explanation did not occur to me that atmospheric conditions had much to do with the migrations of the beasts from place to place on the horseshoe.)
Across an unkempt stone wall which I whipped up laggard muscles to leap—I was going rapidly—sweet-fleshed sheep, of orthodox tan, the cross of Welsh mountain breed with black-faced “Shrops,” were nudging one another in an anxious mass. I looked toward the sinking sun and discerned a black rift perhaps a mile distant: the Vale of Aidenn Water, with the prominences of the western arm of the horseshoe, Great Rhos, Esgair Nantau, and Vron Hill, nosing up to the sky even another mile beyond.
Then down on me came dark ruin with a rush.
I was aware appallingly of some vaster shadow blotting out the gorgeous disc which lay on the western hills, a shadow blatant, militant, perilous. A sting of fear in my breast goaded me to instant flight; I was plunging away all in an instant, every part of me in panic, without realization of what it was from which I fled.
Ten seconds of rushing flight, a frantic glance behind me, and my returning faculties told me what that fell form was, horned and pawed, with cavorting death-like head and eyes evilly a-gleam, the shape rampaging, the feet tremendous on the shaken ground. I knew too well those signs of the Hereford breed, the twining horns and the white face so startlingly suggestive of the skull beneath. It was a bull, the hugest bull on earth, insane with murderous passion.
Terror winged me in that course for life. Once I stumbled and rolled down a slope littered with small stones, but my speed was scarcely lessened. I must have regained my feet, for I drove myself through a patch of merciless nettles and awful thorns, yet was hardly sensible of being torn and stabbed. Not until long afterward did I feel the heavy bruise, like the mark of an iron palm, which my hard and firmly fastened pack had printed between my shoulder-blades, saving me a worse blow. Now my due training for the mile at the University, not so very long ago, and the desire for strict regimen then instilled in me, and my frequent jaunts on foot through broad countrysides, were in good stead. In the beginning of this breathless chase, I had had a wide margin of advantage, and now I was all but holding my own, when ahead of me I saw deliverance. For I had turned westward in flight across the leveller hilltop, and the brink of the Vale of Aidenn Water, with its slope looking a precipice all around and its hollow now a mammoth bowl of impenetrable fog, was less than a furlong away ahead.
Risk had to be taken to make safety sure. I chanced another ugly fall by a quick twist of my neck. I led by twenty yards. Gradually, therefore, I diminished my pace so that at the verge of the cliff only ten feet might separate us—and just before I would have leaped out into the turbid air, I used every remaining particle of strength in a sidewise lunge downward to the grass, letting the bull flash with unconquerable momentum over the edge.
But I myself was a vessel of momentum and could not by any frantic clutching and clawing soever keep myself from sliding over the brink and slipping from an abrupt decline to a sharper one, whence with horrified mind I felt myself go over the verge of nothingness! While I fell backward with eyes staring to the lurid sky, I saw the hulk of the bull shoot out from the summit of the cliff. Never have I seen a thing as black as the mass of the beast, with limbs winnowing in the air and head and vast nose outstretched. The black body would have crushed me to pulp had I not flung myself aside a moment before. I know that I must have been still in the air when the bull struck a thrust-out ledge far below the cliff—I had caught just an instant’s glare of one eye, demoniac and hopeless—then the animal went bellowing and thumping down through the fog into unseen depths until one final crash and cry ended sound in ghastly silence.
¹ Actually Llanbadarnfynydd, nine miles away, where I had put up before. My landlord had given me a lift half-way down in his Morris. (Author’s note.)↩︎