Lake country sketches

by H. D. Rawnsley

LODORE AFTER STORM.

Five days of continual tempest and five nights of storm-wind from the Atlantic had tried the nerves and tempers and tested the sleeping powers of all in the Keswick Vale. Nothing like wind to set folks 'fratching'; and that anybody was still on speaking terms with his neighbour argued well for the kindliness of the townsmen and villagers.

At last it would seem as if the wind had blown itself out, and at six o'clock of a grey February evening silence and calm fell upon the sodden, weary vale. But an ominous cloud-pack boiled up over the western hills, and the barometer went down two inches. The cattle were scarcely 'suppered up' for the night in the farmsteads and the shopmen had scarcely clanged down their last shutter, when the wind again awoke, and the hills thundered and the trees groaned, and we knew that America had sent us another cyclone. The hail-showers thrashed the panes, the windows rattled, the chimneys moaned and sighed, and though tired men and women went to bed, it was only to feel their house-walls shake as if an earthquake shock were passing underneath, and only to wonder which would be the first chimney-stack to fall. The wind grew to a hurricane, and people as they lay in sleepless fear upon their beds heard strange voices in the storm—cries of sailors in agony upon a bitter shore or perishing in the deep. Then the wind would be heard to try all round the house and see if perchance a window-frame would give an entrance and indoor havoc be possible; or a slate would whirl up with a crack and come down clattering on the roof and spin off into the darkness.

The dawn broke dimly, and the pastures of the middle vale lay like a wan sea with isles of emerald. Broken boughs hung gaunt and creaking upon the nearest trees, and the Irish yews curtsied and danced and split themselves into a hundred spires of nodding darkness against the angry sky. But the hurricane, however much it might make man cower and fear, had no power upon the thrush, who saw, behind the hurricane light of cheerless morn, the dawn of springtide and love and calm. No storm could

'Quell or disconcert her golden tongue,'

and there, while the wind fluffed her breast to twice its size, she fluted from the swaying holly tree her old familiar call to the slow to 'be quick! be quick!' to the drowsy, to 'pray, get up! get up!' and then to the sad to 'cheer up now! cheer up! cheer up!'

I answered her challenge and arose. The lake from end to end was ridded with foam, and great clouds of water, torn from the surface, were marching from west to east. Borrodale was black with storm. There was no snow on Skiddaw, though the sleet had in a night turned its fine old head grizzled grey, but over Grasmoor and over Grisedale it seemed as if some huge ocean wave had broken and left its froth behind it.

Nearer, however, than on Grasmoor and on Grisedale there was snow. Far down beyond the purpling 'Walla' woodland, lay, in a crevice of the hills between Gowder Crag and Shepherd's Crag, a mighty drift of seeming winter whiteness. That was no gift of winter; it was the gift of the past night's rain. Gazing at it through a good field-glass one could see that the white drift was a falling torrent, and as one gazed one almost, in fancy, heard

'the roar
That stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore.'

I knew that they only can see Lodore aright who will brave storm and tempest, for so swiftly does this splendid cataract pour itself away that an hour after the rains have ceased upon the Watendlath fells it dwindles to its natural size, loses its milk-white charm, and ceases to summon the wanderer to its presence. But this morning its spell was potent to touch all hearts, and that white winter wreath of snow and sound called us from far away. Down by the old monks' path we went, that the hoofs of sumpter-mules in the Middle Ages had worn deep into the soft soil;—it was to-day a torrent-bed of bubbling water. On by the village school, where, instead of the pattering of children's clogs upon the doorstep, to-day the Greta's water gushed and fell in miniature cascade. Over the bridge beneath Greta Hall, on which the pencil-makers hung in enforced idleness, for there was too much water to allow the use of the millwheel. 'Brig is pinched to be large eneuf for t' watter to-day,' they cried; and so to the town. 'Dar bon! but thoo bed better keep to lee-side oop street—-slates is fleein' same as leaves i' winter,' said an old friend as he passed me. 'Well, Betty, what such a night have you had?' I said to another old friend at the street corner. 'Loavins me!' she answered, 'but it's been a capper. Cwoal cart was lifted up and clean turned ower befoar my eyes in oor back yard; and I've been up and dressed sin five this morn. What I thowt wi' mysel if anything's goin' to happen, it 'ull not dea fur us all to be naked, and sea I got intil my cleas!'

So up the main street—powdered with broken slates and plaster from the house fronts, and out into the Borrodale road we went. Trees were laid by their heels at the church gate, the holly berries gleamed in thousands by the roadside; the wind had done what in this open winter the birds had failed to do. Thence on to the Great Wood. Fine spruces lay across the road, and the roadmen and woodcutters were busy making passage possible for the cart traffic. Such a scent of Christmas trees they made as they hewed away at the spruce branches one felt oneself a child again, and so with a child's heart forward. All through the purple woodland were white patches in top-most boughs, the wounds that the fierce wind had given them. Only one thing the tempest had been powerless to touch; these were the tender lichens and the velvet mosses on trunk and wall. How they gleamed and shone in the forest twilight! And whilst the boughs clashed and the wood was filled with groans and shrieks and cries, there, by the wall and on the ground and on the tree-stems, in quiet restfulness and silent beauty the fearless mosses grew.

But this was not all the gentle life that seemed to fear no storm, for quavering along from bough to bough a school of long-tailed titmice went in unalarmed pleasure. The wind that shook the oak seemed unable to touch them, and down beside me the tiny wren played his old happy game of hide-and-seek, as if, instead of being lashed by a cyclone, the woods were still as eventide in June.

Cat Ghyll, beloved of Southey, roared at us as we passed, and one heard the wind like a trumpet blowing from the steep of Falcon Crag.

Now clear view was gained of Derwentwater, and one noted that the lake lay in long patches of many colours, here bright green, there slate blue, there brown, here white and wan, but ridged throughout with foam; and suddenly, as if it sprang upward from hidden depths, a water wraith would leap to sight and other spirits would join it, and the whole silver company of ghostlike vaporous forms would come dancing across from the further shore and lose themselves in cloud-like dust upon the land. Or here again would rise a tiny waterspout and spin and spin the water up into mid-air, then march and counter-march, lie down, and rise again. While all the time upon the shore beneath the roadway, waves broke and surge tumbled, with moaning of a troubled sea that might not rest. It was something in such a whirl of sound and hissing of such restless waters to feel far up on the other hand, above the russet grey-green draperies and the lilac shales, the calm of the storm-proof citadel of Falcon Crag. We gained Barrow, and heard the waterfall bellowing in the wood; but it was Lodore that we had set out to see, and Lodore shone white and clear upon its steep only half-a-mile away.

Full sight of Lodore had now been gained, but not before two other cataracts flashing to one channel from Gowder Crag had claimed our wonder, while we watched the water fall, as it seemed, out of heaven, down by the silver birches, down by the silver shale, and turn both to darkness by its white contrast. But what a magnificent rose-red glow those birch trees showed, and how with auburn glory the larches gleamed! how too in silken grey and delicate yellow the ash trees climbed the crags! We went forward, but not till we had noted that, while all the world towards Grange seemed one great grey water-flood, here right in front of the purple-brown cliff in whose cleft lay the white Lodore, stood up a little meadowy hill of verdure green as May—the first home-field of the wandering Viking who pushed his long ship ashore at Ravenglass and made his way over the Styhead Pass to ancient Borrodale. For in this green field still flows the spring where Ketel the Viking, who afterwards gave his name to the Wyke which we call Keswick to-day, drank in the olden time. Ketel's Well, as we gaze upon that emerald mound, takes us back to the ninth century and the first coming of the Norsemen to our dales; and what was it that bade the hardy Norse rover choose to pitch his camp by the spring on yonder hill but that same glorious cataract of Lodore, whose gleaming waters and whose voice of thunder speaks to our heart as it one time spoke to his. Nay, for that weary wanderer over sea, Lodore spoke sweeter things. As he listened to the torrent's voice, there came back memories of his own home-land and all the sound and sight of those fair 'fosses' and those shining 'ghylls' from which he was an outlawed exile.

LODORE AFTER A STORM.

We pass on beyond the hollies, beyond the amber reed-bed, beyond the grey copse, and gain the gate to the Fall. We cross the meadow and enter the wood and stand upon the little platform whence the Fall in its fulness may be seen. What strikes one at once is the majesty of the high-towering crag of Gowder to the left of Lodore. What strikes one next, is the feeling of a certain lack of height in the fall. It does not come rushing over a sheer precipice; it is not cloud-born; one seems to know that somewhere not far off a valley stream is passing along through quiet meadows and woodland, and something of the fierce wildness of its fall is curbed and tamed by the thought. Yet as we gaze to-day so white is the heaven in the rift between the cliffs whence it surges into sight, that a very little imagination enables us to feel as if the whole of that white interspace were foam, and one's heart is stirred. Not in a rift, but from the topmost height we think we see and hear a visionary cataract fall and fall.

Up now through broken boulders, wet with perpetual mist, slippery with sodden leaf of russet gold, up till a double wych elm, or two elms bound in sisterly embrace—as if they had in fear clutched one another as they stood in awe upon the torrent's brink, is gained; there in shelter of a huge rock, emerald-coated, silver-shining with the spray, we shelter from the drenching water-dust and see another view of glorious Lodore. See and hear, for while the milk-white waters flash and swirl around the ebon boulders in mid-fall, we hear the tall upstanding cliffs make echo to their voice—such sound as he who hears can never quite forget. We climb again up by a slippery path only fit for a goat's foot, helped by impending branches, helped more by the thought that yonder one will gain not only the noblest view of the waterfall, but a far outlook over the wide-watered vale to grey-blue western hills, beyond which booms the sea that gave us, on the wings of the wind, all this majesty of sound and motion.

In this hurricane, the salt of that ocean is on one's lips, and if its actual murmurs and the 'scents of the infinite sea' are denied us, at least by proxy they are ours. For as we slowly win our way upward the scent of Lodore fills the air, even as its sound fills our ears. Not the kind of paper-mill scent one knows so well within the locks or by the backwaters of the Thames, but scent born of mountain springs and fellside tarns and peaty meadows—scents as delicate as they are subtle.

We have gained our vantage point for sight and sound. The huge rocks appear like leviathans bobbing their noses through the foam. A tree trunk has fallen, and seems to have been caught and held by the mouth of some vast hippopotamus, who rejoices as the torrent dashes over his vast back. And the sound is not of bellowing behemoth or snorting river-horse. No; but such sound as seems to bring all worlds to unison. Shut your eyes, lean, and listen; you may hear a mighty army tramping by, you may hear the clashing of innumerable bells, you may hear the blare of trumpets, you may hear the shouting of a festal multitude, and ever beneath the deepest harmonies the tattoo of the thundering river-god, the drum-drum-drumming of Lodore.

One cannot wonder that hither in 1802 came Charles Lamb, the lover of the city's roar, to listen and rejoice. Keats, too, in 1816 came hither and went, as Lamb went back, a sadder and a wetter man; but it is of Southey and his two children, his Edith May and his darling Herbert, we think to-day—he who in the autumn of 1809 heard the same stream saying the same things it says to us to-day, and who writing to his brother Tom on board the Dreadnought under date October 18, 1809, said:

'I hope you will approve of a description of the water of Lodore made originally for Edith and greatly admired by Herbert. In my mind it surpasses any that the tourists have yet printed. Thus it runs: "Tell the people how the water comes down at Lodore? Why, it comes thundering and floundering, and thumping and bumping, and jumping, and hissing and whizzing, and dripping and skipping, and grumbling and rumbling and tumbling and falling and brawling, and dashing and clashing and splashing and pouring and roaring, and whirling and curling, and leaping and creeping, and sounding and bounding, and chattering and clattering with a dreadful uproar—and that way the water comes down at Lodore."'

We turned for home; a patch of blue sky shone momentarily above the purple hollow of sound and foam. And though still 'the forest cracked, the waters curled,' a sunbeam showered radiance as it flew by moaning woodland and by silent crag. In the Great Wood all colours of purple, amber, rose, and amethyst leapt out at the passing of that gleam. One could not but compare the marvellous and changeful effects of light and colour to those that, in some enchanted land of mystery, the coloured fires of the wizard of the pantomime call forth, for our children's amazement.

Now all near was dark, while far ahead the witchery of the golden woodland grew. Now Walla Crag stood purple grey, now shone in lucent silver powdered with larch-tree gold, whilst ever on beyond the woody lane, Skiddaw, as blue as solid cobalt, rose calmly up into a wandering storm-white sky. And yet for all this witchery of colour, for all this magic transformation scene, one vision stayed—that far-off wreath of quiet snow,—snow that had turned on nearer view to scent and sound, to life and light and laughter, to power and impassioned loveliness, there in the resonant chasm of Lodore.